At Sennen Cove I came upon yet another example: he too was in a dancing rage when I first saw him, chattering, screeching and gesticulating more like a frenzied monkey than a human being. The man he was abusing was a big stolid fisherman, who stood with his hands in his trouser pockets, a clay pipe in his mouth, perfectly unmoved, like a post: it was a wonderful contrast and altogether a very strange scene.
This small, dark, peppery man, who is found throughout the country, and whose chief characteristics appear to be intensified in West Cornwall, is no doubt a survival or, more properly speaking, a reversion to a very ancient type in this country. At all events, there is a vast difference between this little blackie or brownie of Bolerium and the prevailing type. The man of the ordinary type is medium-sized and has a broad head, high cheek-bones, light hair, and grey-blue eyes. The "recognised authorities" are not, I imagine, wholly to be trusted on the question of colour: the southern half of Hampshire appears to me more of a dark or black province than Cornwall. Probably the author of the noble epic, The Dawn in Britain, was misled by the anthropologists when he made his Cornishmen who came to the war against the Roman a dark people:
Who came, strange island people, to the war,
Men bearded, bearing moon-bent shields, unlike,
Of a dark speech, to other Britons are
Belerians, workers in the tinny mines
Of Penrhyn Gnawd, which Bloody Foreland named,
Decit their king upleads them, now in arms.
At Calleva, in which the Romans were besieged by the Britons, in Book xiii, and again in Books xv and xvi, after the tremendous battle of the Thames, when the army of Claudius was opposed in its march to Verulam, and, finally, at Camulodunum, we meet with this contingent:
When swart Belerians, on blue Briton's part...