“Then, when you have at last threaded your way successfully through the streets, and have got out on the beach, you see a pretty miniature bay formed by the extremity of a green hill on the right, and by fine jagged slate rocks on the left. Before this seaward quarter of the town is erected a strong bulwark of rough stones, to resist the incursion of high tides. Here the idlers of the place assemble to lounge and gossip, to look out for [pg 214]any outward-bound ships that are to be seen in the Channel, and to criticise the appearance and glorify the capabilities of the little fleet of Looe fishing-boats riding snugly at anchor before them at the entrance of the bay.
“The inhabitants number some fourteen hundred, and are as good-humoured and unsophisticated a set of people as you will meet with anywhere. The fisheries and the coast trade form their principal means of subsistence. The women take a very fair share of the hard work out of the men’s hands. You constantly see them carrying coals from the vessels to the quay in curious hand-barrows; they laugh, scream, and run in each other’s way incessantly; but these little irregularities seem to assist rather than impede them in the prosecution of their tasks. As to the men, one absorbing interest appears to govern them all. The whole day long they are mending boats, painting boats, cleaning boats, rowing boats, or, standing with their hands in their pockets, looking at boats. The children seem to be children in size, and children in nothing else. They congregate together in sober little groups, and hold mysterious conversation, in a dialect which we cannot understand. If they ever tumble down, soil their pinafores, throw stones, or make mud-pies, they practise these juvenile vices in a midnight secresy that no stranger’s eye can penetrate.”
A mile or so out at sea rises a green triangularly-shaped eminence, called Looe Island. Several years since a ship was wrecked on the island, but not only were the crew saved, but several free passengers of the rat species, who had got on board, nobody knew how, where, or when, were also preserved by their own strenuous exertions, and wisely took up permanent quarters for the future on the terra firma of Looe Island. In course of time these rats increased and multiplied; and, being confined all round within certain limits by the sea, soon became a palpable and tremendous nuisance. Destruction was threatened to the agricultural produce of all the small patches of cultivated land on the island—it seemed doubtful whether any man who ventured there by himself might not share the fate of Bishop Hatto, and be devoured by rats. Under these circumstances, the people of Looe decided to make one determined and united effort to extirpate the whole colony of invaders. Ordinary means of destruction had been tried already, and without effect. It was said that the rats left for dead on the ground had mysteriously revived faster than they could be picked up and skinned or cast into the sea. Rats desperately wounded had got away into their holes, and become convalescent, and increased and multiplied again more productively than ever. The great problem was, not how to kill the rats, but how to annihilate them so effectually that the whole population might certainly know that the reappearance of even one of them was altogether out of the question. This was the problem, and it was solved practically and triumphantly in the following manner:—All the inhabitants of the town were called to join in a great hunt. The rats were caught by every conceivable artifice; and, once taken, were instantly and ferociously smothered in onions; the corpses were then decently laid out on clean china dishes, and straightway eaten with vindictive relish by the people of Looe. Never was any invention for destroying rats so complete and so successful as this. Every man, woman, and child that could eat could swear to the death and annihilation of all the rats they had eaten. The local returns of dead rats were not made by the bills of mortality, but by the bills of fare; it was getting [pg 215]rid of a nuisance by the unheard-of process of stomaching a nuisance! Day after day passed on, and rats disappeared by hundreds, never to return. They had resisted the ordinary force of dogs, ferrets, traps, sticks, stones, and guns, arrayed against them; but when to these engines of assault were added, as auxiliaries, smothering onions, scalding stew-pans, hungry mouths, sharp teeth, good digestions, and the gastric juice, what could they do but give in? Swift and sure was the destruction which now overwhelmed them—everybody who wanted a dinner had a strong personal interest in hunting them down to the very last. In a short space of time the island was cleared of the usurpers. Cheeses remained intact; ricks were uninjured. And this is the true story of how the people of Looe got rid of the rats!
Many causes, Mr. Collins tell us, combined to secure the poor of Cornwall from that last worse consequence of poverty to which the poor in most of the other divisions of England are more or less exposed. The number of inhabitants in the county is stated by the last census at 341,269—the number of square miles that they have to live on being 1,327. This will be found, on proper computation and comparison, to be considerably under the average population of a square mile throughout the rest of England. Thus, the supply of men for all purposes does not appear to be greater than the demand in Cornwall. The remote situation of the county guarantees it against any considerable influx of strangers to compete with the natives for work on their own ground. Mr. Collins met a farmer there who was so far from being besieged in harvest time by claimants for labour on his land, that he was obliged to go forth to seek them in a neighbouring town, and was doubtful whether he should find men enough left him unemployed at the mines and the fisheries to gather in his crops in good time at two shillings a day and as much “victuals and drink” as they cared to have.
Another cause which has of late years contributed, in some measure, to keep Cornwall free from the burthen of a surplus population of working men must not be overlooked. Emigration has been more largely resorted to in that county than, perhaps, in any other in England. Out of the population of the Penzance Union alone nearly five per cent. left their native land for Australia or New Zealand in 1849. The potato blight is assigned as the chief cause of this, for it has damaged seriously the growth of a vegetable from the sale of which in the London markets the Cornish agriculturist derived large profits, and on which (with their fish) the Cornish poor depended as a staple article of food.
It is by the mines and fisheries that Cornwall is compensated for a soil too barren in many parts of the country to be ever cultivated except at such an expenditure of capital as no mere farmer can afford. From the inexhaustible treasures in the earth, and from the equally inexhaustible shoals of pilchards which annually visit the coast, the working population of Cornwall derived their regular means of support where agriculture would fail them. At the mines the regular rate of wages is from forty to fifty shillings a month; but miners have opportunities of making more than this. By what is termed working “on tribute,” that is, agreeing to excavate the mineral lodes for a percentage on the value of the metal they raise, some of them have been known to make as much as six and even ten pounds a month. Even when they are unlucky in their working speculations, or perhaps thrown out of employment altogether by the shutting up of a mine, they have a fair opportunity of [pg 216]obtaining farm labour, which is paid for (out of harvest time) at the rate of nine shillings a week. But this is a resource of which they are rarely obliged to take advantage. A plot of common ground is included with the cottages that are let to them; and the cultivation of this helps to keep them and their families in bad times, until they find an opportunity of resuming work; when they may perhaps make as much in one month as an agricultural labourer can in twelve.
The fisheries not only employ all the inhabitants of the coast, but in the pilchard season many of the farm people work as well. Ten thousand persons, men, women, and children, derive their regular support from the fisheries, which are so amazingly productive that the “drift,” or deep-sea fishing, in Mount’s Bay alone, is calculated to realise, on the average, £30,000 per annum.
To the employment thus secured for the poor in the mines and fisheries is to be added, as an advantage, the cheapness of rent and living in Cornwall. Good cottages are let at from fifty or sixty shillings to some few pounds a year. Turf for firing grows in abundance on the vast tracts of common land overspreading the country. All sorts of vegetables are plenteous and cheap, with the exception of potatoes, which have so decreased, in consequence of the disease, that the winter stock is now imported from France, Belgium, and Holland. The early potatoes, however, grown in May and June, are still cultivated in large quantities, and realise on exportation a very high price. Corn generally sells a little above the average. Fish is always within the reach of the poorest people. In a good season a dozen pilchards are sold for one penny. Happily for themselves the poor in Cornwall have none of the foolish prejudices against fish so obstinately adhered to by the lower classes in many other parts of England. Their national pride is in their pilchards; they like to talk of them, and especially to strangers; and well they may, for they depend for the main support of life on the tribute of these little fish, which the sea yields annually in almost countless shoals.
“Of Cornish hospitality,” says Wilkie Collins, “we experienced many proofs, one of which may be related as an example. Arriving late at a village, we found some difficulty in arousing the people of the inn. While we were waiting at the door we heard a man, who lived in a cottage near at hand, and of whom we had asked our way on the road, inquiring of some female member of his family whether she could make up a spare bed. We had met this man proceeding in our direction, and had so far outstripped him in walking, that we had been waiting outside the inn about a quarter of an hour before he got home. When the woman answered this question in the negative, he directed her to put clean sheets on his own bed, and then came out to tell us that if we failed to obtain admission at the public-house, a lodging was ready for us for the night under his own roof. We found on inquiry afterwards that he had looked out of window after getting home, while we were still disturbing the village by a continuous series of assaults on the inn door, had recognised us in the moonlight, and had therefore not only offered us his bed, but had got out of it himself to do so. When we finally succeeded in gaining admittance to the inn, he declined an invitation to sup with us, and wishing us a good night’s rest, returned to his home. I should mention, at the same time, that another bed was offered to us at the vicarage, by the clergyman of the parish, and that after this gentleman had himself seen that we were properly accommodated by our landlady, he left us, with an invitation to breakfast with him the next morning. This is hospitality practised in [pg 217]Cornwall, a county where, it must be remembered, a stranger is doubly a stranger, in relation to provincial sympathies; where the national sympathy is almost entirely merged in the local feeling; where a man speaks of himself as Cornish in much the same spirit as a Welshman speaks of himself as Welsh.
“In like manner, another instance drawn from my own experience will best display and describe the anxiety which we found generally testified by the Cornish poor to make the best and most grateful return in their power for anything which they considered as a favour kindly bestowed. Such anecdotes as I here relate in illustration of popular character cannot, I think, be considered trifling; for it is by trifles, after all, that we gain our truest appreciation of the marking signs of good or evil in the dispositions of our fellow-beings, just as in the beating of a single artery under the touch we discover an indication of the strength or weakness of the whole vital frame.