Of crabs, prawns, and crustaceans, of shell-fish and rock fish, and the mollusca generally, these pages have already given a sufficient account. They are even more at home in the sea than on the shore.
THE DEVIL’S FRYING PAN, COAST OF CORNWALL.
CHAPTER XIX.
Sketches of our Coasts.—Cornwall.
The Land’s End—Cornwall and her Contributions to the Navy—The Great Botallack Mine—Curious Sight Outwardly—Plugging Out the Atlantic Ocean—The Roar of the Sea Heard Inside—In a Storm—The Miner’s Fears—The Loggan Stone—A Foolish Lieutenant and his Little Joke—The Penalty—The once-feared Wolf Rock—Revolving Lights—Are they Advantageous to the Mariner—Smuggling in Cornwall—A Coastguardsman Smuggler—Landing 150 Kegs under the Noses of the Officers—A Cornish Fishing-town—Looe, the Ancient—The Old Bridge—Beauty of the Place from a Distance—Closer Inspection—Picturesque Streets—The Inhabitants—Looe Island and the Rats—A Novel Mode of Extirpation—The Poor of Cornwall Better Off than Elsewhere—Mines and Fisheries—Working on “Tribute”—Profits of the Pilchard Season—Cornish Hospitality and Gratitude.
The Land’s End has a particular interest to the reader of this work, for its very name indicates a point beyond which one cannot go, except we step into the great ocean. Round the spot a certain air of mystery and interest also clings. What is this ending place like? It is the extreme western termination of one of the most rugged of England’s counties, one which has produced some of her greatest men, and has always been intimately connected with the history of the sea. Cornwall has afforded more hardy sailors to the royal navy and merchant marine than any other county whatever, Devonshire, perhaps, excepted. One must remember her sparse population in making any calculation on this point. Her fishermen and miners are among the very best in the world. Some sketches therefore of Cornish coasts and coast life may be acceptable.[54]
One of the great features of the Land’s End is the famed Botallack Mine, which stretches out thousands of feet beyond the land, and under the sea. Wilkie Collins, in an excellent description of his visit to the old mine says:—“The sight was, in its way, as striking and extraordinary as the first view of the Cheese-Wring itself. Here we beheld a scaffolding perched on a rock that rose out of the waves—there a steam-pump was at work raising gallons of water from the mine every minute, on a mere ledge of land half down the steep cliff side. Chains, pipes, conduits, protruded in all directions from the precipice; rotten-looking wooden platforms, running over deep chasms, supported great beams of timber and heavy coils of cable; crazy little boarded houses were built where gull’s nests might have been found in other places. There did not appear to be a foot of level space anywhere, for any part of the works of the mine to stand upon; and yet, there they were, fulfilling all the purposes for which they had been constructed, as safely and completely, on rocks [pg 208]in the sea, and down precipices in the land, as if they had been cautiously founded on the tracts of the smooth solid ground above!”
