The Land's End: A Naturalist's Impressions In West Cornwall, Illustrated

by W. H. Hudson

Of course there are exceptions, especially among gamekeepers, although in a majority of cases their observation is of that baser kind which concerns itself solely with the things that profit. But there is also the nobler kind of observer, the one in a thousand whose keen boyish interest in all living things is not lost when he is called on to take a part in the serious business of life. Ceasing to be a boy he does not put away this boyish thing, this secret delight in nature which others outlive. It is in him like the memory of a first love, the image of a vanished form which endures in the mind to extreme old age and outlasts and has a lustre beyond all others. It is this surviving feeling of the boy which makes the native naturalist, the man with keen observant eye and retentive memory; and however illiterate he may be, or unsocial in disposition, or uncouth or repellent in manners, it is always a delight to meet him, to conquer his rudeness or reserve and to listen to the strange experiences garnered in his memory.

In the chapter on Cornish imagination something was said about the actions of animals, even of those we are most familiar with, which come as a great surprise, and I gave an account of one—an incident I witnessed of a rock-pipit which, caught by a violent gust of wind just at the moment when its wings being set for the gliding descent to earth could not be used to resist the current, was blown away into the midst of a band of hovering herring gulls and very nearly lost its life. One knows that one will never witness just such an incident again, but there will be others equally unexpected and strange for the watcher. In the course of this book I have related a few: one of a gannet falling from a great height like a stone into the sea just by the side of a herring gull floating on the surface, and one of a fox, standing like a carved figure on a big rock, savagely attacked by a raven and refusing to be driven from its stand.

Here I cannot resist the temptation to introduce an incident of this kind, but far more wonderful than any one I have related in this or any other book, which was witnessed not by a naturalist but an artist, my friend Mr. R. H. Carter, of the Land's End. He was with his friend, the late Rev. F. C. Jackson, Rector of Stanmore, who used to take his holidays in West Cornwall and was himself something of an artist. They were sketching one day on the huge cliffs of Tol-Pedn-Penwith, near the Land's End, when Mr. Carter noticed that some animal had been recently scratching the earth at the foot of a huge pile of rocks near where he was sitting. There was a large hollow place under the rock into which one could see, as there was an opening on a level with the ground on one side, and it struck him that a badger had taken refuge in this cavity, and had been obliged to scratch a little earth away to squeeze his body in. He called his companion's attention to it, and getting down on the turf and lying flat so as to bring their eyes on to a level with the floor they gazed into the cavity. They could see no animal, but the light was dim inside, and Mr. Jackson proceeded to twist up half a dozen wax matches into a small compact ball, which he lighted and then carefully pushed in right to the middle of the hollow space. The burning wax made a good light, but still they could see no creature, only at one side, a foot or so from the light, there was a dark patch which they could not make out; it was, they imagined, a hole in the rock which showed black. Presently, as they gazed in, still trying to penetrate into that dark hole with their sight, a paw was seen to emerge and move towards the light until the whole foreleg of a badger was revealed; then the paw scraped up a little loose soil from the floor and carefully drew or jerked it over the burning ball of wax and put the light out.

They had both witnessed the whole action, and by and by with a long stick or pole they succeeded in ousting the badger from his niche in the little cave. Had they not done so the sceptical reader might have said that what they had seen was an illusion—that they were looking for a badger and expecting to see one and had badger on the brain so to speak; and by and by when a slight moving shadow caused by the flickering flame made its appearance it took the form of a badger's paw and leg in their sight, and when the flame expired they imagined that the illusory paw had extinguished it. I dare say that if such an incident had been related by the Canadian, Charles Roberts, or by any of the writers of the "new or romantic school" of natural history in America, it would be set down by most readers as an unusually wild invention of the author.

The ferryman had no such wonderful story to tell when we compared notes, and I intend here to relate only a few of the curious incidents he had witnessed, and this mainly for a purpose of my own. They were mostly little tragedies.

One summer day when he was out in his boat fishing for pollack at his favourite ground a mile or two beyond the Godrevy Lighthouse he noticed three guillemots near him, one old bird with its half-grown young one, and a second young bird which accompanied the others but kept at a little distance from them. This young guillemot had doubtless been lost or left by its parents. There was no other bird in sight except a great black-backed gull, flying idly about, now making a wide circle and occasionally dropping on to the water to examine some small floating object, then flying off again. He appeared to pay no attention to the guillemots, nor they to him, and it therefore came as a great surprise when all at once in passing over the three birds he dropped down upon the second young guillemot and seized it before it had time to dive. The captive struggled in vain, sending forth its shrill cries for help far and wide over the still sea, while the great gull, sitting on the surface, proceeded in a leisurely manner to despatch and then devour his victim, tearing it to pieces with his big powerful yellow beak.

He told me of several other little tragedies of the kind which he had witnessed with surprise, one of a curlew which at the moment of flying past him was suddenly chased by a sparrow-hawk and pressed so hard that it dashed down to the beach, where it was instantly grappled. The ferryman made all haste to the spot, and the hawk flew off at his approach, leaving the curlew dead and bleeding on the sands. He picked it up and took it home to eat it himself. But of all these cases the one of the great black-backed gull impressed him the most on account of the casual way in which it came about, just as if the gull had been taken by a sudden impulse to drop upon and slaughter the young guillemot. Such an incident serves to show how perilous a world the wild creature exists in and on how small a matter its safety often depends, and it also gives the idea of an almost uncanny intelligence in the birds that live by violence. No doubt the gull was tempted to fall on that young bird solely because of its keeping a little apart from the other two, because it had no parent of its own to protect it.

The rocks to the north of St. Ives Bay are an ancient haunt of the common seal, one of the few colonies of this animal now left on the south coast of Britain. The ferryman was one day fishing in his boat at this point close to the mouth of that vast cavern in the rocks where the seals have their home, when a loud king cry or roar made him jump in his boat, and looking round he caught sight of a seal thrusting his head and half his body out of the water with a conger about seven to eight feet long fastened to his ear. The blood was streaming from the seal's head and he was trying to shake his enemy off and at the same time turning round and round in his efforts to bite the conger; but the black serpentine body wriggled and floated out of his reach, and in a very few moments they went down. Again and again they rose, the seal coming out each time with the same savage cry, shaking himself and biting, the conger still holding on with bull-dog tenacity. But on the last occasion there was no cry and commotion; the conger had lost his hold and the seal had him by the middle of the body in his jaws. On coming up he swam quietly to the sloping rock close by, and half in, half out of the water began tearing up and devouring his victim, the blood still running from his own head.

He had another seal story which interested me even more than the last, since the chief actor and conqueror in this instance was the nobler animal man, the seal being: the victim.

In the early autumn of 1907 there were mighty winds on this coast, with tremendous seas and very high tides, which made it impossible to use the ferry; but when the weather moderated and the ferryman took to his boat once more he came upon a young seal, which had, no doubt, taken refuge in the Hayle estuary and was lost from its parents. The days went by and it did not leave the river: the mother seal had not found it, and apparently the poor young thing had no sure instinct to guide it across St. Ives Bay to the seal caverns in the cliffs to the north of the lighthouse, which was probably its birthplace. And probably finding itself very lonely in the estuary, it came by and by to look on the man in the boat, who was always there, as a sort of companion—perhaps as a seal of curious habits, which looked a little like an adult seal, but progressed in a somewhat different manner, keeping always to the surface of the water and swimming with the aid of two long wing-like fins. But it appeared to be a good-natured seal, and always regarded the orphaned youngster with a mild and welcoming expression. First it watched the ferryman from a little distance, then approached him every time he appeared, then began to follow, coming nearer and nearer, and would swim behind the boat, quite close, just as a spaniel or other water-loving dog will swim after its master's boat.