About eleven miles from the Land’s End there lies a dark porphyry rock, the highest point of which rises seventeen feet above low water. It is called “The Wolf,” and previous to the construction of a sea-tower upon it no rock had been more fatal to the mariner. It is beaten by a terrific sea, being exposed to the full force of the Atlantic, and it lies just in the track of vessels entering or leaving the channel. In 1860 the Trinity House commenced the erection of a lighthouse on it, 116 feet high, with a revolving dioptric light. “The first flash,” said a leading journal, “from the Wolf Lighthouse was shot forth on the 1st of January, 1870, and within the last ten years it is difficult to calculate what good it has done, by standing like a beneficent monitor in the centre of the greatest highway for shipping in the world.” The Wolf light flashes alternately red and white at half-minute intervals. A great authority on the subject, Sir William Thomson, however, expostulates vigorously against all revolving lights, asserting that, for example, the Wolf is more difficult “to pick up,” in nautical parlance, than the fixed beacon of the Eddystone.
THE LIZARD LIGHT.
The Rev. C. A. Johns, writing about 1840,[55] says that smuggling was still practised [pg 211]till within a few years previously. Most families on the coast were more or less engaged in it, and many of the houses had, and still have, secret underground chambers, which could be entered only through the parlour cupboard, which was furnished with a false back. Old grey-headed adventurers talked with evident pleasure of the exciting adventures of their younger days, and of their frequent hairbreadth escapes. One sturdy veteran in particular, who since he had dropped his profession of smuggler had on many occasions risked his life in the effort to save the crews of shipwrecked vessels, told how he was chased by a king’s boat, how he threw himself overboard and swam for dear life, and how he eluded, by diving, blow after blow dealt by an oar or cutlass, at last to escape safely to land. The rowers who pursued may not have put forth their utmost strength, and the blows may have been dealt with purposed inaccuracy, for in those days there were many sailors in the navy who had been smugglers, and had a fellow-feeling for their kind. “I can myself,” says Mr. Johns, “recollect having conversed some forty years ago with a coastguardsman who had been a smuggler, and who had with his comrades been captured by a revenue cutter. He and another were tried and convicted, and sentenced, as was then customary, to five years’ service in the navy. While on board the vessel in which they were to proceed to a foreign station, anchored at Spithead, they escaped from confinement, and threw themselves into the sea by night, with the intention of swimming ashore. They had not, however, gone far when they were descried by the sentinel on board, who gave the alarm, and they were fired at. My informant reached the shore in safety, hid himself for a short time, and being afraid to return to his own neighbourhood, entered into the preventive service, and was at the very time I saw him, after the lapse of some years, visiting his friends in his native village, and close to the scene of his early feats of daring. His comrade was not so fortunate; either he was struck by a bullet, or became exhausted before he reached the shore, and was drowned. At all events, he was never seen again.”
About the same period, Mr. Johns tells us, he was, one fine summer evening, loitering about the beach, near a small fishing-village, in a remote part of the county. It was about four o’clock, the sea was as smooth as glass, and the wind so light that whatever vessels and boats were in sight were either stationary or sluggishly impelled by oars. One fishing-boat only, about a hundred yards from shore, had its sails hanging idly from the mast, but yet appeared to be creeping towards a quay which ran out between the beach on which he was standing and the houses in which the coastguard resided. At the very instant that she had advanced so far that the pier was interposed between her hull and the houses a great splashing, as of boxes or kegs, or something else, rapidly thrown in the water, was heard. Simultaneously a number of men ran down the beach into the water up to their waists, and then scampered up to their houses, each bearing an armful of something. In a few minutes the boat capsized; probably this was done on purpose, but as it was in shallow water no harm resulted. Some innocent-looking fishermen soon righted her and baled her out. Mr. Johns learned later on that no less than 150 kegs of spirits were landed on that occasion right under the very noses of the coastguard. It was a desperate venture, but the fishermen-smugglers had calculated that the officers would not expect any attempt of the kind in calm weather, and had reckoned rightly. [pg 212]Smuggling was almost invariably carried on in stormy weather, or on dark, cloudy nights. On some occasions the people of these fishing-towns and the country behind rose en masse and resisted the revenue officers, even to the extent of stoning and firing upon them.
LOOE.
The antiquities of Cornwall have called forth a very considerable quantity of learned literature, but, with the exception of the picturesque and graphic matter furnished by Wilkie Collins, Philip Henry Gosse, and, in lesser degree, by the writer just quoted, the county is not popularly known. Mr. Collins’s description of Looe, an ancient Cornish fishing-town, will be read with interest. He says: “The first point for which we made in the morning was the old bridge, and a most picturesque and singular structure we found it to be. Its construction dates back as far as the beginning of the fifteenth century. It is three hundred and eighty-four feet long, and has fourteen arches, no two of which are on the same scale. The stout buttresses built between each arch are hollowed at the top into curious triangular places of refuge for pedestrians, the roughly-paved roadway being just wide enough to allow the passage of one cart at a time. On some of these buttresses, towards the middle, once stood an oratory, or chapel, dedicated to St. Anne, but no traces of it now remain. The old bridge, however, still rises sturdily enough on its old foundations; and, whatever the point from which its silver-grey stones and quaint arches of all shapes and sizes may be beheld, forms no mean adjunct to the charming landscape around it.
“Looe is known to have existed as a town in the reign of Edward I., and it remains to this day one of the prettiest and most primitive places in England. The river divides it into East and West Looe, and the view from the bridge, looking towards the two little colonies of houses thus separated, is in some respects almost unique. At each side of you rise high ranges of beautifully-wooded hills; here and there a cottage peeps out among the trees, the winding path that leads to it being now lost to sight in the thick foliage, now visible again as a thin serpentine line of soft grey. Midway on the slopes appear the gardens of Looe, built up the acclivity on stone terraces one above another, thus displaying the veritable garden architecture of the mountains of Palestine, magically transplanted to the side of an English hill. Here, in this soft and genial atmosphere, the hydrangea is a common flower-bed ornament, the fuchsia grows lofty and luxuriant in the poorest cottage garden, the myrtle flourishes close to the sea-shore, and the tender tamarisk is the wild plant of every farmer’s hedge. Looking down the hills yet, you see the town straggling out towards the sea along each bank of the river in mazes of little narrow streets; curious old quays project over the water at different points; coast-trade vessels are being loaded and unloaded, built in one place and repaired in another, all within view; while the prospect of hills, harbour, and houses thus quaintly combined together is closed at length by the English Channel, just visible as a small strip of blue water pent in between the ridges of two promontories which stretch out on either side to the beach.
“Such is Looe as beheld from a distance; and it loses none of its attractions when you look at it more closely. There is no such thing as a straight street in the place, no martinet of an architect has been here, to drill the old stone houses into regimental regularity. Sometimes you go down steps into the ground floor, sometimes you mount an outside staircase to get to the bed-rooms. Never were such places devised for hide-and-seek since that exciting nursery game was first invented. No house has fewer than two doors leading into two different lanes; some have three, opening at once into a court, a street, and a wharf, all situated at different points of the compass. The shops, too, have their diverting irregularities, as well as the town. Here you might call a man Jack-of-all-trades, as the best and truest compliment you could pay him—for here one shop combines in itself a smart drug-mongering, cheese-mongering, stationery, grocery, and oil and Italian line of business; to say nothing of such cosmopolitan commercial miscellanies as wrinkled apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils, and fly-blown mock jewellery. The moral good which you derive, in the first pane of a window, from the contemplation of brief biographies of murdered missionaries, and serious tracts against intemperance and tight lacing, you lose in the second, before such fleshly temptations as ginger-bread, shirt studs, and fascinating white hats for Sunday wear at two-and-ninepence a-piece. Let no man rightly say that he has seen all that British enterprise can do for the extension of British commerce until he has carefully studied the shop-fronts of the tradesmen of Looe.