In 1601 the first squadron organised by the East India Company sailed from Torbay, and in 1667 the Dutch fleet, commanded by De Ruyter, paid the Bay a brief but not a friendly visit, doing some damage. In 1688 another fleet appeared—this time a friendly one, for it brought William, Prince of Orange, who had been invited to occupy the English throne abdicated by James II. We were informed that when his ship approached the shore he spoke to the people assembled there in broken English—very broken—saying, "Mine goot people, mine goot people, I mean you goot; I am come here for your goot, for your goots," and suggested that if they were willing to welcome him they should come and fetch him ashore; whereupon one Peter Varwell ran into the sea, and carried the new King to the shore, gaining much renown for doing so. This happened on November 5th, the date for landing doubtless having been arranged to coincide with the anniversary of the attempt of Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder eighty-three years before, so that bonfire day served afterwards to celebrate the two occasions. The house where William stayed that night was still pointed out in Brixham.
In 1690 James II, who had been dethroned and exiled to France, told Tourville, the French Admiral, that if he would take his fleet to the South of England he would find all the people there ready to receive him back again, so he brought his ships off Torbay. Instead of a friendly reception here, he found the people decidedly hostile to James's cause, so he detached two or three of his galleys to Teignmouth, quite a defenceless place, where they committed great ravages and practically destroyed the town. These galleys were a class of boat common in the Mediterranean, where they had been employed ever since the warlike times of the Greeks and Romans. In addition to sails, they were propelled with oars manned by slaves; and a similar class of ship worked by convicts was used by the French down to the middle of the eighteenth century. The men of Teignmouth, who had no wish to be captured and employed as galley slaves, seeing that they were in a hopeless position, retreated inland. Lord Macaulay thus describes the position in his History:
The Beacon on the ridge above Teignmouth was kindled, Hey-Tor and Cawsand made answer, and soon all the hill tops of the West were on fire. Messengers were riding all night from deputy lieutenant to deputy lieutenant; and early the next morning, without chief, without summons, five hundred gentlemen and yeomen, armed and mounted, had assembled on the summit of Haldon Hill, and in twenty-four hours all Devonshire was up.
It was therefore no wonder that Trouville found his landing opposed by thousands of fierce Devonshire men, who lined the shores and prevented him from landing his troops; the expedition was a complete failure, and he returned to France.
In those days, when railways and telegraphy were unknown, the whole country could be aroused very quickly and effectively by those beacon fires. The fuel was always kept ready for lighting on the Beacon hills, which were chosen so that the fire on one hill could be seen from the other. On our journey through England we passed many of these beacons, then used for more peaceful purposes.
In 1815 another ship appeared in Torbay, with only one prisoner on board, but a very important one. The ship was the British man-of-war the Bellerophon, and the prisoner the great Napoleon Bonaparte. We had already come to the conclusion that Torquay, with its pretty bay, was the most delightful place we had visited; and even Napoleon, who must have been acquainted with the whole of Europe, and who appeared in Torbay under what must have been to him depressing circumstances, exclaimed when he saw it, "Enfin, voilà un beau pays!" (What a beautiful country this is!) He arrived on July 24th, five weeks after the Battle of Waterloo, and departed on August 8th from Plymouth, having been transferred to the Northumberland for the voyage to his prison home in St. Helena, a South Atlantic island 760 miles from any other land, and where he died in 1821. During the few days' visit of the Bellerophon at Torbay, thousands upon thousands of people came by land and water in the hope of seeing the great general who had so nearly made himself master of the whole of Europe, and although very few of them saw Napoleon, they all saw the lovely scenery there, and this, it was said, laid the foundation of the fortunes of the future Torquay.
NAPOLEON ON THE BELLEROPHON.
From the Painting by Orchardson.
We had intended leaving Torquay for Totnes by the main road, which passed through Paignton, but our host informed us that even if we passed through it, we should not see Paignton in all its glory, as we were twelve years too early for one pudding and thirty-nine years too late for the next. We had never heard of Paignton puddings before, but it appeared that as far back as 1294 Paignton had been created a borough or market town, and held its charter by a White-Pot Pudding, which was to take seven years to make, seven years to bake, and seven years to eat, and was to be produced once every fifty years. In 1809 the pudding was made of 400 lbs. of flour, 170 lbs. of suet, 140 lbs. of raisins, and 240 eggs. It was boiled in a brewer's copper, and was kept constantly boiling from the Saturday morning until the Tuesday following, when it was placed on a gaily decorated trolley and drawn through the town by eight oxen, followed by a large and expectant crowd of people. But the pudding did not come up to expectations, turning out rather stodgy: so in 1859 a much larger pudding was made, but this time it was baked instead of boiled, and was drawn by twenty-five horses through the streets of the town. One feature of the procession on that occasion was a number of navvies who happened to be working near the town and who walked in their clean white slops, or jackets, and of course came in for a goodly share of the pudding.
One of the notables of Paignton was William Adams, one of the many prisoners in the hands of the Turks or Saracens in the time when the English Liturgy was compiled. It was said that the intercession "for all prisoners and captives" applied especially to them, and every Sunday during the five years he was a prisoner at Algiers, William Adams' name was specially mentioned after that petition. The story of his escape was one of the most sensational of its time. Adams and six companions made a boat in sections, and fastened it together in a secluded cove on the seacoast; but after it was made they found it would only carry five of them, of whom Adams was of course one. After the most terrible sufferings they at length reached "Majork," or Majorca Island, the Spaniards being very kind to them, assisting them to reach home, where they arrived emaciated and worn out. The two men left behind were never heard of again. We had often heard the name "Bill Adams," and wondered whether this man could have been the original. The county historian of those days had described him as "a very honest sensible man, who died in the year of our Lord 1687, and his body, so like to be buried in the sea and to feed fishes, lies buried in Paignton churchyard, where it feasteth worms."