Small Talk at Wreyland. Second Series

by Cecil Torr

That seems incongruous enough, but it is nothing to the incongruity of an Anglo-Saxon coin with its inscription all in Arabic except two lines of Roman letters, “Offa the King,” which come in upside down between three lines of Arabic, “Mohammed the Prophet of God.” It is a gold coin, a mancus, of the same weight as an Arabic dinar; and it is dated in year 157 of the Hegira, or 773 A.D. It was found in Rome, and must be one of those gold mancuses that King Offa undertook to pay Pope Hadrian for Peter’s Pence.

The southernmost part of Italy was known as Bruttium in Latin, but Brettia in Greek, and was said to take its name from Brettos (a son of Hercules) who came over with the first Greek colonists. And this, I suspect, is the only basis for the story that Britain took its name from an imaginary Brutus who brought a colony here. I suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth got the Brettos story at second hand through Stephanos, who quotes it from Antiochos of Syracuse, say 423 B.C. And our Geoffrey either got it wrong, or altered it to suit his theme, and thus created Brute the Trojan.

The story of Brute the Trojan is not wilder than the story of Æneas, and the motive is the same—to connect the Britons (like the Romans) with the Homeric heroes and thus with the Olympian gods. (Brute was a great-grandson of Æneas, so Venus was his great-great-grandmother.) I cannot see why the story makes the Trojans land at Totnes, fifteen miles from here, rather than in any other part of Britain. But at Totnes they show you the very stone on which Brute stepped ashore, just as they show you the stone at Brixham on which Dutch William stepped ashore, and the stone at Newton from which he was proclaimed as King.

Nobody takes Brute the Trojan very seriously now; but I cannot understand the people who scoff at Trojans coming to Britain, and then talk solemnly of Phœnicians coming here. In books and pamphlets and essays and articles and by word of mouth, in Devon and in Cornwall and the Scilly isles, one hears everlastingly of these Phœnicians.

All this talk of the Phœnicians is founded on a blunder. Strabo devotes book iii of his Geographica to what we now call Spain and Portugal. In iii. 5. 11 he says that the Cassiterides islands were off the coast of Spain and Portugal, and that the tin trade with these islands was formerly in the hands of the Phœnicians. In iii. 2. 9 he says that tin was found in Spain and Portugal and in the Cassiterides, and adds parenthetically “and it is brought also from Britain to Marseilles.” Diodoros is more explicit, v. 22, 38, saying that the British tin came from the western part of England, and went to Marseilles overland through France, a journey of thirty days with horses. I suppose people have forgotten Diodoros, and failed to see that Strabo is using a parenthesis; and have then mixed up the whole of what he says in iii. 2. 9 with what he says about the Phœnicians in iii. 5. 11. There is no suggestion in any ancient author that the Phœnicians ever had anything to do with this trade in British tin.

As for the Cassiterides, they must be the Burlings. These are the only noticeable islands on the outer coast of Spain and Portugal; and ancient authors say the Cassiterides were on that coast. Strabo and Diodoros, Mela and Pliny, Ptolemy, Dionysios and Avienus, all agree in putting them there, though they give them various positions from Cape Finisterre and Ferrol down to Cape St Vincent, and call them Hesperides or Œstrymnides as well as Cassiterides.

In the Scillies it is an article of faith that those islands are the Cassiterides, and this heresy of mine aroused the wrath of good Scillonians. (They never say Scilly Islanders themselves: it is too ambiguous.) Those islands seemed very remote, when I visited them first, in the autumn of 1886. The cable was broken, and the mail-boat did not waste her coal on making the passage in an equinoctial gale. But people told me I could get a pilot-cutter to take me off in any weather for £5. If it failed to make Penzance, it was sure of making Cork or Brest.

My going to the Scillies was indirectly the cause of Walter Besant’s going there and writing his novel of Armorel of Lyonesse. I was often talking of the islands after I came back, and he went in the spring of 1889. The novel pleased the islanders, and when I went there next (1896) there seemed to be an Armorel in every house. It was a contrast to Tarascon and Alphonse Daudet’s book. I never saw a Tartarin anywhere there.

Being at Tarascon, I inquired for the Tarasque—the dragon that was led captive by Saint Martha—and I found it locked up in a stable, 18 March 1891. It is not allowed out in processions now, as it has broken too many people’s bones by the waggings of its tail. Getting inside it, I found a tiller that worked the tail as if it were a rudder, and I made it wag.

The dragon at Tarascon is not unlike the dragon in one of Retzsch’s illustrations to Schiller’s Kampf mit dem Drachen, where the knight uses a dummy to accustom his horse and hounds to the look of a dragon in real life. He does this in France, and then goes back to Rhodes and kills the dragon there. The story is told of Dieudonné de Gozon; and he must have seen the dummy at Tarascon, as he was at Avignon from 1324 to 1332. But in one version the knight dressed up a bull to personate the dragon. In a version current at Rhodes it is a dervish, not a knight. He loaded forty donkeys with eighty sacks of lime, and drove them past the dragon’s den. The dragon swallowed them, lime and all, and then went down to drink.