William Gibson, the smuggler in question, was a bold, daring young man, and he, with others, had crossed over to France more than once in a small open boat, a distance of 150 miles, rowing there and back, running great risks to bring home a cargo of brandy.
In 1820, the time when William was at his best in these smuggling enterprises, St. Mary’s was visited by a pious, simple-minded young woman, Mary Ann Werry by name, the first representative of the Bible Christian connexion to land on the island. The congregation were in the throes of a revival, and eager for more and more preaching, but the minister upon whom they principally relied was commercially minded, and demanded £2 for his services. The members refused to give it. “There is a woman here,” said they, “we will have her to preach to us”; and, being asked, she consented, and preached from 1 Tim. iv. 8, “For bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.”
We have the well-known ruling of Dr. Johnson upon the preaching of women, that it in a manner resembles a dog walking on its hind-legs: it is not done well; you only marvel that it is done at all. [N.B.—Dr. Johnson would not have favoured, or been favoured by, modern Women’s Leagues.] But, at any rate, Miss Werry seems to have been a notable exception. She was eloquent and persuasive, and played upon the sensibilities of those rugged Scillonians what tune she would.
Tears of penitence rolled down the cheeks of many a stalwart man (to say nothing of the hoary sinners) that day. Among the number thus affected was William Gibson, of St. Martin’s, who from that hour became a changed person. No longer did he refuse to render unto Cæsar (otherwise King George) that which was Cæsar’s (or King George’s). He gave up the contraband trade, and, forswearing his old companions’ ways, turned to those of the righteous and the law-abiding, and became a burning and a shining light, and, as “Brother Gibson,” a painful preacher in the Bible Christian communion. And thus, and in lawful fishing, with some little piloting, he continued steadfast, until his death in 1877, in his eighty-third year.
CHAPTER XII
The Carter Family, of Prussia Cove
In the west of Cornwall, on the south coast of the narrow neck of land which forms the beginning of that final westerly region known as “Penwithstart,” is situated Prussia Cove, originally named Porth Leah, or King’s Cove. It lies just eastwardly of the low dark promontory known as Cuddan Point, and is even at this day a secluded place, lying remote from the dull high-road that runs between Helston, Marazion, and Penzance. In the days of the smugglers Porth Leah, or Prussia Cove, was something more than secluded, and those who had any business at all with the place came to it much more easily by sea than by land. This disability was, however, not so serious as at first sight it would seem to be, for the inhabitants of Prussia Cove were few, and were all, without exception, fishermen and smugglers, who were much more at home upon the sea than on land, and desired nothing so little as good roads and easy communication with the world. An interesting and authoritative sidelight upon the then condition of this district of West Cornwall is afforded by The Gentleman’s Magazine of 1754, in which the entire absence of roads of any kind is commented upon. Bridle-paths there were, worn doubtless in the first instance by the remote original inhabitants of this region, trodden by the Phoenician traders of hoary antiquity, and unaltered in all the intervening ages. They then remained, says The Gentleman’s Magazine, “as the Deluge left them, and dangerous to travel over.” That time of writing was the era when these conditions were coming to an end, for the road from Penryn to Marazion was shortly afterwards constructed, much to the alarm and disgust of the people of West Cornwall in general, and of those of Penzance in particular. Penzance required no roads, and in 1760 its Corporation petitioned, but unsuccessfully, against the extension of the turnpike road then proposed, from Marazion. That was the time when there was but one cart in the town, and when wheeled traffic was impossible outside it: pack-horses and the sledge-like contrivances known as “truckamucks” being the only methods of conveying such few goods as were required.
Under these interesting social conditions the ancient semi-independence of Western Cornwall remained, little impaired. Many still spoke the older Cornish language; the majority of folk referred to Devonshire and the country in general beyond the Tamar as “England”—the inference being, of course, that Cornwall itself was not England—and smuggling was as usual an industry as tin and copper-mining, fishing, or farming. Indeed the distances in Western Cornwall between sea and sea are so narrow that any man was commonly as excellent at farming as he was at fishing, and as expert at smuggling as at either of those more legitimate occupations. This amphibious race, wholly Celtic, adventurous, and enthusiastic, was not readily amenable to the restrictions upon trade imposed by that shadowy, distant, and impersonal abstraction called “the Government,” supported by visible forces, in the way of occasional soldiers or infrequent revenue cruisers, wherewith to make the collectors of customs at Penzance, Falmouth, or St. Ives, respected.
“The coasts here swarm with smugglers,” wrote George Borlase, of Penzance, agent to Lieut.-General Onslow, in 1750. Many letters by the same hand, printed in the publications of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, under the title of the “Lanisley Letters,” reiterate this statement, the writer of them urging the establishment of a military force at Helston, for “just on that neighbourhood lye the smugglers and wreckers, more than about us (at Penzance), tho’ there are too many in all parts of the country.”
The Cornish of that time were an unregenerate race, in the fullest sense of that term, and indulged in all the evil excesses to which the Celtic nature, untouched by religion, and wallowing in ancient superstitions, is prone. They drank to excess, fought brutally, and were shameless wreckers, who did not hesitate to lure ships upon the rocks and so bring about their destruction and incidentally their own enrichment by the cargo and other valuables washed ashore. Murder was a not unusual corollary of the wreckers’ fearful trade, partly because of the olden superstition that, if you saved the life of a castaway, that person whom you had preserved would afterwards bring about your own destruction. Therefore it was merely the instinct of self-preservation, and not sheer ferocity, that prompted the knocking on the head of such waifs and strays. If, at the same time, the wrecker went over the pockets of the deceased, or cut off his or her fingers, for the sake of any rings, that must not, of course, be accounted mere vulgar robbery: it was simply the frugal nature of the people, unwilling to waste anything.