The South Devon Coast

by Charles G. Harper

The interior of the church has of late been exquisitely decorated and repaired: we will not say “restored,” for that word is rightly of ill-savour in these times. In place of the almost inevitable pitch-pine pews, or the commonplace chairs, there are green-stained, rush-bottomed chairs, with woodwork of the same hue: all very artistic and delightful, and sufficing to show that the more usual order of things is less inevitable than might be supposed, and only so common because taste is a quality of the rarest. Only, I would that these things did not so commonly go with that new reforming zeal which is sending the Church of England Romewards, so fast as its clergy dare. Here a faculty has been obtained for a rood-screen, and in general things are developing at a rate dangerous to that new movement itself and bringing that counter-reformation which is presently to repeat history. History, it is true, does repeat itself, but not on precisely identical lines, and the newer Reformation will be the disestablishment and disendowment of an unworthy Church, and free-trade in religion.

There are weird rocks out beyond Thurlestone, on the coastwise route round to the Avon estuary; one of them—it may be glimpsed in the background of the Thurlestone illustration—resembling some monstrous growth of the mushroom kind. The direct way to the crossing of the Avon is through Thurlestone street, and thence by the hillside village of Buckland, and by Bantham, a hamlet nestling under the lee of the Ham, a great sandy elbow thrown up, ages ago, by the sea and the winds, in vain efforts to fling back the Avon upon itself. That river is no rushing torrent, but just a softly gliding stream; and the sand dunes have not sufficed to imprison it. All they have done is to turn its course aside, due west instead of south, and there, denied a direct access to the sea, it has eaten away the cliffs in a great semicircular mouthful, and goes gliding out to the Channel through a waste of flat sands.

It was here in 1772 that the Chanteloupe, homeward-bound from the West Indies, was totally wrecked, and of all those on board only one person saved. Those were the times when the fisherfolk and shore-dwellers generally prayed for wrecks, and if none was forthcoming, helped Providence to produce them by exhibiting false lights on shore, to lure vessels to their doom. They thought no shame of asking, “O Lord, give us a good wreck,” and were perhaps very little more civilised than the savages of strange lands, who, thinking shipwrecked sailors, to have been shipwrecked at all, must be under the high displeasure of the gods, murder them out of hand, and consider themselves, in so doing, the vicars of those affronted deities.

“A good wreck,” especially if there were no survivors left to tell the tale, or to claim anything, would keep the seaboard of half a county in luxury of sorts for quite a considerable time, and as survivors were such detrimentals, they were, in those “good old times,” very quickly made not to survive. It was a rude, but practical application of that Socialistic doctrine of collectivism, of which we hear so much nowadays, “the greatest good to the greatest number.”

The story of the Chanteloupe is a dark and repellent instance of those practices. It narrates how a lady named Burke, familiar with the evil reputation of these people, and fearful of being murdered, put on all her jewellery when the ship struck, and was flung ashore glittering with precious stones. If she had thought to purchase life with that display, she made the most fatal of errors, for the sight only served to arouse the worst passions of those beach-combers, who slaughtered the unfortunate woman for the sake of her rings and other trinkets. When enquiries were set afoot, her body was discovered in the sands, bloodstained, with fingers cut off and ears mutilated; but it does not appear that the guilt was brought home to any one. The fisherfolk, doubtless, all hung together, lest they should hang separately.

Two years earlier a local Quaker, one Henry Hingeston, had published a pamphlet denouncing the wrecking propensities of this coast:

“I have been deeply affected,” said he, “to see and feel how sweet the report of a shipwreck is to the inhabitants of this country, as well professors as prophane, and what running there is on such occasions, all other business thrown aside, and away to wreck. … I am verily persuaded that it hath been more sweet to hear that all the men are drowned, and so a ‘proper wreck,’ than that any are saved, and by that means hinder their more public appearance on that stage for getting money. O! the cruelty that hath been acted by many. My heart hath been often heavy to consider it, insomuch that I think multitudes of heathen are nothing near so bad. Remember the broadcloth slupe, stranded in Bigbury Bay, richly laden. O! for shame, for shame, I am really vext that ever my countrymen should be guilty of such devilish actions.”

But the estimable Hingeston might just as effectively have preached to the gulls and the cormorants on the iniquity of catching fish, as to have denounced wrecking. ’Twas in the blood, and that is all there is to it.

These old tales of long-vanished days seem very remote and indistinct, but they came very near and vivid when a few years ago some children digging in the sand of the Ham, turned up a skull, pronounced to be that of a negro. It was considered, together with heaps of bones afterwards discovered, to be a relic of the tragedy of the Chanteloupe.

The Devonshire folk—the rustic sort, at any rate—generally call their Avon the “Aune,” and a little hamlet not far from this same Bantham is “Aunemouth;” while the village of Aveton Gifford, standing up-river, where the salt estuary becomes a freshwater stream, is impartially “Aveyton,” or “Auton,” “Jifford.”