Cornwall being a land of mines has developed machinery and furthered invention in this direction. The most notable of the inventors she has produced is Richard Trevithick, who first made the high-pressure engine, and is still more remarkable as the early pioneer of motor traffic, putting his road locomotive on the Camborne highway on Christmas Day, 1801, and obtaining a speed with it of 12 miles per hour. In 1812 he laid before the Navy Board his invention for a screw propeller for ships, only to meet with a refusal. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, born in 1793, also ran steam-motors on the roads until they were forbidden by Act of Parliament, and the work of a lifetime and his fortune of £30,000 vanished into thin air. The oxy-hydrogen blowpipe and the steam-jet were invented by him. The wreck of H.M.S. Anson on Looe bar with the loss of over 100 lives in 1807 had a great effect on one of the spectators, Henry Trengrouse, a Helston cabinet-maker, who thereupon invented the rocket life-saving apparatus and spent £3000—all his means—in experiments and in vain endeavours to induce Government to adopt the system. Another great benefactor to mankind was Sir Humphry Davy, the son of a poor gilder near Penzance. His safety-lamp he nobly refused to patent lest the sphere of its usefulness should be restricted, and he is fittingly honoured with a statue in his native town.
Sir Humphry Davy
More than one distinguished traveller finds place among Cornish worthies. Richard Lander, the son of a Truro innkeeper (1805-34), stands at the head of them. He went with Clapperton to Sokoto and on his death took up his work, tracing the mouth of the Niger on a second expedition, and dying on a third at Fernando Po. Peter Mundy, born about 1596 at "Penrin, a pretty towne in Corne Wall," as he describes it, was one of the most remarkable travellers that the West of England has produced, whether in virtue of his long trading voyages to the Far East, or of his continental wanderings, of which he kept a not less careful record. James Silk Buckingham, who died in 1855, wrote eighteen books of travel, but was mainly noteworthy for his endeavours to do away with the monopoly of the East India Company.
Among statesmen must be noticed Sir John Eliot, born at Port Eliot in 1592, and at one time friend of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, with whom he later broke, and taking up a strong line in the Parliament of 1628 against arbitrary taxation helped to force the Petition of Right from Charles. He was ultimately committed to the Tower, where he died three years later in 1632. To give an adequate sketch of the life of Sidney Godolphin would be to give the history of the times of Charles II, James II, William of Orange and Anne, with each and all of whom he was closely implicated. An extraordinarily able financier, his character was such as to permit him to serve either party indifferently. "Sidney Godolphin," said Charles, "is never in the way and never out of the way." Lord High Treasurer under Queen Anne, he was made Earl of Godolphin, only to be disgraced in 1710 and die shortly after.
Samuel Drew, the "Cornish Metaphysician," who was born at St Austell, had been a smuggler and a shoemaker in his earlier days, but developed into a Wesleyan preacher and became the author of an essay on the Immortality of the Soul. Of more normal mould was Humphrey Prideaux, born at Padstow in 1648, who wrote a Life of Mahomet, and The Old and New Testament Connected, which reached its 27th edition only a few years ago. He became Dean of Norwich and died in 1724.
Cornwall has produced several local antiquaries, as the Rev. Richard Polwhele, who died in 1838; the Rev. William Borlase, d. 1772; William Hals, the historian of the Duchy; and William Sandys, who died in 1874. She has had but few true poets, but the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, though not actually born in Cornwall, spent all his life there and may certainly come under this heading. He became Vicar of Morwenstow in 1834, and remained there till his death in 1875, having during this time transformed his parishioners from a set of lawless wreckers to a decent community. His poems were almost all connected with Cornish subjects, and one of the best known of them is that on Bishop Trelawney's imprisonment—"A good sword and a trusty sword," with the refrain—"And shall Trelawney die? There's twenty thousand Cornishmen; Shall know the reason why."
