It is hardly necessary to add that the Coppinger of these and other rumbustious stories is a strictly unhistorical Coppinger; and that, in short, they are mainly efforts of Hawker’s own imagination, built upon very slight folklore traditions.
Who and what, however, was the real Coppinger? Very little exact information is available, but what we have entirely demolishes the legendary half-man, half-monster of those remarkable exploits.
Daniel Herbert Copinger, or Coppinger, was wrecked at Welcombe Mouth on December 23rd, 1792, and was given shelter beneath the roof of Mr. William Arthur, yeoman farmer, at Golden Park, Hartland, where for many years afterwards his name might have been seen, scratched on a window-pane:
D. H. Coppinger, shipwrecked December 23 1792, kindly received by Mr. Wm. Arthur.
There is not the slightest authority for the story of his sensational leap on to the saddle of Miss Dinah Hamlyn; but it is true enough that the next year he married a Miss Hamlyn—her Christian name was Ann—elder of the two daughters of Ackland Hamlyn, of Galsham, in Hartland, and in the registers of Hartland church may be found this entry: “Daniel Herbert Coppinger, of the King’s Royal Navy, and Ann Hamlyn mard. (by licence) 3 Aug.” The “damsel” of the story also turns out, by the cold, calm evidence of this entry, to have been of the mature age of forty-two.
Mrs. Hamlyn, Coppinger’s mother-in-law, died in 1800, and was buried in the chancel of Hartland church. It is, of course, quite possible that his married life was stormy and that he, more or less by force, extracted money from Mrs. Hamlyn, and he was certainly more or less involved in smuggling. But that he, or any of his associates, chopped off the head of an excise officer is not to be credited. Tales are told of revenue officers searching at Galsham for contraband, and of Mrs. Coppinger hurriedly hiding a quantity of valuable silks in the kitchen oven, while her husband engaged their attention in permitting them to find a number of spirit-kegs, which they presently found, much to their disgust, to be empty; and, moreover, empty so long that scarce the ghost of even a smell of the departed spirit could be traced. But the flurried Mrs. Coppinger had in her haste done a disastrous thing, for the oven was in baking trim, and the valuable silks were baked to a cinder.
Little else is known of Coppinger, and nothing whatever of his alleged connection with the Navy. He became bankrupt in 1802, and was then a prisoner in the King’s Bench Prison. With him was one Richard Copinger, said to have been a merchant in Martinique. Nothing is known of him after this date, but rumour told how he was living apart from his wife, at Barnstaple, and subsisting on an allowance from her.
Mrs. Coppinger herself, in after years, resided at Barnstaple, and died there on August 31st, 1833. She lies buried in the chancel of Hartland church beside her mother.
According to the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, Coppinger was not really a Dane, but an Irishman, and had a wife at Trewhiddle near St. Austell. He, on the same authority, is said to have done extremely well as a smuggler, and had not only a farm at Trewhiddle, but another at Roscoff, in Brittany. A daughter, says Mr. Baring-Gould, married a Trefusis, son of Lord Clinton, and Coppinger gave her £40,000 as a dowry. A son married the daughter of Sir John Murray, Bart., of Stanhope. The source of this interesting information is not stated. It appears wildly improbable.
Hawker very cleverly embodied the smuggling sentiment of Cornwall in a sketch he wrote, styled “The Light of Other Days.”