Past Berry Head, with its crown of golden gorse, its cave known as Ash Hole, supposed to have been the burial place of soldiers of Cæsar’s legions, and the house upon its lower slopes which, during the great French Wars with Napoleon, was used as a hospital, and was afterwards given to the poet Lyte by King William IV, one is soon in sight of the rugged pinnacle rock or islet known as the Mewstone, which stands like a sentinel on guard, just outside the entrance to the Dart. The scenery from Berry Head southward is of a very different character from that which distinguishes the coast from Sidmouth to Brixham. The calm loveliness of red cliffs, rich with vegetation, hung with creepers, thick with ferns, and gently fissured, is replaced by rock scenery which grows grander and more beautiful as it becomes more sombre and rugged, whilst in the background are the fertile heights of Devon sloping steeply to the cliffs and many groups of outlying rocks off shore, against which the emerald and indigo sea laps in summer and roars in winter.
As one draws in closer with the land, one is not slow to realize the popularity and importance of Dartmouth and the Dart estuary as a haven and as a port in the strenuous days of old. Even nowadays one might be within a mile or so of the entrance, and yet remain in ignorance of the existence of a town of any size, and only suspect it by the presence of vessels inward or outward bound. The Dart provided just such a quiet and secure haven as in the days when the Channel was infested with privateers and even less reputable craft was essential to the sea-going community of these shores.
Around the river which, rising in the centre of wild and lovely Dartmoor, then wandering across bogs, plains, and fertile valleys, and past picturesque towns and villages, finds ultimately so lovely an outlet into the sea, poets and novelists have woven their webs of song and fancy, whilst famous artists have recorded its wonderful charm and beauty upon their canvases. If not one of the most historic rivers of the British Isles, the Dart may yet claim to be one of those around which romance and imagination have been most closely entwined. One cannot talk to Devonians long without becoming aware of the high place that this changeful river holds in their affections. “It is the most personal stream I have ever known,” a well-known angler has said. “I have traversed it from almost its source to its end, where at Totnes the fresh water meets the salt after a course through moorland bogs, wide-spreading uplands, and valleys where its brownish waters come rushing and leaping down, and where shady pools, fit homes of silvery trout and salmon, tempt the angler to pause. Throughout its often turbulent course there is nothing monotonous; almost every inch of it is lovely in its own peculiar way. It is, indeed, a Queen of rivers, though the native mind ascribes to it the gender of the opposite sex.”
The first glimpse one has of Dartmouth when approaching it from the sea is the ancient castle of St Petrox standing opposite the ruins of its mate of long ago on the Kingswear side. Then one catches a vista—how charming whether in sunshine or when the mists of early morning hang grey-blue above the houses, and have yet to be dissipated by the sun’s rays—of the old town which lies almost hidden behind a green slope of land ending in a cliff. Past the ancient castle, built on the edge of the cliff and surrounded by the most delightful woods, where a picturesque old church seems as though almost about to fall into the water from its apparently perilous site on the very edge of the precipice, past villas nestling amid the trees, and rocky shores, past tiny coves, and slaty cliffs, bare except where trees, saplings, or ferns cling to make them beautiful, one comes at last on jade-coloured water, to the town, grey-looking and sheltered by high cliffs and downs behind it, built sheer up from the edge of the river itself.
There, amid lofty hills on either side of the widening river or the arm of the sea (whichever one pleases to call it) lies what has been described as “the most beautiful and fascinating town in all Devon.” Prince, the famous vicar of Berry Pomeroy, whose book, so full of the Devonian spirit, if somewhat bombastic and ill-balanced in style, may yet be read with profit by those to whom the history of the past of “the fighting, glorious county of Devon,” has an interest, describes it thus, and the description save for a few minor details holds good to-day. Dartmouth, he says, is “a large and populous town, situated on the southern side of a very steep hill, which runneth east to west at considerable length of near a mile, whereby the houses as you pass on the water seem pensile (pendent), and hang along in rows like gallipots in an apothecary’s shop; so high and steep is it that you go from the lower to the higher parts thereof by stairs, and from the bottom to the top requires no less than a hundred.”
Seen from the water near the Britannia the old town is indeed charming, with the picturesquely irregular and weathered roofs of the older houses rising tier upon tier, and the grey-blue smoke of chimneys hanging like a perpetual and kindly veil softening crudities of architecture and adding pictorial charm. There are many quaint houses, more especially those built by Hayman about 1634–1640, in the Butterwalk, with the huge, pointed gables and overhanging upper stories wedded to modern fronted shops, in which are displayed “Paris fashions” and up-to-date goods that at first seem out of character with such surroundings. There is, indeed, much of interest for the artist and antiquarian in Dartmouth streets and by-ways, just as at almost every turn ashore and on the surface of the beautiful land-locked harbour there is something to arrest the attention of the casual observer.
Much of the history of this ancient and interesting town is obscured by the mists of the ages which have passed since the first settlement was made upon the western shore of the lovely river. But we know that the waters “upon which Roman triremes and Danish galleys, and later huge captured galleons swung with the tide,” saw also the assembling together, at the close of the twelfth century, of the Crusaders’ fleet, which sailed the long voyage through the Bay to the Mediterranean to join Richard Cœur de Lion at Messina.
Two centuries later the adventurous spirit which has always animated the men of Devon in general, and of Dartmouth in particular, found vent in one of those predatory expeditions against the coasts of Normandy and Brittany for which the place was afterwards to gain so renowned a name. In the last year of the fourteenth century one John Hawley, deciding upon an “enterprise against those pestilent rogues the French,” chartered all the shipping of which Dartmouth could boast for this purpose, and in retaliation for the depredations of “the French pirates upon the coasts of Devon,” set sail for the shores of Normandy and Brittany. How successful this enterprising merchant’s little private naval war turned out may be judged from the fact that he and his captains, or they for him, captured thirty-four French ships with their cargoes amounting to 1,500 tuns of wine. It is little to be wondered at that after the return of the ships Dartmouth “ran red with the luscious wines of France, and that none need go dry so long as they would drink success to the bold men of the Dart and confusion to the French.”
Such expeditions as that of Hawley, however, were sure to have their counterpart in retaliatory descents by the French; and the history of the town—during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries especially—if written, would be one long story of daring and piratical adventures on the part of the men of the Dart, and surprises and alarms from the French, who on several occasions visited the town and plundered it.
Nature herself would appear, however, to have given some excuse for these piracies (for to call them aught else would be but the merest euphemism) in that she had provided a haven so admirably adapted not only as a base from which to set forth upon such expeditions, but also as a refuge which though so commodious could yet, on account of its narrow entrance, be easily defended. In the reign of Edward IV the burgesses entered into an agreement with their Royal master for the provision of a “stronge and mightye and defensyve new tower” (now known as Dartmouth Castle) from which a chain was to be stretched in time of need to one on the opposite, Kingswear, side of the harbour’s mouth, for the purpose of keeping out the King’s enemies, the French pirates, and other marauders, the King agreeing to pay the sum of £30 per annum for ever for this service, a large amount, when one considers the difference in the value of money then and now.
That Dartmouth seamen early became famous is abundantly proved by the circumstance that it was a captain hailing from this western port who was selected by the immortal Chaucer as one of the characters to ride in company with the Cook, Prioress, Doctor of Physic, the Franklin, the Frere, and all the rest of that band of Canterbury pilgrims of long ago. Amongst the many “pen portraits” he has given us, few, probably, excel in strength and truth that of the Shipman “of Dertemouthe”; which, after reading the history, and conning the traditions of the town in the stirring times of long ago, one can readily accept as typical of many of the men who, pirates though they were, did their part to fight the battles of England, and uphold the noblest traditions of a sturdy seafaring race.
Chaucer extenuates nothing as he writes (painting a picture of the man, his day, and surroundings at one and the same time):
E Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Macmillan’s Globe Edition).
The picture that Chaucer thus paints of the “Shipman of Dertemouthe,” though it probably was a portrait, nevertheless was also true of the seamen in those far-off times of almost every sea-going nation, when the right of the ocean was ever that of the strongest, and the only law that obtained with the sea-dogs of England, France, Holland, or Spain was that of might. Whatever the squeamish amongst historians or moralists may say, the bold sea rovers were a natural evolutionary growth of the life on the coasts, and those of Dartmouth amongst the best. But half-a-day’s sail in a swift craft away across the Channel lay a portion of France not less fitted by Nature to breed pirates and later on privateers than the fretted coast lines of Devon and Cornwall with their myriad coves and refuges, to which the bold seamen could retreat with their plunder, or to make good the damage of battle or breeze. Just as the sister counties we have mentioned bred their hordes of sea-rovers, so did the coasts of Brittany and Finistère. The instinct of piracy and wrecking dominated both English and Bretons alike, and indeed it was well for England that the bold spirits of Cherbourg, St-Malo, Morlaix, and Brest (to mention but a few places where such dwelt) were counterparted by those of Dartmouth, Plymouth, Fowey, and Penzance.
The men of these ports not only fought when compelled, but (to quote an old chronicle) “lusted exceedingly after the blood and treasure of the French corsairs, and other sea rovers.” That the men of Dartmouth were as doughty fighters ashore as afloat is testified by Walsingham (amongst others) in his Chronicle. In this vivid, and let us hope veracious, record one finds an account of the attack upon Dartmouth by Du Chastel, who planned a descent upon the south-western coasts generally, as well as an attack upon Dartmouth in particular, in revenge for the depredations of the men of that port on the Breton coast. The news of Du Chastel’s intention seems to have leaked out, for when some hundreds of Bretons had been landed with the intention of attacking from the land side at the same time that their friends made an attempt from the sea, the former found that the men of the Dart were prepared to receive them, having entrenched themselves to the number of several hundred behind a deep ditch.
The women of the town seem to have borne an Amazonian part in the defence of their hearths and homes, for we learn that they fought stoutly, “using slings with dire effect, so that many of the invaders, both knights and common men fell beneath their missiles into the said ditch.” These and many others were summarily killed by the men, who appear to have given no quarter even if it were asked. On this occasion as on many others the men of Devon proved themselves as well able to defend their homes and possessions as to ravage and take those of other people, and the French, after losing upwards of 400 killed and wounded, and leaving another 200 or so of their comrades prisoners in the hands of the Dartmouth folk, were compelled to seek refuge in their ships as best they could, and ultimately to abandon the idea of attacking other towns on the coast, and return to their own shores.
Scarcely a year elapsed, however, ere the Bretons were back again, and this time, unhappily for the men of the Dart, the news of their coming did not precede them. Dartmouth was surprised, an entrance was forced, the town burned, and many—both men and women—were slain. Thus, in the stirring times of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, ebbed and flowed the fortune of piratical warfare between the hereditary foes of the sea-coasts of Brittany and Devon.
But Dartmouth men and Dartmouth ships were never idle, nor were they always engaged upon mere filibustering expeditions. In the hearts of Devon seamen the flame of patriotism has ever burned, and so on more than one occasion they came in the nick of time to the aid of England, and embarked upon enterprises of national, not merely personal, significance and importance. It was so half a century before the expeditions to Brittany, which brought about the descent of Du Chastel and his force. Then, in 1385, after the death of Edward III and his warlike son Edward the Black Prince, the French were planning one of the periodical invasions of England, which on a grand scale were always doomed to failure, and the English admirals and generals seemed to have become indifferent, or were, perhaps, worn out by the long years of fruitless fighting in Guienne, Poitou, and Brittany. It was then that the Dartmouth men gathered their ships together, and regardless of treaties or the lack of national support, swept up the Channel, forced their way into the mouth of the Seine, where the French fleet was being brought together, and preparations for the invasion were going on, attacked the enemy, sank several of the ships, and carried off with them back to Dartmouth four others, including, Walsingham tells us, a knight’s barge, filled with spoil rich enough to satisfy the greediest freebooter. This undertaking of Dartmouth folk was of national importance; although such events were usually much more of the nature of merchants’ speculations or piracy, which seldom failed to bring about retribution from the equally bold and enterprising Bretons. Indeed, there would appear good reason for supposing that the right to levy “private warfare” was at least tacitly admitted by both English and French rulers of the period, for in an ancient volume bearing upon the subject one finds a distinct statement that at least one English Sovereign, Edward III to wit, aided and abetted his subjects in this matter, the excuse given being the laxity of the then Duke of Brittany in restraining his subjects from similar depredations. Three ports are mentioned, Dartmouth being one, to which the King afforded “help and notable puissance upon pety Bretayne for to warre.”
It may be remarked in passing that men who had been bred of corsair stock, who had learned the value of courage and the lust of battle on the open sea, and the fascination of pillage and rapine as early as they learned anything, needed little official encouragement to undertake and continue the predatory warfare beloved and followed so sturdily by their forbears. Whatever one’s opinion as to the lawfulness or otherwise of such marauding habits, which often, it may be admitted, told severely on the innocent, it is well to remember the historical fact that these sea-rovers of the West of England formed the nucleus of the British Navy, and the thews and sinews of the power which enabled England in after years to flout the great Armada of Philip of Spain, and to stand alone when Europe bowed before the crash of dynasties, and trembled beneath the tread of Napoleon’s legions.
Out of the murk of piracy and lawless freebooting upon the coasts of France and Spain was destined to emerge centuries later the material from which were drawn the navy of Nelson, and the victors of Trafalgar, and of many another hard fought fight, men indomitable when engaged at long odds; enterprising and courageous when traversing in solitude unknown seas and unknown lands; chivalrous (yes, chivalrous in measure) when a gallant foe yielded; full of belief in the overruling Providence which had set Britain in the midst of the waters that she might throughout all the jugglery of Empires and nations remain free.
In the State papers and ships’ log-books which we have seen may be found material for all the romances that can ever be written of daring doings in the narrow seas, of the pirates, and afterwards of the privateers and smugglers who sailed out of Devon and Cornish ports and coves, and made the Channel during several centuries, war or no war with France and Spain, almost impossible of safe passage to merchantmen of the latter nations, except when strongly convoyed.
Of many of the stirring scenes which the port of Dartmouth must have witnessed, there are unfortunately few historical records. But we know that it was visited by several of the early Kings. Here, too, in Saxon times came Sweyn, son of Godwyn, into whose hands Earl Beorn fell a prisoner, and by him was afterwards put to death about 1049. It was to Dartmouth that the “Red King” William Rufus came in hot haste from his hunting of the deer on Dartmoor in 1099, after receiving the news of the siege of Mans, Dartmouth being the nearest port from which he could embark.
Just upon a century later, in 1190, came Richard Cœur de Lion with his army of knights and Crusaders obsessed by the necessity for slaying infidels, and of themselves dying in a far-off land. King John came to Dartmouth more than once, notably in 1214, after his defeat at Roche aux Moines in Anjou. It is this monarch, Leland states, who gave a charter to the town, confirmed in the succeeding reign by Henry III, although another writer, Merewether, states that in 1319 the town set up a claim as having been free in the reign of Henry I early in the twelfth century.
A less pleasant visitor of Royal blood was Prince Maurice, nephew of Charles I, who besieged and took the town in 1643, the Royalists losing possession three years later, when General Fairfax and his Parliamentarians stormed and captured the place after considerable loss of life and destruction of property. Charles I was here in 1643, and (so tradition asserts) held his court in a room of one of the houses in the Butterwalk, and Charles II visited the place after his Restoration, some say with fair Mistress Gwynne in his suite.
But after all it is not to Royal folk that Dartmouth owed its fame in years gone by, but to the sturdy seafarers of whom the famous navigating sons of Devon, Adrian Gilbert, who (to quote a letter of Queen Elizabeth herself) “doth travail and seeke, and by divers meanes indeavoureth and laboureth that the passage unto China and the Isles of the Moluccas by the northwestward may be known”; Martin Frobisher, and John Davis of Sandridge; Francis Drake, and John Hawkins are but a few. It was to John Davis that the task of discovering the sea route concerning which Sir Humphrey Gilbert (the brother of Adrian) wrote a Discourse “to prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East Indies” was entrusted. In all he made three voyages, in 1585, 1586, and 1587, in vessels which are well described in Chaucer’s words, “little bote(s) no bigger than a manne’s thought”; and afterwards we are told that he sailed into southern seas, and eventually was killed by the Malaccan pirates with whom he had had more than one “brush,” leaving behind him a permanent memorial in the name of Davis’s Straits between Greenland and Baffin Land.
To Queen Elizabeth herself some credit must be given for the encouragement and stimulus her patronage afforded these hazardous enterprises; and if it was because of the reflected glory which would accrue to her, or even direct monetary profit, well, what matter?
In Hakluyt one finds how “certain honourable personages and worthy gentlemen of the Court and Country, with divers worshipful merchants of London and the West Countrie, moved with desire to advance God’s glory, and to seek the good of their native country, consulting together of the likelihood of the discovery of the North-West Passage, which heretofore has been attempted, but unhappily given over by accidents unlooked for ... resolved, after good deliberation, to put down their adventures, to provide for necessary shipping, and a fit man to be chief conductor of this so hard an enterprise.” Then we are told how one Master William Sanderson, merchant, of London, became the greatest of the adventurers in respect of the money he provided, and how he commended to those who had the adventure in hand one Master John Davis, “a man very well grounded in the principales and art of navigation,” as captain and chief pilot of the expedition. One can imagine the meetings of the adventurers in London, and the zest with which the gentlemen of the Court, the Queen’s representatives, secret or open, and the worthy merchants, conned “sea-cards,” the charts of Master Martin Frobisher’s voyages of a few years before, and the learned and closely reasoned discourse of Sir Humphrey Gilbert himself regarding the existence of the Passage. It may be that among these was the chart of friar Andro Urdaneta, which Sir Humphrey Gilbert states was “made by his own (Urdaneta’s) experience and travel ... wherein was plainly set down and described this North-West Passage,” agreeing in all points with Ortelius’ map.
And then there were the preparations at Dartmouth itself. The gathering together of a “company of goodlie seamen, not easily turned from any good purpose, and strong withal in their determination to serve the Queene’s Most Excellent Majestie and their countrie well and faithfully in this adventure”; the selection of ships and the fitting out of the same. They who adventured forth on long voyages in those days indeed needed stout hearts, for to the perils of the deep and the unknown were added those of possible starvation and drought.
But at length everything was ready, and (again quoting Hakluyt’s vivid pages) “all things being put in readiness, we departed from Dartmouth the 7th of June towards the discovery of the aforesaid North-West Passage with two barques, the one being fifty tons, named the Sunshine of London; and the other being of thirty-five tons, named the Moonshine, of Dartmouth. In the Sunshine we had twenty-three persons, Master John Davis, captain.... The Moonshine had nineteen persons, William Bruton, captain.”
We are further told that ere the ships dropped the land astern, doubtless in view of risks of the voyage and difficulties of revictualling, “the captain and the master drew out a proportion for the continuance of our victuals.”
One can imagine with what interest the setting forth of Davis and his adventurous companions was watched by the townsfolk on the quays, and how doubtless scores of them took the tree-shaded path to the bluff above the old church of St Petrox to watch the two tiny vessels gradually pass out of sight to the west as “the wind being at north, and being fair weather” they departed. How different in dignity and impressiveness is this simple phrase from the fuss, fume, and noisy announcement of the departure of modern Polar expeditions, with rampant personal advertisement, and free “puffing” of commercial wares and stores.
Few as were the adventurous souls in the Sunshine and Moonshine, there was doubtless many a sad-hearted lass in Dartmouth town that night. And in the waterside taverns seamen foregathered over their ale tankards and tots of rum idly speculating as to the existence of a North-West Passage, and as to whether bold John Davis, Master Mariner, and his men would ever see Dartmouth harbour again.
But on September 30 of the same year, when the expedition had been gone just over three months and three weeks, Davis was back again safe and sound with both his ships. The Moonshine, which had been lost sight of on the 27th, during “a marvellous storm being come in not two hours before” Davis’ own vessel.
His second voyage commenced from Dartmouth on May 7 in the following year (1586); and his third on May 19, 1587.
Something of the spirit which actuated these boldly adventuring mariners of Dartmouth and the old West Country breathes, we think, in the words with which Sir Humphrey Gilbert closes his learned and famous Discourse.
He says, “for if, through pleasure and idleness, we purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth, but the shame remaineth for ever.
“And, therefore, to give me leave without offence always to live and die in this mind, that he is not worthy to live at all that for fear of danger of death shunneth his country’s service and his own honour, seeing death is inevitable, and the fame of virtue immortal.”
From these stirring times of great enterprises is but a step to those which came but a year or two later, when out of Plymouth hard by streamed Drake’s little covey of ships on their mission of engaging the vast Armada, which even when Davis and his intrepid companions set forth for their voyaging amid Polar ice and northern seas was a menace that cast a shadow over the national life.
Just as the townsfolk of Dartmouth had crowded to the cliffs at the harbour entrance to see Davis depart on his voyages, and wave him God-speed, so climbed they once again to watch the Armada, which Philip of Spain in his pride had named “Invincible,” “wrecking nought that God Himself was with the English fleet and Lord Howard of Effingham,” go surging up the Channel, flags flying, cannon belching, with “pictures of the Holy Saints, and coats of arms wrought upon their sails”; and the little English ships hanging to them in hot and furious pursuit.
Then came a time of comparative rest for the beautiful little port on the Dart, which, however, as we have before stated, saw some of the storm and stress of the Civil War. With the bold and successful enterprises of Dartmouth privateers during the long war with Napoleon, or with those of equally daring smugglers at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, there is no space to deal in detail. We need only say that the spirit which had formerly actuated the Hawleys, Davises, Hammonds, Clintons, and Vaughans (to mention but a few)—many of whose enterprises are set forth in the State papers—was not now a-lacking when England experienced once more a time of stress and need, and opportunity for personal gain walked in step with patriotism.
The greatness of Dartmouth as a seaport has departed. In the comparative quietude of her streets and alleys one does, however, seem to catch as it were an echo of other and more splendid days. And in the types one meets by the waterside and in the purlieus of the quays the observant can yet trace something of the old seadogs who, adventuring much, went forth in quest of new worlds and new trade routes, or roved the Breton coasts in search of conflict and of plunder. The waters of the harbour are nowadays, however, chiefly ploughed by pleasure craft, white winged yachts in place of the armed sloops and fast sailing craft, once bent on pillage, or commerce with Newfoundland and other far countries.
In the churches—more especially those of St Clement and St Saviour—one finds rich treasures of architecture, and of monuments to men and women citizens of Dartmouth famous in adventure, trade, or philanthrophy. In the former church, which dates from the fourteenth century and was fortified during the Civil War, are numerous memorials, the quaint inscriptions which they many of them bear, setting forth in brief the life history of those they commemorate. But it is the church of St Saviour, set in the middle of the quaint old town, also work of the fourteenth century (and earlier), which is the gem of the place. The exceptionally fine screen is said to be an Armada relic; but whether this is so or not, it is sufficiently beautiful to merit the closest attention and examination. All who go to Dartmouth and visit the church should notice the south side door known as the “Dragon” Door, quaint with wonderful representations of animals, and dating, so it is said, from the fourteenth century or even earlier. In the altar piece, the subject of which is “Christ raising the Widow’s Son,” one has some of the finest of Brockedon’s work, a distinguished son of the Dart born at Totnes. And here, too, as in St Clement’s, sleep many whose names were writ upon the town’s roll of fame in the times when Dartmouth gave of her best in battle and discovery.
Totnes seems so indissolubly linked with Dartmouth in history and adventure, that few who come to the outer port with time on their hands fail, we fancy, to find their way up the beautiful river to that inner port, now decayed ’tis true like the outer, but yet of more than passing interest. Of its antiquity there can be as little doubt as of its picturesqueness; although there are those who scout the theory (or statement) of that none too veracious chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, that Brutus of Troy landed at Totnes. Which story the devout townsfolk from time out of mind have striven to keep alive by the preservation in the pavement of quaint Fore Street of the stone upon which the princely, world-wide wanderer is said to have rested after his landing.
In the street we have named, near the beautiful old Eastgate, which stands half-way up its steeply climbing roadway, are some of the most architecturally interesting houses of the town. Merchants’ palaces of the time when Totnes was completely environed by its walls, and “its inhabitants, even in times of trouble, could sleep at ease because of its strong defences.” It is from the old Norman keep, built, so ’tis said, by Judhael de Totenais, that one obtains what local folk proudly assert is the finest view in Devon. From it (let the claim pass unchallenged) one does see a prospect of delight, widely stretching and cultivated fields and uplands, with distant plum-hued Dartmoor on the far horizon to the northward. To the south and in front of the lower town is the beautiful reach of the river up which in ancient times came the returned vessels from distant lands, richly laden with the spoil of commerce or pillage which made the Totnes merchants, if not “rich beyond the dreams of avarice,” yet wealthy amongst their peers.
But Totnes of to-day knows little of sea-borne commerce, and is mainly given over to the pursuits of a country town of somewhat indifferent enterprise, with the sole excitements afforded by recurring market days, and the gossip of the incoming folk from the district round about. A sharp enough contrast to the stirring days of old when excitement and adventurous life was the distinguishing feature, and “none could tell what each tide would bring up from the sea. News of loss or gain, of returned or missing ships, of wealth for prosperous merchants or disaster which might make the richest of them poor.”
In the ancient Parish Church of St Mary one has an interesting building dating from the fifteenth century, replacing a thirteenth century edifice which in turn stood on the site of a much earlier Norman church. The beautifully carved screen (said by some authorities to be the finest in Devon), and the registers which date from the middle of the sixteenth century, and contain an astonishing amount of most interesting information regarding the old merchant princes of the Elizabethan and succeeding periods give St Mary’s Church an unusual attractiveness for antiquarians and students.
In its old Guildhall, which is a portion of the old priory of St Mary, granted to the Corporation in the reign of Edward, just behind the church, Totnes possesses a building alive with historic memories of the deepest interest, and containing amongst its deeds and records Rolls of the Guilds from the year 1260, charters of many kings and queens, some of the oldest as clear and almost as fresh as the day on which the pens which wrote them were laid down three or four centuries ago. In its Town Clerks of recent years—especially in Mr Ed Windeatt—Totnes has generally been fortunate in having gentlemen by whom the old records and treasures of the town have been appreciated and carefully preserved. And writers and historians have found their labours much lightened by the excellent manner in which the documents have been collated and arranged.
Those who “know their Dart” will if possible leave this beautiful, sleepy old town, which is set so charmingly on the hillside amid rounded fertile uplands and many-tinted woods just before sunset. Then the passage back to Dartmouth down the river, from the brown water of the Dart to the gradually greening salt water of the estuary, is one of almost indescribable and unforgettable beauty. It lies past Sandridge where that intrepid explorer and much adventuring seaman John Davis was born; and Greenway, where Adrian and Humphrey Gilbert had their home. And then, just before reaching Dartmouth once more one passes the mid-river rock of sinister appearance and tradition, known as the Anchor, to which in former times scolding wives and disobedient daughters were ferried and left to encounter the rising tide, and (as we are told) if “when the water was up to their petticoats the same remained obdurate,” were left until obstinacy yielded to wholesome fear of a complete ducking, or worse.
As one leaves the interesting and lovely old town of Dartmouth, and drops the estuary astern, and approaches that long, low headland, Start Point, which lies eight miles to the south-west, one passes the stretch of white, sandy beach, near which took place that fierce fight of long ago between Du Chastel’s Bretons and the men and women of Dartmouth town. On these sands, too, had landed in the autumn of 1370, another adventurer, but of more noble kind, namely, the Earl of Warwick, the “King Maker.”
When once Start Point, with its lighthouse and lighthouse buildings hung upon the western side of the cliff two hundred feet in the air, and looking in the strong light as though cut out of ivory, has been left astern, one comes to the wild looking Prawle Point, with its signal station, and then into the estuary of Salcombe River, leading up to Kingsbridge of ancient renown.
Salcombe has been called “one of the prettiest havens in Devon,” and after a visit one is inclined to agree that the description is not unmerited. It is indeed a delightful spot, as yet largely unspoiled by “development”; picturesquely built beneath the shelter of well-wooded hills. These, clothed with verdure, form a remarkable contrast to the hills on the Portlemouth side which lie bare and open to the strong westerly and south-westerly gales which sweep up from the sea. This same Portlemouth is a straggling collection of ancient, grey-toned cottages, clinging to the sides of a steeply climbing road. In the churchyard is a tombstone to the memory of a farmer who was poisoned by his servant, which is interesting from the fact that the latter’s punishment of being burned at the stake is set forth upon the stone so that “all people warning take.” The girl was tried in 1782, and condemned to be first hanged and then burned; “which barbarous sentence was duly carried out at Exeter, and was the last instance in England of such a punishment being inflicted.”
Just before one reaches Salcombe, which nestles amidst its wealth of myrtles, Portugal laurels, Guelder roses, arbutus, orange and lemon trees, and sheltered even from the soft south wind by Lambury Point, one passes Fort Charles, one of the many isolated Royalist strongholds during the stirring times of the Civil War in the West Country.
Soon after the outbreak of hostilities this fort, which had been previously repaired and reclaimed from almost a state of ruin by Sir Edmund Fortescue “who was for the King,” was attacked by Colonel Weldon, Governor of Plymouth, “who approached with both horse and foot to the siege, and made a hell for four months of the little fisher town Salcombe.” That the place should have held out so long was a wonder, but the end was bound to come. Fort Charles capitulated, but Sir Edmund Fortescue was allowed to march out with his force with the honours of war, and to retain the keys of his castle. The latter, however, was dismantled (making the retention of the keys a somewhat empty form) and has never since been used or repaired. And thus fell the last place to hold out for the King in Devon.
Salcombe, with its narrow streets and ancient houses forming so great a contrast to the newer portions of the town and the villas dotted here and there amid the wealth of green upon its slopes, has an old-world atmosphere, and a picturesqueness which makes most who drop anchor in its fiord-like estuary reluctant to depart, and anxious to return again.
To lovers of English history Salcombe will always be a spot of fragrant and pleasant memory and pilgrimage, from the fact that it was here that the great historian James Anthony Froude lived for many years and did much of the work wherein “he clothed the story of stirring deeds and historic happenings, which had long since been dead, with flesh and blood so that it lives again in the minds and hearts of men.” Froude died here in 1894, and many pilgrims yearly make their way to the long, low house with a verandah running round it, and its casements opening out into the charming garden in which he loved to wander, and where Tennyson came to visit him. It was at Salcombe, too, that the poet received the inspiration for “Crossing the Bar,” whilst on Lord Brassey’s Sunbeam, and those who have slipped out of the estuary when the sun is dipping westward can appreciate the picture conjured up in the opening stanza:
The tale of Salcombe as regards its former greatness and present-day comparative decay is similar to that of so many other little ports which we have visited and described. Leland refers to it in his Itinerary as a “fisher towne.” But anciently it was more than this. The records of the number of ships belonging to and trading with Salcombe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries prove it to have then been a place of considerable importance. And in the middle of the former century the Customs returns amounted to a sum of about £5,000 per annum. In the latter half of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth centuries Salcombe was a great smuggling place. Was not, indeed, the estuary made by Nature herself for such a purpose? And the smugglers, we are told, “gave much trouble to the riding officers and ‘preventive’ men of the coast from Dartmouth to Plymouth.”
Kingsbridge, once a flourishing port with a considerable Mediterranean trade, employing some two hundred vessels not a century ago, is no longer of much commercial importance. The way from Salcombe up to the further town is a muddy channel, almost devoid of picturesque scenery, and beset with mudbanks. But amongst the ancient things which survive at Kingsbridge is the custom of brewing and drinking “white ale,” of unprepossessing appearance and considerable potency, said to have been invented at Dodbroke, with which Kingsbridge is so closely connected. It is, indeed, a curious beverage of almost treacly consistency, made of malt, hops, eggs, and flour, fermented with grout, and is best avoided by the stranger.
In the old Shambles erected in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, which form a picturesque element in the Fore Street, and in the Church of St Edmund, dating from the second decade of the fifteenth century, Kingsbridge holds out some inducement for the visits of antiquarians. In the quaint inscription on the memorial to one Robert Phillips, just outside the chancel door is clearly stated a truism for all who run to read.
Bolt Head, rugged and forbidding of aspect, and the Mewstones which guard the western side of the Salcombe estuary must be rounded ere one’s course can be laid for Plymouth, along a rugged and wild coast deeply and dangerously fissured, in which are the mouths of the picturesque streams the Avon and Erme. Then come more Mewstones, the number of which along this coast has often caused us to wonder. These passed, Plymouth is right ahead.
As one passes up the wide expanse of that unequalled anchorage known as the Sound, where have floated almost from time immemorial the argosies and battle fleets of England, and into which so much of the wealth of the world has been borne in the past as now, the spoil of enterprise or of war, one realizes something at least of the spirit of ancient times. Plymouth has forged ahead whilst many of her sister ports of bygone ages have slowly decayed. Throughout the centuries there has been no rest, no idle contentment with things that are until they cease to be. And thus it is that Plymouth, of all the ancient ports of the West Country on the Channel, has increased in greatness as the years have rolled by.
Few more inspiring and beautiful pictures are to be found along the coast than those afforded by Plymouth Sound. Wedded to fine scenery is bustling commerce. Across the seaway lies the world-famous breakwater, and behind it all along up to Plymouth the sea is beset with craft of all kinds; huge trading vessels, mostly three and four masters, which have voyaged to the ends of the earth; fishing boats, which look like cockle shells in comparison; destroyers, and torpedo boats; tramp steamers belching out black clouds of smoke in rivalry with that of the tugs; and, more majestic than all, the ocean liners and occasional incoming battleships making their way slowly up the Sound.
There are few spots on blue water where is given so great a touch of life to things inanimate. And when one comes to an anchor off Drake’s long low isle, or in the shelter of the beautifully wooded Mount Edgcumbe, the ghosts of mighty seamen of the past seem to flit across the scene, and visions of long lost fleets, and adventurers’ galleons rise unbidden to the mind.
Plymouth is one of those “ancient places in the making of which all periods of national history have had a share.” It even disputes with Totnes the honour of having been the landing place of Brutus the Trojan, when some three thousand years ago he paid a visit to these shores. The story that the Trojan champion Corianaeus and a giant of the West Country, one Gogmagog, wrestled a fall on or near the famous Hoe, in which the latter was ultimately vanquished and cast into the sea, is a part of the Brutus legend. The Plymouth Fathers of old time evidently accepted it as having some foundation in fact, as they caused a representation of the giant to be cut in the turf of the Hoe, which remained to remind the townsfolk and seafarers alike of the combat until about the time of the Restoration.
Of the doings and history of the town of Plymouth, known in the Domesday Book as Sutton or South Town, then having about half a score of inhabitants, prior to the Norman Conquest (if any town existed, which one may doubt, notwithstanding Geoffrey of Monmouth) there are practically no records or traces of any kind. Eventually the Domesday hamlet increased and became divided into two portions, Sutton Prior, or the eastern portion, falling to the Priory of Plympton, and the western part coming through grant by the Crown into the possession of the family of Valletort, which still forms one of the subsidiary titles of the Edgecumbe family, whose connexion with Plymouth is so intimate.
The rise of the port was destined to be rapid, for towards the end of the fourteenth century only three other towns in England had larger populations. Two of these, it may be noted, were ports—London and Bristol—and the third the seat of an archbishopric, York. Long before this period, however, Plymouth possessed a market, and had sent representatives to Parliament. And in the reign of Henry II it received its Charter—the first granted by Act of Parliament, a unique privilege, of which the city fathers have always been justly proud. The first mayor in pursuance of this charter was elected in 1439, William Ketherick by name; who (according to records which have been preserved) was a noted sportsman, and the possessor of “an appetite of right goodlie proportions, though he was but a little man.” There is a story that at the banquet he gave on his election, lest his appetite and that of his guests should run the risk of remaining unsatisfied, there was included amongst the numerous dishes, joints, and delicacies provided, a monster pie, into which “every beast, bird, and fish was put, with spices and other matter,” which measured nearly five yards in length and one and a half in breadth, and indeed speaks volumes for the digestions of those times.
Like its neighbour Dartmouth, Plymouth has been almost from time immemorial the home of daring adventure and warlike enterprises. And like the sister port it possesses a fine and commodious harbour (though one less easily defended), singularly well adapted as a base for expeditions of the kind which marked the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries more especially. But although many of the ships and fleets which sailed out of the Sound for the coasts of France, Spain, and the Americas in bygone times were unauthorized freebooters, early in the existence of Plymouth more truly national expeditions set sail from its quays. For example, towards the close of the thirteenth century a great fleet of upwards of 320 vessels assembled for an attack upon the French coasts; and in 1355—some sixty years later—Edward the Black Prince came here for a similar purpose. And during the wars between the Houses of York and Lancaster there was stir in the old streets by the waterside marking from time to time the arrival of some Royal fugitive or exile. Here, too, came unfortunate Margaret of Anjou, the dauntless, sleepless foe of Edward IV; and the not less unfortunate Duke of Clarence. In the first year of the sixteenth century there landed at Plymouth yet another ill-starred lady, the Princess Katherine of Aragon, on her way to marry Prince Arthur, and destined afterwards to become the wife of his brother Henry VIII. She was entertained right royally by the citizens of Plymouth, chiefly by one of the merchant princes of the port, named Paynter, who lived in a magnificent mansion not far from the waterside, which has, alas! in recent years shared the fate of most historical buildings that come in the way of modern and commercial progress.
But although many books might be written concerning the sailing of the Plymouth corsairs against “the damnable pirates out of St-Malo, Morlaix, and Brest,” and other smaller ports of the Breton coast, and afterwards of the daring doings of ships which, leaving the port as honest traders to the Spanish Main, or West Coast of Africa, yet, when on the high seas, hoisted the black flag of piracy, we have no space to spare in which to describe them in detail. Nor, indeed, to deal with the “bloody adventures of bold seamen out of Plymouth, on the opposite coasts,” nor to recount the marvellous exploits of those who ranged the Spanish Main, and became passing rich by reason of the singeing of the Dons’ beards, and the booty which fell to daring enterprise and bold adventure, where no man valued either his own life or the lives of his foes.
It is impossible, however, to pass without a somewhat detailed mention of the most eventful period of the town’s history when “by some concatenation of Fortune and circumstance so many brave and gallant men of skill and resource dwelt in or came to Plymouth, that they might in the hour of England’s need take upon themselves her strong defence.”
It is not too much to say that Plymouth came to its own in the great days of Elizabeth. For then the magnificent harbour for a time became the centre and focus of all that was noblest and most strenuous in national life and effort. And the position that Plymouth then attained has never been entirely lost. It is the one great old-time port of the South-West coasts which has known no decline and seen no decay.
In the streets of the old town, which has largely passed away to make room for the needs of strenuous modern commerce, were enacted stirring scenes; which, indeed, as one writer phrases it, “made the very pavement stones and quays of the town the stage of history.” Here were gathered, at all events, most of the foremost actors in the great pageantry of the Elizabethan age and the Armada period. Here came Drake, Sir John Hawkins, Martin Frobisher, Sir Walter Raleigh, Lord Howard of Effingham, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Lord Seymour, and many more sea lords of the Channel and the wider seas beyond. It was the work of these, and others almost as famous and equally daring and patriotic, to raise England to the pinnacle amongst the nations of the world that she occupied by the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and has never since lost. To them in a large measure must be given the credit of planting the seeds of Empire throughout the then known world, which by their efforts in adventure and discovery was so considerably extended during the latter part of the sixteenth century. To these intrepid seamen and explorers of Plymouth and other Western ports we owe not only that shining gem India, but also the vast America we so unhappily lost, the Empire in the South Seas, and the territory of the frozen North lands which cling close to the Pole.
It is, however, more particularly with the great Armada and the setting forth of that band of intrepid adventurers for conscience’ sake, the Pilgrim Fathers, that the history of Plymouth is linked with that of the nation for all time. On the Hoe, now “tamed,” but otherwise much as it was in Drake’s and Raleigh’s time, the merchant princes of Plymouth were in those far off days wont to forgather, to discuss the news of the day, and to watch the outgoing and incoming of the ships in which their fortunes were embarked. And it was to the Hoe that the bold adventurers, who sailed forth into unknown as well as known seas, bearing with them the fortunes of others with their own lives as surety, turned their last gaze as they dropped away down the Sound out into the deep waters.
It is recorded, too, that when any ship was setting forth on an errand of importance, not only did the vessel salute the shore with guns, and the music of the ship’s band (where such could be mustered), but the guns upon the Hoe were fired, the crowd gathered upon it to witness the departure huzza-ed, and music was played.
One can, therefore, easily imagine the excitement which seized upon the town on that Sunday in August, in the year 1573, when the news came from the look-out that Drake was back from one of his adventurous voyages, and, as a writer of the time says, “all people came rushing out of the churches, insomuch that there were few Christian souls left to hear the preacher.”
The same spirit which had made adventurers (and perhaps on occasion pirates) now made heroes, instinct with a high ideal of England’s honour and renown. Those were days in which Englishmen bandied no words with the Dons of Spain, but spoke with ball with the breath of powder, as the following instance of Sir John Hawkins’s treatment of the Spanish admiral who failed in naval etiquette will show. It happened that the Spanish fleet, some fifty sail, sent to bring Queen Anne of Austria from Flanders to Spain, entered (to quote Sir Richard Hawkins) “betwixt the island and the maine without vayling their topsayles, or taking in of their flags.” Sir John Hawkins, on seeing this, made no delay, but commanded his gunner to shoot at the flag of the Spanish admiral’s ship as a gentle hint of the breach of etiquette. Again quoting, we find “they (the Spaniards) persevered arrogantly to keep the flag displayed, whereupon the gunner at the next shot lact the admirall through and through, whereby the Spaniards finding that the matter began to grow earnest, took in their flags and topsayles and so ran to an anchor.”
As was not unnatural the Spanish admiral sent a boat to Sir John, in command of an officer of rank, to demand an explanation. The English admiral, however, promptly declined to afford any, and moreover told the Spaniard plainly that “as in the Queene’s port ... he had neglected to do the acknowledgement and reverence which all owe to another majestie,” he must depart within twelve hours whether in fair wind or foul, “upon pain to be held as a common enemy.”
It was to men like these that the fate of England could be so surely entrusted. For to dauntless courage and marvellous skill in the arts of seamanship was added the fear of God in their hearts, sometimes curiously obscured it is true, but in reality genuine and inspiring.
For some time before the ships of the Armada cast loose their moorings in Lisbon on May 19, 1588, and set out upon the conquest of England under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, the English fleet, under the command of Lord Charles Howard, Sir Francis Drake, and Sir John Hawkins had been collected together and marshalled in Plymouth Sound awaiting the news that the Spaniards were in the Channel. The ships had been chosen and “found” by men who knew what value to place upon sound ships, rigging, and fittings; and under the eye of Howard, Seymour, Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and others who afterwards bore their gallant part, the English ships (some mere cockboats) which rode at anchor under the lee of Mount Edgcumbe, waiting for the advent of the enemy, and “straining at the cables to get at the Spanish Dons,” were made ready.