The South Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

THE START.

It behoves the stranger to be careful how he comes to his exploration, for this, Λ, is the section of the Start. Sloping sides of short slippery grass at an alarming angle descend dangerously to the sea from the serrated skyline, and a false step will send you rolling down to those rocks that have proved fatal to full many a shipwrecked mariner.

It is some sixty years since the lighthouse at the extremity of the point was built. The lantern of it is two hundred feet above the sea; and shows two lights, lit every evening, ten minutes before sunset: a revolving beam once every minute for vessels out in the Channel, and a constant fixed gleam for shore-going boats, to warn them off the Skerries bank.

But, for all these safeguards, the Start remains a fatal point. When a “snorter” from the south-west, or a fog, sends vessels out of their course upon this coast, they are doomed. The lights are next to useless in foggy weather and at such time the fog-horn, bellowing in unearthly manner, is fraught with every kind of tragical suggestion.

Among the many wrecks of modern times is that of the Spirit of the Ocean, March 23rd, 1866, when twenty-eight out of thirty were drowned, the Gossamer, China tea-clipper, driven ashore between the Start and Prawle Point in December 1868, when thirteen of a crew of thirty-one were lost; the Emilie, laden with saltpetre, broken up during a fog in June 1870; and the Lalla Rookh, a large vessel, coming home from Shanghai, laden with 1,300 tons of tea and 60 tons of tobacco, wrecked in March 1873 near Prawle Point. Shortly before the vessel struck she ran so close to the rocks that four of her crew jumped on to them as she flew by; but this was a wreck which did not touch the deepest note of tragedy, for in the end, all but one of those on board were saved. There was, however, a woeful waste of cargo, and the little beaches near by, and the long three miles of Slapton Sands, were for days strewn in places with the wreckage of the Lalla Rookh, and ridges of tea eleven feet high, and trails of tobacco of almost equal size, were piled up at high-water mark by the waves.

Most dramatic was the wreck of the steamship Marana, in the wild blizzard of March 9th, 1891. As night closed down upon the wild scene off the Start, the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, looking forth from behind a window, upon that seething world of torn sea and whirling snowflakes, thought she saw a vessel drive through the smother of it, under the lighthouse. No help was possible, and the vessel was gone like a ghost. The tale that was afterwards told was a pitiful one.

Just before the vessel struck, and was broken in two, amidship, the crew made for shore, twenty-two of them in the lifeboat and four others in a smaller. The surf in Lannacombe Bay was so great that they dared not attempt a landing, and made for Prawle, where the lifeboat was smashed to pieces on the Mag Ledge. Most of the unfortunate sailors were drowned, only four surviving to tell the tale. A fifth, who had managed to drag himself, bruised and bleeding, from the rocks to land, lay down, exhausted, for shelter, and died out there in the snow. It was not until a fortnight later that his body was found.

It was on the same occasion that the Dryad was totally wrecked at the extremity of the Start at midnight, and all hands lost. One survivor was seen at daybreak, clinging to a rock, but before help could reach him he was washed away.

The neighbourhood of the Start is an unsatisfactory place to be in on a day threatening rain, for it is outside roads, and the more than knee-high bracken of the coastguard paths is at such times a supersaturating growth. And the way up-along and down-along and round this way and that, past Pear Tree Point, where there are not any pear-trees (and I dare swear there never were any) is toilsome. Beyond the Point is the yellow strand of Lannacombe, famous for Lannacombe Mill and its miller, who, when French privateers were here, there, and everywhere in the old rumbustious days and visited him one night, flung his money-bag out of window and found it, safe enough, the next morning, suspended in an elder-bush. The guide-books tell how the ruins of the mill may be seen, but they shyly hide themselves from some, and the other Lannacombe Mill, up the combe, which may not be historic in this small sort, is at any rate picturesque enough to be excused a story. If one were not afraid of getting wet through on a moist afternoon, here by the clucking water-wheel and the moss-grown walls and the clear-running mill-leat should some hours be whiled away.