The South Devon Coast

The Carys had so long been seated by the shores of Tor Bay, in the halls of the discredited and dispossessed monks, that they had lost all sense of the trend of affairs, and were utterly unimaginative; and accordingly when in 1786 Sir Robert Palk, retiring wondrously enriched from the governorship of Madras, and with an £80,000 legacy into the bargain, purchased Tormoham Manor, they made no attempt to outbid him. To the changed times and to the Palk family Torquay owes its growth. Tor Bay had in all those bygone centuries been a lovely solitude, for in the warlike ages, when fire and sword swept even sheltered spots like Dartmouth, snugly hidden behind a difficult entrance, an open strand was too dangerous a place to settle upon; but Sir Robert Palk early perceived changed conditions and made his account with them, and in due time his son, Sir Lawrence Palk, succeeded him and built the first harbour. The inevitable consequence of the Palk activities and of the changed condition of affairs was that the town of Torquay sprang into vigorous existence, and the further and equally obvious consequence of the Palks becoming great as ground-landlords was that in the fulness of time they were raised from baronets to be barons; Sir Lawrence Hesketh Palk, fifth baronet, being in 1880, in his thirty-fourth year, raised to the peerage as Baron Haldon. I can quite distinctly hear gnashings of teeth and imprecations at lost opportunities from the direction of Tor Abbey, echoing down the alleys of the years.

Torquay was built when the Italian villa fashion prevailed in the land. It was a favourable spot for such an experiment. Look back upon those terraced and rock-girt hills from this kindly distance of the harbour, and the Italianate character of the scenery, in its brilliant colouring and bold and picturesque outline, is obvious, and from this remove quite a number of those villas deceptively resemble in outline the marble palazzos of Florence, of Venice or Bologna. But close at hand they are no more Italian than an Italian warehouse, which we all know to be a parabolic description of an oil and colour shop.

And now Torquay has acquired a Mayor and Corporation, with town arms and a crest and the advertising motto, Salus et Felicitas, and ought to be happy as well as healthful, as per motto: even though that motto does, when spoken, suggest “sailors and solicitors.” But no! Torquay has since learned that these luxuries are expensive; in the facts that while, when the town was incorporated, in 1892, there were then but twenty-one officials, whose salaries amounted to £2,413, there are now thirty-nine, who draw £5,495.

Presently there will be electric tramways at Torquay! Conceive it, all ye who know the town. Could there be anything more suicidal than to introduce such hustling methods into Lotos-land?

I observe that, according to a handbook advertising the attractions of Torquay, while its winters are mild, its summers are cool, and that “the maximum mean annual temperature is 56·7°, and the minimum 45°.” Also it appears that “the thermometer in the shade seldom rises to 70°.” I must, therefore, be mistaken in supposing that in August I have frequently observed it, in the Strand, and on the spot eloquently known as “the Gridiron,” to be twenty degrees higher, and the Lord only knows what phenomenal heights in the sun. Under the same extraordinary illusion, yucca, bamboo, palms, eucalyptus, and other tropical plants flourish in the beautiful rock-walks along the Torbay road, and the fuchsia grows in the likeness of trees.

There are many who think Torquay looks its best on moonlit summer nights, when the lights in hill-top villas seem to vie with the stars, and the search-lights of naval leviathans in the bay send inquisitive beams along the shore or, adventuring higher, surprise fair maids in their bedrooms and make them blush.

CHAPTER XVI
BRIXHAM—LANDING OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE

Along the curving shores you come, past Tor Abbey Sands, Livermead, and the little red knob of Corbyn’s Head, with a hole in the rock like an eye, to Paignton. The reason for Paignton’s modern existence as a populous seaside town is found in its excellent sands and safe bathing, Torquay itself lacking any but the most meagre foreshore, and the tides coming up to its sea-walls. The best feature of Paignton is, after all, an extraneous thing: the lovely view from it of Torquay. In the old days, when Paignton was merely a village of cob-built and thatched cottages, grouped at hazard round the large, ancient and beautiful church, it must have been well worthy an artist’s attention—but that day was long since done, and Paignton is now merely a modern town, built on a flat site, with a conventional pier, public gardens, and band stand, and a weird freak building on the edge of the sands, known as Redcliffe Towers, or sometimes as “Smith’s Folly”; the Colonel Smith who built it many years ago apparently taking as models for his eccentric residence the round tower of Windsor Castle and the would-be Oriental monstrosities of the Pavilion at Brighton. The result is that it looks a kind of poor relation of both.

Being a good deal more recent than Torquay, Paignton is not so stucco-smothered; and its villas and the buildings of its very busy and smart chief street are largely in brick and terra-cotta.

The exceptionally beautiful church, which, however, is sadly hidden away amid these later developments, is due to Paignton having been the site of a Bishop’s palace. A few ruins only of that palace remain, with a romantic-looking tower, in which according to a picturesque legend, Miles Coverdale translated the Bible.

At the secluded sands of Goodrington and Elbury Cove, that look perhaps their best from the trains that hurry by, the traveller bids farewell to the red rocks of Devon, and comes into the regions of limestone and slate. The way leads on to Brixham: the railway itself proceeding to Kingswear, opposite Dartmouth, and throwing off at “Churston Junction” a little two-mile branch to the heights above Brixham town. All day and every day a short train shuttlecocks those two miles, the engine pulling one way and pushing another. If there be any three persons better qualified above their fellows to speak of monotony, they must surely be the engine-driver, stoker, and guard of this train.

The little terminus, so high above the town, smells like a fish-shop, for Brixham is pre-eminently in Devon the place of fish, and great trainloads go forth every day. You look astonishingly down upon roof-tops from this place.

Down there is Brixham, perched with seeming precariousness along the steeply sloping sides of the hills overlooking the pool that forms its crowded harbour. To those who have never seen the fisher towns of Cornwall it is an amazing place: those who know the Cornish coast realise that this is the first of the true West Country fishing harbours, and it seems to them to have strayed over into Devon by mistake. To speak by the card, the “Brixham” of modern speech is strictly “Brixham Quay,” and Higher Brixham, away up-along, on the high table-land, is the real original Brixham; but Brixham Quay long since supplanted the original place in importance. It is by far the largest and busiest fishing-port in Devon, and as different from Torquay in character as chalk proverbially is from cheese, marching-boots from patent-leathers, salt from sugar, or any other picturesque and striking antithesis you can think of. In Torquay you commonly hear Brixham spoken of as a “dirty, stinking hole” and by similar terms, the reverse of endearing, but while we may not deny it to be that, it is that and something more. It is natural, and characteristic of the real old seafaring and fishing life of this coast, and Torquay, however delightful, is not. Torquay and all “seaside resorts” are excrescences, and utterly uncharacteristic of the real indigenous life. No artist would choose to paint or sketch Torquay and its delightful but pictorially impossible villas, and smart but artistically desolating visitors; but Brixham is an artistic paradise. It is dirty but natural, smelly but picturesque at every turn. An excellent opportunity offers here, had we the leisure, for a philosophic disquisition on the delightfully picturesque qualities of dirt and untidiness, and the negation, artistically, of order and sanitation. Because of its wallowing in fish-offal and its generally rough-and-ready ways, Brixham is no place for the visitor, as generally understood; but artists rejoice in it and its ways.

It must by no means be understood that the houses of Brixham are picturesque. They are nothing of the kind, being simply gaunt, stark unlovely structures of cob, or stone, or lath and plaster, as the case may be, generally stuccoed and slate-roofed; with a resultant effect of greyness. But they are arrayed in such amazing tiers of terraces, one above the other, and are huddled so nearly together, and hang so closely over the harbour that the general effect is highly picturesque.

Brixham changes little, and appears to be very much as P. H. Gosse, visiting it in 1853, found it; “close, mean and dirty,” with “refinements of filth” which he had never seen paralleled. One feels quite sorry for that distinguished naturalist; but on the shore, at low water, under the stones, he found Trochus ziziphinus numerously, which seems to have been some consolation. One feels irresistibly tempted to suggest that, had he stayed at Brixham the night, he might also have found pulex irritans, at the least of it, which would not have been so satisfactory.

It was to this fishy place that William, Prince of Orange, came on November 5th, 1688, intent upon saving the liberties of England from extinction at the hands of his bigoted father-in-law, James the Second. The “Protestant Deliverer” came invited and welcomed by the majority of Englishmen, for the country was so shiftless that it could not make out to save itself; and, because of the mutual jealousies that would have forbidden the success of any rising headed by one of our own, must needs call in the cold, silent Dutchman, whom none loved. One’s sympathies are distinctly with the debonnair Duke of Monmouth, whose rebellion had ended so disastrously, three years earlier.

The Hollander preparations for this invasion were great, and spread over a considerable period of time; and there was, moreover, no secret made of them. The flotilla gathered together for the enterprise consisted of fifty men-o’-war, and over five hundred transports, carrying an army of fourteen thousand men. It was thus not very much the inferior in strength to that of the great Armada itself. It waited long in the harbour of Helvoetsluys, attendant upon the wind, which had been blowing steadily in an unfavourable direction. At last, October 16th, it changed from west to east, and the hour seemed to have come. The prince took leave of the States-General, which wept copiously over him; while he remained, as was his wont, grave and phlegmatic, only recommending the princess to their care, should anything happen to him.

The great fleet sailed on the 19th, but the next day the wind changed to north, and then worked round with violent gales from the west, so that, in distress, they were obliged to put back to port. No vessels were lost, and only one man was drowned, but five hundred horses died.

The States at once gave orders for the replenishing of all stores, the princess, for her part, ordered prayers four times daily, and at last, on the evening of November 1st, the fleet again put forth, with an east wind. The original idea was to have landed in the mouth of the Humber, and it must have seemed, to many of the Englishmen who accompanied the expedition, an ill-omen that they were carried down channel into that identical West Country which had proved so fatal to Monmouth.

The English fleet was assembled, watchful, at the mouth of the Thames, but unable, in the teeth of the east wind, to emerge; and saw, with helplessness, the great concourse of ships go, full sail, down channel. Despite the fears of those who looked upon the west as ominous of ill, the elements were thus working for the success of William, who thus, unchallenged, arrived off the coast of Devon. Arrived there, the more timorous began to fear being carried too far west to Plymouth, or beyond, from which the intended march to the capital, along the heavy roads of autumn, would be a toilsome and hazardous undertaking.

But all things made for success, and, arrived in Torbay on the night of November 4th, the easterly wind ceased and changed to soft breezes from the south. The next morning the landing began, in this harbour of Brixham. It was November 5th, the auspicious anniversary of the famous failure of the Popish “Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” and the bells of Brixham rang out joyously, to celebrate History made, and History in the making.

Brixham Quay was then just a quay, and little else. The crowded houses of this later age were represented only by a few scattered fish-cellars and sheds, and in place of the stone piers and artificial harbour we now see was merely a pool formed by nature, unassisted by art.

Many legends of this landing survive at Brixham. One tells how the prince, standing in the boat that brought him towards the shore, exclaimed in the best English he could command, to the people who crowded the quay, “Mine goot beoble, I mean you goot, I am come here for your goot—for all your goots”; but I think that is suspiciously like one of the famous Ben Trovato’s stories, and it certainly has been told of other aliens coming to these shores. The legends then go on to tell how the prince asked if he were welcome, and being assured of the fact replied that, if he were really welcome, they should come and fetch him; which means no more than that there were then no stairs to the water, and that, if a fine gentleman wished to land dry and clean, he must needs be carried ashore.

One Peter Varwell, a fisherman, described as a short, thick-set little man, then jumped into the water and carried the Deliverer to land. We are not told how the Duke of Schomberg and Bishop Burnet, among other great ones, came ashore; I am afraid they had to hoof it through the water and the fish-offal. But when Burnet did set foot upon the quay, the prince, turning to him and taking his hand, asked if he did not believe now, more than ever, in predestination. This was by way of a gentle rebuke to that distinguished Churchman’s want of faith during the preparations for the expedition, when at every mischance he had dejectedly said the enterprise seemed to be predestined to failure.

CHAPTER XVII
LANDING OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE

The landing was completed in three hours, without a hitch and was followed by divine service on the beach, concluded by all the troops singing the 118th Psalm, which is at once a psalm of thanksgiving for mercies received, and a bidding for others. Reading it, you conceive the Psalmist as timorously thankful, buoyed up by faith to a certain degree, and yet horribly frightened; and thus, there can be no doubt, it was highly appropriate to the situation in which all at that moment found themselves. We may, perhaps, suspect that the eighth verse, which deprecates confidence being put in princes, was omitted for this occasion.

An absurd story tells us that the inhabitants of Brixham (or “Broxholme,” as the Dutch called it), presented an address to the prince, in this form:

The individually quite sufficient objections to this are that the prince was not yet acknowledged king, and that tea was then unknown at Brixham; and in any case, it would have been an expensive luxury far beyond the reach of fisherfolk. What “buckhorn” may have been is a mystery not revealed to the present generation.

The place was thronged that day and night with the expeditionary force, and the landlord of the one inn that then sufficed for the thirst of the whole community—it was probably the “Buller’s Arms,” quite recently rebuilt—was, according to the diarist who recorded all these things, so puffed up with the honour of serving so many lords that he almost imagined himself to be one.

William himself was lodged in the house, still standing in Middle Street, the home of the little man, Varwell, who afterwards marched with the army on to Exeter, and was promised a reward for his services. Unhappy Varwell! He went later, to London, and fell to gossiping with strangers in a tavern, with the result that they drugged him and sent one of their confederates to Whitehall to claim the promised recompense. He was paid a hundred guineas, and when the real Varwell put in an appearance, he was not only sent empty away, but received a good thrashing as well.

William’s army, having camped in the fields overnight, marched from Brixham about noon on November 6th, in very rainy weather and along bad roads. They made but four miles that day, and halted the night at Paignton, where tradition says William slept at the “Crown and Sceptre,” within sight of that old red sandstone tower in which, according to another tradition, Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, another sturdy Protestant protagonist, had translated the Bible.

Meanwhile William had been receiving assurances of support from influential personages. Nicholas Roope, of Dartmouth, was the first considerable person to join him. But others exhibited a not unnatural timidity and caution. Memories of the ferocious revenge taken upon the sympathisers with Monmouth, three years earlier, were keen, and the influential and the great did their negotiation as secretly as might be. That is why records of those early days are so scarce and traditions are our only resort.

The greatest and the proudest personage then in the neighbourhood of Brixham was Sir Edward Seymour, of Berry Pomeroy Castle. He it was who, when William asked if he were not of the family of the Duke of Somerset, replied: “Pardon me, the Duke of Somerset is of my family.” There you see the head of the original stock venting his spleen on the younger branch of the Seymours, upon whom the accident of fate had bestowed a proud title, while the elder was fobbed off with a mere knighthood.

Sir Edward joined the Prince of Orange at Exeter, when it was tolerably clear to most people that the cause of James was lost; but when the Prince was but newly landed, that cautious Sir Edward, and a number of equally cautious gentlemen with him, met him secretly at Aish, a lonely, out-of-the-way hamlet between Brixham and Totnes, to discuss the support to be given. The cottage where they met is still standing, and is called “Parliament House,” while all the country-folk know the road to it by the name of “Parliament Lane.”

That caution was very noticeable, all the way to Exeter. When William came to Newton Abbot, and stayed at Ford House two nights, Sir William Courtenay, the owner, although he left directions that the prince was to be hospitably entertained, found it convenient to be elsewhere on urgent business that would brook no delay, and when the clergyman at Newton handed over the keys of the church, in order that the bells might be rung in honour of the proclamation in the market-place, of the Prince as King William the Third, he made it clear, pro formâ, that he only relinquished those keys on compulsion.

There is some curious food for the whimsical mind in the fact that the Prince of Orange should have crossed the river Lemon, on his way past Newton Abbot; and there is ample room for criticism of the inscription on the famous Proclamation Stone in Newton Abbot market-place, in which it is stated that the Rev. John Reynell proclaimed the Protestant Deliverer there, November 5th. Reynell—the clergyman who was so cautious as to hand over the keys of the church only “on compulsion”—was not a man rash enough to proclaim any king who might presently become a fugitive, and thereby possibly find himself arraigned before the ferocious Jeffreys. No: Reynell did not proclaim the new king. It was probably Dr. Burnet—who accompanied the expedition—who did so, and certainly not before November 7th. Meanwhile, we will leave William to march on to Exeter and thence to London, where he arrived December 18th.

The stone on which William’s foot rested on his landing has been jealously preserved, but it has been moved about overmuch. The landing was on the site of the present fishmarket, and there the obelisk partly enclosing the stone was first erected; but when another William—the Duke of Clarence, afterwards William the Fourth—came ashore at Brixham in 1828, it was removed to its present position, on what was then called the New Quay. The weird passion for utility that characterises Englishmen, and has spoiled so many monuments, has caused this obelisk to be crowned with a gas-lamp.

It was left to modern times to fitly commemorate this great event in our history, for on the two hundredth anniversary the marble statue of the king that now forms so striking a feature of the harbour was erected. He is represented at the moment of his stepping ashore and, hand to heart, declaring, “The liberties of England and the Protestant religion I will maintain.”

Those who gaze upon the statue and pronounce the face of it ugly forget that William was not handsome. He was consumptive, asthmatic and hollow-cheeked, and the sculptors have rendered him, not idealistically, but as he was, with the very necessary reservation that he is here of heroic size, while in life he was small and undersized.

For the rest there are few records at Brixham of the coming of William of Orange. No blood was shed there, and the only note of that stirring time to be found in the parish registers is the pathetic burial entry: “1688, November 21, a foreigner belonging to the Prenz of Oringe,” with another entry of the same date referring to the same person being buried in woollen: “a Dutch man, cujus nomen ignotum.” He was probably some humble follower, who fell sick aboard, and so died on the threshold of this land flowing with milk and honey, in which so many of his fellow mynheers flourished so well.

The Brill, the vessel on which William came to England, had a strange after-history. She was re-christened Princess Mary, and converted into a yacht. So she remained through the reign of Queen Anne; but when the Hanoverian line began, and sentiment was cut off at the main, she was sold to some London merchants, who re-christened her the Betsy Cairns and sent her trading to the West Indies. From that condition the poor old vessel declined to that of a collier, and so continued for an incredible number of years, being wrecked on the Black Middens, off Tynemouth, in quite recent times.

CHAPTER XVIII
BRIXHAM—THE FISHERY—ROUND THE COAST TO DARTMOUTH

The statue of Dutch William makes the background of Brixham Harbour picturesque, and the fishing-fleet and the houses climbing up, tier above tier, confer a nobility upon the statue: they re-act upon one another, in short, in a most admirably pictorial way. There are over three hundred vessels in the trawling fleet of Brixham, and all are sailing-boats. The largest, known technically as “dandies,” are of fifty tons burthen, and cost about £1,000. The intermediate, and most numerous class are “bumble-bees,” and the smallest are merely “hookers,” “hukers,” in the Devon inflection, of twenty-five tons. The cost of a “bumble-bee” is £450. It carries a crew of three men, who work according to the custom of the Brixham fishery, on rarely changing lines. Brixham, unlike the great fishing port of Grimsby, where steam-trawling and highly costly vessels owned by corporations are the rule, conducts its industry on more individual and joint-stock lines. Here we find the captain and the owner usually one and the same person, working with his two men on the partnership principle. He is, of course, by virtue of his ownership a capitalist in his way, and for the purpose of getting a return for his venture, as well as for his labour, the shares of the boat are divided into five parts, of which he takes three; one for self, one for the boat, and one for the nets and general gear, leaving one each for the crew, who contribute only their labour. The takings are divided every week, and, like the fortunes of war, they vary extravagantly.

If you conceive a bag forty to fifty feet in length, you will have some approximate notion of the size of a trawl-net. The mouth of it is stretched wide apart by a pole like a builder’s scaffold-pole, heavily shod at each end with iron, for the purpose of weighing down the mouth of the net as it is drawn, or “trawled,” along the bottom of the sea. Sailing out of harbour, the trawl-net is “shot” the length of some seventy fathoms, necessary to reach the bottom of the fishing-grounds in Torbay, and thus, going with the wind for six to eight hours, the smacks drag their exaggerated bags along the bed of ocean, scooping up whatever lies in the way. It may thus justly be supposed that the bed of Torbay is a pretty well-swept floor.

It is a comparatively easy thing to shoot a trawl-net, but a long and laborious job for two men, straining at the winch, to wind it aboard again, with its load of fish, often very largely useless. So soon as the hauling up of the nets begins, myriads of sea-gulls, springing apparently from nowhere in particular, appear, with the instantaneous promptitude of a crowd in a quiet street of London when an accident has happened. Screaming and circling about, dipping instantaneously into the water, and rising up quickly, they often make daring snatches at the fish aboard. Surely there is nothing so sharp-eyed on earth, in air, or water, as a sea-gull, and nothing so greedy and insatiable. The sea-gull is the scavenger of the fisher towns and villages, and is not nice in his tastes. Nothing comes amiss to his hungry maw, from fresh fish down to stale, ancient enough to be a very monument of offence and a something beyond the worst experiences of a sanitary inspector; and the dead kittens and rats of the seaside communities form welcome side-dishes.

The gulls’ turn, however, comes when the sorting of the nets begins. When the useless dog-fish are flung overboard they struggle and guzzle their fill: for, unfortunately for the fisherfolk, the dog-fish are never lacking, although the saleable fish may be often sadly to seek. But now dog-fish are often marketed as “flake.” The catch is generally a miscellaneous one of turbot, bream, plaice, whiting, hake, haddock, gurnet, sole, and brill, with a few lobsters, crabs, and eels, and when the undesirables among the fish, and the stones and the seaweed, are sorted out, frequently resolves itself into a dozen or so pair of soles, and a few baskets and “trunks” of other fish. The aristocracy of the catch are, of course, the turbot and the soles, but when a bad day’s trawling and a day of poor market prices come together, the day’s labour for three men may not bring the skipper more than twelve shillings and his two men four shillings apiece.

The fish is sold by auction in the long-roofed but open-sided shed that runs the whole length of the harbour, and the auctioneers settle weekly with the skippers, after deducting their commission, the market-dues, and the earnings of the lumpers, as the fish-porters who carry the catches from the smack to the market are called. Rougher, more rugged, ragged, or more quaintly dressed and bearded men than those of the Brixham trawling fleet, and those others who attend the auctions, it would be difficult to find; but many among them are of the famous “Brixham lords.” A “Brixham lord” is the product at a considerable distance of time, of the vicissitudes of the old lords of the manor of Brixham. That manor, passing from the Novants and the Valletorts, and coming eventually to the Bonviles, was at length divided into quarters, of which one quarter came to the Gilberts, from whom it was purchased by what in these financial days we should term a “syndicate” of twelve fishermen. In the course of many generations and the natural subdivision of property, those original twelve shares of that quarter have been so apportioned that the “lords” of Brixham, owning infinitesimal portions of the manor, are a very large crowd indeed. Some of them, too, are “ladies.” The saying of Brixham is therefore easily credible, that there are more lords of the manor in it than in any other town in England.

A pathetic literary interest belongs to Brixham, for it was here that the Rev. Henry Francis Lyte was vicar for twenty-five years. He died at Naples, whither he had gone to seek health, in his fifty-fourth year. One last evening, before he left Brixham for ever, as he knew it must be, he prayed that he might be allowed to write something by which the memory of him might be kept green to all time, and, returning from the fisher-town as sun was setting, to Berry Head House, conceived and wrote that best-known of hymns, “Abide with Me.” In the widespread favour it immediately obtained, and in the vogue it must ever retain while hymns last, his prayer was answered. It is a beautiful hymn, but a thing of tears, depression, and hopelessness, that leaves you a great deal worse, and a great deal more self-pitying, than before indulging in it. As well might one suggest sitting in a draught as the remedy for a cold, as hope to revive the spirits on “Abide with Me.” It is beautiful, but for my part, I want something more uplifting and robustious, and would rather go forth and do battle with blue-devils and kick stumbling-blocks out of the way, and keep a stout heart to the ultimate breath, on some swashbuckling Hew-Agag-in-Pieces-before-the-Lord psalmody, than dissolve in tears on the minor key of “Abide with Me.”

Berry Head is a kind of natural barrier, or unsurmountable wall, to the Brixham people. You will readily understand why it should be so, if you seek to walk round to Kingswear by the coast. It is so, not so much by reason of the steepness and ruggedness of the way, for the road out of Brixham, up-along to the railway-station and so on to Churston Ferrers, is equally heart-breaking, but there are all manner of occasions for going in that direction; while few have any business, or pleasure either, over Berry Head, or along that lonely and rugged coast, save some poor fool of an exploring tourist who, encountering rain on these shelterless coastguard walks, is fain to think, like the Melancholy Jaques in Arden, that when he was at home, he was in a better place. Hence the peculiar appositeness of the Brixham synonym for death, “going round the Head,” as it were into the Unknown. “Bless ’ee! ’er’s bin gone round the Head these dree months” was the reply to an inquiry after one recently dead.

Primed with all this knowledge, it is scarcely with uplifted heart that the explorer scales these minatory heights. On the way to the Head the road looks down upon the incomplete breakwater, begun in 1843 and abandoned when 1,300 feet of it had been built and £21,000 expended. Across the bay lies Torquay, glorious in the sunshine; behind us is the end of the world, as it seems—the gorsy plateau of the Head, with a forlorn refreshment house among the ruins of five forts erected during the Napoleonic scare, themselves built amid the walls and earthworks of the Romans, constructed some 1850 years ago. Here is the Ash Hole, a cavern where the soldiers of the early nineteenth century flung the bones and broken pottery and domestic refuse of their barracks on the top of a similar deposit made by the Roman soldiery of the first century of our era. And beneath the potsherds of the Romans is stalagmite, and beneath that again the bones of animals extinct aeons before Rome began. Ugh!

From hence it is an easy walk to the sheer edge of this great mass of pink limestone, which drops perpendicularly down into deep water. Round the point, the cliffs grow darker and more jagged, with the Cod Rock and Mewstone out in the sea and Durl Head, splashed pink and black, marked by a deserted iron mine.

Durl Head looks across to Mudstone Sands, not really muddy, and Sharkham Point. Inland, in between them, is Windmill Hill, with its celebrated cave, sharing the prehistoric honours of Kent’s Cavern. No visitor to Brixham who arrives by steamboat is likely to be left in ignorance of “Philp’s Cave,” for handbills extolling the glories of it are plentifully distributed at such times.

Philp was a dyer who in 1857 determined to leave his dyeing and go in for quarrying, and to this end purchased a plot of land here of the Commissioners for the enclosure of Waste Lands. He soon got to work, and in the following January the cave “discovered” itself by engulfing a quarrying tool that Philp in person was using. He explored the place and found it to be a tunnel running fifty feet into the hill, with a further gallery at the end, in another direction. Stalagmite made a continuous covering on the floor, and from it projected bones which scientific men who soon flocked to the spot proclaimed to be those of reindeer and cave-bears. Among them were the flint implements of prehistoric man, who seems never to have returned for them, for his bones are not among the remains. Perhaps one of the hyænas of Kent’s Cavern cut him off, untimely.

I think the ten miles (for it is not an inch less) round from Mudstone Bay to Kingswear is the loneliest, and the most scrambly and tiring, coast climb in South Devon. Rocks succeed sands, and sands follow rocks; headlands alternating with bays, and ups with downs. Now you face west, now south, then something betwixt and between; and if you don’t quite box the compass, you do so very nearly. Every coombe, every headland, has a name, but they are all of a likeness: Sharkham Point, Southdown Head, Man Sands, Crab Rock Point, Long Sands, Scabbacombe Sands, Down Head, Ivy Cove, Pudcombe Cove, Kelly’s Cove, and Froward Point. Not a soul will you see, not a house, save the coastguards and their station and cottages at Man Sands. And this is overcrowded England!

Off Froward Point, black and splintered and well-named, is yet another Mewstone, with a companion, the Cat Stone; and the Black Rock some distance out. From here we turn gradually round and come by Mill Bay, under the tall white day-mark on the hill-top, to Kingswear Castle.

CHAPTER XIX
DARTMOUTH

The cheapest ferry in England is that which takes you across from Kingswear to Dartmouth. In point of fact, there are two: the pontoon-like affair that plies from the ferry-slip, and the Great Western Railway’s steamer, conveying passengers between Kingswear station and Dartmouth Quay. The fare for one person is merely a humble halfpenny.

It is a romantic way of entering Dartmouth, which lies across there, down by the water’s edge, with great hills rising in the background, and the smoke from Dartmouth’s thousand chimneys ascending visibly, like some great incense-offering. From this point of view you perceive the essential justness of that ancient foreigner’s report when, sent to spy upon the chances of surprising Dartmouth, he declared that the hills were its walls.

And the story of Dartmouth is one of raids, made and suffered, alternately. The kingdoms of England and of France might be at peace, but the ports on either side of the Channel were often engaged in their own private wars, and sent ships and men out to burn, pillage, and slay; while between the English seaman and the Spaniard there existed an enmity which neither treaties nor prudence could set at rest. The gallant seaman of the age of romance, whether Frenchman, Spaniard, or Englishman, was nothing less than a corsair: a murdering scoundrel who, if he could appear in person at this day before his eulogists, would be the most unwelcome of visitors from the great and glorious past. His only recommendation is his undoubted courage and his exclusive patriotism. The English sea-captains of Queen Elizabeth’s day had no more doubt of being God’s avengers against the Spaniard than they had of the sun’s setting in the west; and—although we do not hear so much of the views entertained by the other side—the foreigners doubtless held equally bigoted opinions. The merchant-adventurers of Dartmouth, such as the Hawleys and the Roopes, whose monumental brasses may to this day be found in the ancient churches of St. Saviour in the town, and St. Petrox at the Castle, were embattled traders, whose captains knew what was expected of them, and accordingly did not merely trade peacefully to foreign parts, but beat about the seas in the hope of snapping up rich prizes; whether in time of peace or war mattered little or nothing. Their piety and their ferocity were equally remarkable, and they could find it easily possible to slit a throat, or to make a whole ship’s company walk the plank, to the tune of a thanksgiving psalm. It was a remarkable combination of good qualities and defects, but after all not more remarkable than the doings of such modern people as Rockefeller in America—who will, by illegitimate trading and systematic lying, ruin thousands while posing before a Sunday School—and of his fellows in England, whose names the law of libel will not permit of being printed.

The daring seamanship and the unscrupulous methods of Hawley’s captains, little better than pirates, enriched Hawley immensely, and the like may be said of the Roopes and others. At times of national emergency Hawley could, with an ease readily to be understood, lend his ships entirely for warlike purposes, and probably his crews did not find the change from their “mercantile” voyages very striking. In 1390, for example, as the chronicler Stow informs us, his flotilla “took thirty-four shippes laden with wyne to the sum of fifteen hundred tunnes.” It was probably of one of Hawley’s captains that Chaucer was thinking when he described the “shipman of Dartmouth,” one of the Canterbury Pilgrims setting out from Southwark in 1383. This shipman, at any rate, had need of pilgrimage, or some drastic purging course for the remission of sins, for he is described as having sent many “home by water”; a polite way of saying that he had murdered many upon the high seas by making them walk the plank overboard.

The great John Hawley is represented in effigy on the floor of St. Saviour’s church. He died full of years and honours in 1480, and his two wives, Joan and Alice, are represented beside him. He looks a substantial and honest merchant, a benevolent burgess, and everything respectable and right worshipful, as though piracy were a word that had no meaning for him. The interior of St. Saviour’s is further remarkable for the Elizabethan gallery, panelled and elaborately ornate with the heraldic shields of other old legalised pirates of the town, and for its beautiful early sixteenth-century pulpit of most ornately carved, painted and gilt stone: one of some eight or ten such pulpits in wood or stone to be found in the surrounding districts, and nowhere else in England. The extraordinary boldness, wealth, and high relief of the carving single these remarkable pulpits out from anything else in the country; and their gilding, their vivid red, blue, and green colouring, give them a gorgeous and almost barbaric effect.

Probably as a direct result of the piratical doings of the Dartmouth people, inviting reprisals, it was in 1481 considered advisable to further strengthen the defences of the narrow entrance to Dartmouth harbour; and the existing fortifications on either side were built. The people of Dartmouth were clever enough to get this done at the expense of the nation, the king agreeing to pay the cost, to the extent of £30 a year, out of the customs of Dartmouth and Exeter. The “stronge and myghtye and defensyve new tower” then agreed upon to be built is the existing castle. A chain was to be stretched across between this and Kingswear every night, and although this has, of course, disappeared, the places whence it was stretched are still to be seen.

Dartmouth as a port of call for liners died hard, but the last line of steamships, the Donald Currie service to the Cape, went, and now it is divided between being a favourite yachting station and the home of the new Royal Naval College, which, transferred from its picturesque and makeshift old home aboard the Britannia and Hindostan, now crowns the hill and nobly dominates the whole of Dartmouth in the great range of buildings overlooking the Dart.

The ferryman who puts us across the Dart is full of information and as full of regrets about the Britannia and Hindostan, the new Naval College, and the changed conditions of seafaring life, but with a sardonic smile he thinks the cadets will learn their business as well ashore as they have done afloat. “Why not?” he asks. “They don’t want no sailors nowadays. There was a time when a sailor was never without his marline-spike an’ mallet. Now they’re all bloody Dagoes and Dutchies in the merchant sarvice, an’ engineers and stoke-hole men, with cold chisels, ’stead of knives, in the Navy. For a sailor—when there were sailors, mind you—to be without his knife, why, he might every bit as well up’n give his cap’n a clump auver th’yed, so he might. An’ up there—” he jerked so contemptuous a thumb over his shoulder that it was almost a wonder the new flagstaff on the new central tower did not wilt—“up there them young juicers is fed up with ’lectricity ’n things no Godfearing sailorman in my time never heerd of.”

Although it is designed in the Paltry Picturesque Eclectic Renaissance or Doll’s House, style with ornamental fripperies and fandangalums galore, the Naval College has the noblest of aspects, seen from down the harbour, or across the Dart, from Old Rock Ferry. Planted on the wooded summit of Mount Boone, the long range of buildings, backed by dark trees, sets just that crown and finish upon Dartmouth which suffices to raise the scenic character of the place from beauty to nobility. A curious feature of it is the clock in the central tower, which rings seafaring time ashore: so many “bells.” At sea the twelve hours are divided into three watches of four hours each, with a “bell” to every half-hour. Thus the “bells” rise with the half-hours to eight, when they begin again, with the completion of the first half-hour of the new watch. In this manner, the “bells” agree with shoregoing chimes only twice a day: at eight o’clock, morning and night.