There is no difficulty raised against the pedestrian following the private drive made by Lord Revelstoke round the coast. In this manner the great piled-up slabs of rock forming Stoke Point can be seen, with Yealm Head and the woodlands on the way. But most pilgrims who have already made a long walk of it will undoubtedly feel disposed to cut that detour out and make for the modern church of Revelstoke inland, overlooking a creek of the deep sea-channel of the Yealm and the villages of Noss Mayo and Newton Ferrers. “Newton” and “Noss” those villages are familiarly styled. They confront one another like Putney and Fulham across the Thames, the old church of Newton Ferrers in outline the fellow of the new one of Revelstoke. But the new building is the veriest upstart. It was built by Lord Revelstoke in 1882, at a cost of £29,000, and is a very prominent example of great cost, much pretension, and little real art. Less of the ecclesiastical furnishers’ work and more solid, if less showy, fittings would have made the church more worthy its beautiful site. That riches take to themselves wings is exemplified here; for in less than ten years from the completion of this church and the ornate rebuilding of Membland Hall, came the great Baring financial crash, and with it the impoverishment of Lord Revelstoke.

The Yealm runs up, as a deep, narrow and beautiful salt estuary for some three miles inland, and excursion steamers from Plymouth penetrate so far as Steer Point, where Kitley and Coffleet creeks branch right and left to Yealmpton—“Yampton” locally—and Brixton, and in the middle the smaller creek of Puslinch. The fresh water stream of the Yealm, like all the streams of South Devon, comes from Dartmoor. The banks of the estuary are deeply wooded and extremely picturesque; presenting, more than any of those numerous inlets that are so notable a feature of this coast, the appearance of a gorge; Noss Mayo standing on its branch creek, deriving, indeed, the first part of its name from the projecting height—the “ness” or “nose”—on which it stands. Noss in 1849 suffered terribly from cholera, and even more terribly two centuries ago, when only seven of its inhabitants survived.

By the row-boat ferry at Yealm Mouth the explorer is put to the tiring scramble towards Wembury. Descending the hillside fields of corn, the lonely church is seen, and over it, out to sea, the famous Mewstone appears, rising, a huge, abrupt and angular mass of dark limestone rock, a mile off-shore. Dangerous, and nearly inaccessible though it be at most times, it and its surrounding sea look so innocent and harmless under the sun of a still day in July that the evil reputation of that rock and these waters seems based on insubstantial grounds. Yet the Mewstone has amply occasioned the poetic tribute:

The verse points to the origin of the name of this and the several other Mewstones along this coast of Devon; the sea-mew is of course the sea-gull, and these isolated reefs so many “sea-gull rocks.” References are often found in literature to the “laughter of the gulls,” but the name of “sea-mew” more nearly indicates the sound of the peevish cry of those birds, which closely resembles the mew of a cat.

About 1836 the Mewstone was inhabited by one Samuel Wakeham and his wife, who lived in a little rustic house and looked after Squire Calmady’s rabbits, which swarmed the seemingly lifeless rock. The Mewstone was made the subject of an article in a local South Devon magazine, and (according to the editor of it) drew the annexed reply from the “Lord of the Isles,” as the editor calls him. The thing is amusing, but smells suspiciously like an editorial invention:

There is no village at Wembury; only, down beneath the swelling contours of those hillside cornfields, a church, a farmstead, and a water-mill on the very verge of the beach: the whole so situated and of such a singularly unnatural loneliness and air of detachment that you feel sure whatever history may have to say of the place, or whatever it may leave unsaid—you feel sure, I say, that the sea has at some time come up and munched off a great piece of land and the village with it, and has long ago digested the whole. And indeed what is left of Wembury is situated in a little semi-circular bay, where the downs descend to low clifflets of friable earthy rock, which is now slaty, now gravelly, and again of the red Devonian sandstone, all by turns. It is as though that hungry sea had come suddenly and taken a mouthful, as you might bite a piece of bread and butter.

Descending to this strange spot, you look down upon the leads of the church tower and thence come by rough and steep tracks to the shore, where a little stream runs by the water-wheel of the old mill on to the shingle of the beach. So near is the wheel to the sea that in times of storm the salt water of the waves mingles with the fresh, and so close to the tide are the walls of the mill-house that when the winds lash the waters into foaming breakers the rooms smell of the salt spray, and are filled with the clamour of the elements.

Here the singular picturesqueness of the place is most fully revealed, and the church to which just now you descended is seen to stand high and boldly above the beach, on a commanding knoll, girt about with a circular brick retaining-wall heavily buttressed, lest it, as well as the church, and the churchyard it shores up from a sudden descent, should come toppling down in common ruin.

The age, the rugged beauty, and the interest of the church are almost completely hidden beneath a coating of plaster, and the grass grows rankly in the churchyard, where the odd epitaph may be noted:

Henry Kembil
died Nov. 25 1725
’Tis over with your friend
Mind That.

An arresting inscription, surely, and not a little puzzling until it is discovered that Henry Kembil was a ferryman of the Yealm and a portion of his epitaph is a play upon the word “over,” by which, shouting across the river, the would-be passenger who is versed in Devon ways still brings the ferryman to him.

Save, indeed, for the hullabaloo created by the battleships out to sea and the forts off Plymouth, practising their heavy guns, Wembury would scarce be associated with bloody war; yet if this place is really the “Wicganbeorch” of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle—as by antiquaries it is supposed to be—it saw particularly hard fighting in A.D. 851, when “Ceorl the Ealdorman, with the men of Devon fought against the heathen men (that is, the Danes), and there made great slaughter and got the victory.”

Those “heathen” men or Danes were the vikings, of whom early history has so much to tell; but here we see the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, in writing “Wicganbeorch,” which means Wiking-bury—adopting the advice given so many centuries later by Tony Weller to his dutiful Sam, and “spelling it with a ‘we.’”

The big gun practice of the battleships out in the Channel, whose roaring is like that of several thunderstorms growling in concert across the water, is very impressive, and majestic, and altogether different from the sound of firing from the forts, producing a less resonant noise, like that of rude and impudent persons, very much out of temper, violently and continually slamming doors.

Oh! it is good to stand on the beach of a primitive place like Wembury when the sea breeze blows in strong, and the great curling waves come creaming up to the very walls of the mill-house, with the stinging salt particles on your face and an unutterable sense of vitality and freedom clothing you, and the giant waves spouting out yonder on the Mewstone, and the hoarse jamboree of the great guns bellowing yonder. But when the sea and the air are still and the August sun glares down upon the hilly coast, why then there is nothing for it but to either rest till sundown or plod on exhaustedly in a reeking moist heat, welcoming every little puff of wind on the rises, and almost sinking to the ground in the stew-pan of the hollows.

CHAPTER XXVI
THE CATWATER—THE BARBICAN—THE “PILGRIM FATHERS”—THE HOE

Distances in and around Plymouth are most remarkably deceptive, and the local geography is full of surprises. The famous Plymouth Sound is from two to four miles wide, but the clear air and the heights on either side give an impression of smaller scale. As you round the hilly coast from Wembury and come within the Sound, you enter upon a panoramic scene, where the great Breakwater, itself nearly a mile and a half long, with a sea-passage on the hither side of a mile’s breadth, rests upon the blue waters like some pigmy undertaking, and the ironclads seem quite trivial. The ordinary vision is altogether at fault at Plymouth, and requires careful adjustment to an unfamiliar scale of things; and in the meanwhile the stranger, walking round the coast, discovers that in tramping these last miles the way is quite twice as long as it seems. Plymouth town lies distinctly in sight, but you seem for a long while never to approach any nearer, and meanwhile you tramp up coastguard paths and down, and round into coves and still more round headlands, gradually coming within the area of War Department activities; where old forts and middle-aged forts, and forts still in the making astonish the rabbits. The outstanding features of garrison towns are grittiness, barrenness, and glare, served up in squalor; and military strength is generally made to look silly by clothes-lines fluttering signals of washing day over the embrasures and the dry moats. Approaching Plymouth therefore by Bovisand and Staddon Forts, the heat and the glare make the very brains ferment in your head, the grit scarifies your feet, and the sordid garrison details, and then the slumminess of Turnchapel sear your very soul. But in between, there are some jewelled nooks: the green valley and woods of Bovisand and little unexpected baylets, with tiny sands that you look down upon suddenly, shamefacedly surprising young ladies bathing in a costume of little more than nothing, supplemented thinly by their native modesty, and piquantly surmounted with picture-hats. Convention would require them to be embarrassed, but the startled pedestrian’s blushes and the nymphs’ comparative unconcern outrange the expected feelings of the situation.

At Turnchapel the ferry steamer takes the wearied exerciser upon Shanks’s Mare across the Catwater to Phœnix Wharf and the old original Plymouth, adjoining the Barbican and Sutton Pool.

Every one knows the stream that comes down from Dartmoor and falls into the Laira creek as the Plym, but its original name was the Cad, and Plymouth was originally “Sutton”: still known as “Sutton-on-Plym.” It is found under this name in Domesday Book. The name Catwater, or Cattewater, as it is also spelled, may be a survival of the original name of the river, as well as being one of the numerous stretches of water with this prefix: the Cattegat, i.e., the “narrow gate,” at the entrance of the Baltic; Catford, near London, Catawade, on the river Stour, near Manningtree; all with the same meaning of narrowness.

There is some ground for supposing that the original name of Plymouth, or a portion of the vast site now occupied by the Three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, was in Saxon times “Tamarweorth,” and the present name only begins to figure in ancient documents of the mid-thirteenth century, in a tentative way, as “Sutton-super-Plymouth.” After that period it gradually rose to importance, being first represented in Parliament in 1298. Sutton Pool, the innermost basin of Plymouth, the old original harbour, and still the place to which the fishing smacks and many of the local steamers come, is bordered by the ancient quays and the queer old houses of the Barbican, once a district inhabited by merchant princes, but now pre-eminently “Old Plymouth,” and although exceedingly picturesque, scarcely a residential quarter. The Barbican took its name originally from the castle, now the citadel, which guarded the narrow entrance to Sutton Pool, across which was stretched every night, in the time of Henry the Eighth, a protective chain. From these defences the existing arms of Plymouth, four black castles between a green saltire, are said to derive. The pious motto of the town is Tunis fortissima est nomen Jehovah, but at the same time Plymouth is very strongly fortified in the military way.

Certain very definite and picturesque scenes arise out of the dim abysmal, grey and confused rag-bag of history here in this fishy Barbican. Most definite of all the last farewell to England of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. On the pavement, by the quay, is a modest stone, inscribed, “Mayflower,” with the date; and near at hand, let into a wall, a less modest commemorative bronze tablet, with this inscription:—

There were forty-eight men and fifty-three women and children in this little band, and the voyage occupied sixty days.

The spot means much to Americans, for here the handful of emigrants for conscience’ sake definitely cast adrift from their native land, which denied them religious liberty, and made oversea to the coast of Massachusetts, there to found a nation anew. The little Mayflower had sailed originally from Boston, in Lincolnshire, and bade farewell to old England from the coast of Devon; and thus it seemed fitting to those stern voluntary outcasts that they should—still fondly looking back to their motherland—name their landing-place in the new world “Plymouth Rock,” and the earliest among their settlements “Boston.” There was, therefore, an exquisite fitness in the circumstance that it was into this Boston harbour in America, a hundred and fifty-three years later, that the colonists should fling the taxed tea, and thus begin the struggle whence the dependent New England colonies emerged as the sovereign United States.

Our sympathies go out, historically, toward those Pilgrim Fathers, but they would seem, viewed closely, to have been not quite so lovable as historic glamour makes them. Their religious fervency was undoubted, but by all accounts it made them ill to live with, and they would have been greatly improved by a little sense of humour. But then—it is a startling thought—if humour had entered at all into their composition they had never left their native shores at all, and the stern principles which led them to refuse to acknowledge James I. as head of the Church, and to expatriate themselves when that shambling travesty of a king declared that if they did not conform, the country should not hold both, would have melted into satiric laughter and an easygoing compliance.

But two autocrats may not reign side by side; as easily might a soliloquy be conducted by two or more persons; and a king with a fondness for omniscience and absolutism, and a people whose religious fervency had risen almost to the white heat of fanaticism cannot abide together; hence the voyage of the Mayflower, and this place of pilgrimage for descendants of those New Englanders.

The greatest point of vantage in all Plymouth is the great open space beside the citadel.

It is the Hoe. What the Rialto was to Venice, what the Hard to Portsmouth, the Sandhill to Newcastle-on-Tyne, the Broomielaw to Glasgow, that was the Hoe to Plymouth of old. From it, let us never forget, on a memorable day of 1588, the “Invincible” Armada was sighted; that proud fleet which was to conquer England, and place the foot of Spain upon our necks, and the spiritual domination of the Pope of Rome over our consciences. History tells us that the King of Spain was not making that unprovoked attack upon us which the simple legends of an earlier and uncritical age would have us believe, and we know that he was but seeking a very natural revenge for the piracies Drake and others had long practised upon his ships and foreign possessions; both sides played the same lawless game, only in those days Spain was the richer country and her treasure galleons the easier prey.

How did Elizabeth’s captains await the coming of the foe? Cheerily and calmly enough, though their ships were few and small, and parsimony at the fountain-head of State forbade the proper measures being taken in the teeth of this long-threatened danger. Stout hearts and ready seamanship, aided by the providential tempest that wrecked the stately ships of Spain, served our turn, and Old England came victorious through that time of storm and stress, as she has since come through many another, by favour of Providence and through the handiwork of brave hearts alone. Statesmanship and the proper preparations of Government had been to seek, as they commonly are. Was ever there another so happy-go-lucky—and so lucky—a country?

I like—and all Englishmen must needs like—to think of the proud spirit of that gallant company of captains assembled upon the Hoe at their game of bowls, when news of the Armada sighted off the Lizard, and coming with the south-westerly wind up Channel, gave them momentary pause. There were gathered together Lord, Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral of England, and with him were Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and other great captains, among others of lesser fame. It was like to be a crushing force that was advancing toward our shores, for it numbered no fewer than one hundred and thirty-five men-o’-war, with crews of 8,000 men and 19,000 soldiers. But so confident were that gallant company of their capacity to resist invasion that—so the story from that time has run—on the suggestion of Sir Francis Drake, who boldly asserted that there was plenty time to finish their game first and thrash the Spaniards afterwards, they elected to complete their bout of bowls.

I will not seek the authority upon which that brave old tradition rests, and a malison, I say, upon all who would whittle away our most cherished beliefs. Cold-blooded commentators tell us that the famous expression, “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders,” was not uttered, and declare, contrary from general belief, that the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo never said, “Up Guards, and at ’em!” and very likely some one, somewhere, has made hash of the heart-stirring tradition of Plymouth Hoe and claimed to prove something craven and mean. Sufficient for me, however, the story with which the Muse of History has hitherto been content.

For centuries the memories of that soul-stirring victory over the Invincible abode only in the minds of Englishmen and between the covers of history-books, but in these latter days, these post-heroic days of criticism and commemoration, when all the great men are dead and all the great deeds done, and we have for some time been engaged upon raising monuments to the deeds and to the men who wrought them, or criticising and explaining the why and the how and the uses, or the uselessness it may be, of those men and the work of their hands,—in these latter days, I say, an Armada Memorial has been set up upon the historic Hoe. It is a tall pedestal, embellished with bronze plates and medallions, and bearing the inscription, “He blew with His winds and they were scattered,” and with the virago figure of a helmeted Britannia rushing in tempestuous petticoats, atop. Close at hand is the statue of Sir Francis Drake, that brilliant member of a brilliant group of Devonian Elizabethans; one who, like Raleigh, in his time played many parts, was foremost among those scourges of Spain we bred in those spacious days, pirate, filibuster, patriot, benefactor, and the first to circumnavigate the globe. Little wonder, then, that the name of Drake is honoured, even yet, in Plymouth. They honour his memory so jealously every year, at the Corporation visit to the weirs, not because of his martial exploits and the services he rendered the nation, but for the benefit he conferred upon Plymouth by bringing its water-supply from the inexhaustible springs of Dartmoor; and thus, in piously exclaiming, “May the descendants of him who brought us water never want for wine,” the Mayor sinks the repute of the Imperialist of the Elizabethan age in that of the local benefactor.

The improving hand of modern times has indeed improved away much of the outward and visible romance of the Hoe, which, from the rugged cliff-top common of Elizabeth’s time, whence the great captains, roused from their historic game of bowls, first glimpsed the dreaded Armada, has been flattened out into trim lawns, and provided with broad gravelled promenade paths, like the veriest urban park or recreation ground. All the forces that make for the commonplace and the obvious have been let loose upon the Hoe, and much of its highly picturesque character has been lost under the treatment of the surveyor and the landscape gardener. But this historic spot can never be quite spoiled, so long as it continues to look out upon Plymouth Sound, and nothing less than a cataclysm of Nature can alter that outlook.

Consider how exceptional the site. A hundred and fifty feet above the sea, it looks straight out to the Channel, three miles away, with the many square miles of glorious Plymouth Sound in between, enclosed to right and left by the wooded heights of Mount Edgcumbe and the terraced hills of Mount Batten and Bovisand. Drake’s Island, immediately in front of the Hoe, and looking so near, is a mile away, and at the distance of another two miles is the famous Breakwater. The Hoe thus stands at the head of one of the finest harbours in the world: finest alike from the seafaring and the picturesque points of view; but it has yet another function—or had, in those days before the giant ordnance of modern times was dreamt of—for it is situated prominently between the further inlets of the Catwater and the Hamoaze, where, unsuspected by the ill-informed enemies of other centuries, lay the wealth of Plymouth. Then it was that the Citadel, built upon the Hoe, was capable of challenging the foe, wishful of sending exploratory keels up the many creeks and estuaries that run in every direction inland, like the spreading fingers of a hand. The citadel is a fine, impressive piece of late seventeenth-century work, and although it was obsolete as a defence centuries ago, appeals very strongly to the layman in fortification, to whom battlements and castellated architecture appeal more forcibly than the earthworks of yonder forts semicircling the crescented hills, from Staddon Heights and Bovisand in Devon, to Tregantle and Screasdon in Cornwall.

Off the Hoe, in the most commanding position, disputing, if need were, the entrance to Mill Bay, the Catwater and the Hamoaze, is the great crag now known as Drake’s Island. It is a kind of islanded Gibraltar, a nest of forts and batteries of a calibre not generally known, but reputed immensely strong. Drake’s Island is not accessible to the public, and like all mysteries, is looked upon with awe. In the old days, when it was St. Nicholas Island, the place made an ideal prison, as regicides and recusants discovered in the reign of Charles the Second.

That was a worthy and a noble idea by which Smeaton’s old lighthouse-tower, superseded from its watch and ward over the Eddystone, was rebuilt on the Hoe in 1882. From the gallery of it you may glimpse its successor, diminished by the distance of fourteen miles to the semblance of a tiny stalk rising lonely amidst the waste of waters. It was no reflection upon the stability of the tower that it was found necessary to remove it, after it had safely weathered the storms of a hundred and twenty years in that exposed situation. It was the reef on which it stood that had decayed. The interior of this wave-washed tower, come ashore again after so many years, is open to inspection, and there, around the cornice of what was the store-room, you read the expression of the piety of those who built, in the text, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it,” while above the lantern is the further inscription, “24th August, 1759, Laus Deo.”

Unhappily for the romantic associations of the Hoe, fifth-rate and utterly unhistoric streets and tramways conspire to render sordid the immediate neighbourhood, and the place-name has itself been, time beyond the memory of man, the sport of the H-less. It was H. J. Byron, the dramatist, who made a crushing retort to an actor, who, late for rehearsal, had excused himself by saying he had been for a “walk round the ’oe.” “Next time,” said Byron, “don’t wander so far. Take a stroll round the H.”

CHAPTER XXVII
THE STORY OF THE EDDYSTONE—THE GUILDHALL—ST. ANDREW’S

Excursion steamers in summer take thousands of visitors from the Hoe Pier out to the Eddystone, and so in many minds renew the moving story of that fatal reef. The existing lighthouse is the fourth to be built in this terrible isolation, whose loneliness appeals more to the imagination when viewing the solitary tower in the hazy distance, from the Hoe, than when it is seen at close quarters. At a distance its puny proportions in relation to the surrounding leagues of restless sea are realised with a shudder at the temerity of its builders, but near at hand the massive character of its masonry is the first thing to attract attention. If the daring of modern engineers inspires respect, what should be those emotions with which we look back upon the first audacious attempts to rear a lighthouse upon the tiny foothold of the exposed Eddystone, so far back as 1696?

It was early in 1665 that the first proposal for lighting this dangerous reef, full in the course of ships passing up or down Channel, was made; Sir John Coryton and one Henry Brouncker petitioning the Duke of York, the then Lord High Admiral, for permission to build a number of lighthouses, and, incidentally, one on the Eddystone. This proposal, referred to the Trinity House, was eventually reduced to a scheme for the Eddystone only, and the projectors, who were not proposing to benefit mankind without a good profit for themselves, were to be recouped their outlay by a charge of 2d. a ton on foreign shipping entering West Country ports: English vessels to be free of charge.

Nothing more was ever heard of this early project, but in 1692 one Walter Whitfield made a bid for a patent from the Trinity House, by which he was to be authorised, at his own risk, to build a lighthouse, to reap the entire profits for a term of three years, and one-half for the next fifty years: the undertaking then to revert to the Trinity House. A patent was granted on these terms in 1694, but no works were initiated, and even when a revised agreement was made in 1696, it was not Whitfield, but Winstanley, who designed and built the first Eddystone Lighthouse. Under this compact the projector’s term of full profits was extended from three to five years.

Henry Winstanley was a singular genius: very much of an artist, something, but not much, of an engineer, and a wholly sanguine person. He commenced operations on the rock on July 14th, 1696, his workmen being occupied all that summer in drilling holes and fixing the iron stanchions that were to support his building. Sometimes he and his men slept on the rock itself, on other occasions they were rowed at nightfall to the guardship Terrible, which, lent by the Admiralty, stood off and on all day. In June 1697, the commander of this ship, one Commissioner St. Loe, thought well to go off upon a wholly unauthorised cruise for nearly a week, and in the meanwhile a French privateer pounced upon Winstanley and his men, took Winstanley prisoner and, taking away the last stitch of the workmen’s clothing, turned them adrift in their boat. To the credit of the French government, Winstanley was speedily released, and the too zealous captain of the privateer seems to have been reprimanded for excess of zeal; while St. Loe was peremptorily asked by the Admiralty for an explanation of his conduct. In the midsummer of 1698 Winstanley’s lighthouse was completed and on November 14th, shed the first warning gleam across the waters. It was a remarkable structure. Rising to a height of about eighty feet to its weather-vane, it was fantastic in outline, beautiful in colour and gilding, and adorned with devices of the sun in splendour and the imposing inscriptions, “Pax in terra. Post tenebras lux. Glory be to God.” It was rather more picturesque than even a Chinese pagoda, and offered so many angles of resistance to the wind that we can only marvel how the elements in those four years allowed him to complete it, and then suffered it to remain another three years. If picturesque beauty were the sole consideration in lighthouse-building this mingled stone and timber tower with its strange suggestions of Wren’s City of London church steeples and the “Queen Anne” architecture of Bedford Park, was surely the finest lighthouse ever built. It proclaims itself in every circumstance the work of an artist, and was to its smallest detail unpractical. Winstanley even provided a highly picturesque means of defence against an enemy: a contrivance in an upper gallery that would drop heavy stones upon his boats; and he designed an elaborate room, from which, in the picture, you see him fishing, and apparently trying to hook one of the boat’s crew pushing off from the rock.

Many of these ornate features were found to be hazardous; the tower itself was not sufficiently lofty, and alterations were made in 1699, by which its height was increased to 120 feet. Remodelled, it was, in Winstanley’s own opinion, as safe as any castle ashore, and he expressed himself as only too eager to be in his lighthouse when the worst storm ever known was blowing. On November 26th, 1703, he had his wish. He put off from the Barbican at Plymouth for the Eddystone on the afternoon of that day, when all the signs pointed to an unprecedented tempest. That night was the night of the famous storm that levelled uncounted trees, unroofed and wrecked many mansions, and sunk fleets of shipping. Henry Winstanley was born at Littlebury, near Saffron Walden, but he is not buried there, for on that night he and his lighthouse and the lighthouse-keepers perished together. When morning dawned the rock was bare, except for one surviving link of iron chain. Winstanley’s project had lost considerably more than £3,000, and his widow was reduced to seeking a pension from the Government; but a singular fascination seems to have impelled private persons to risk their all in a work that should have been the sole concern of the Trinity House. A certain John Lovett, merchant, of London, was the next to enter this, as a commercial project, and the designer of his lighthouse was Rudyerd, a Ludgate Hill silk mercer. He began work in 1706, and by 1709 had completed a wooden tower, which lasted nearly fifty years, and was then destroyed by fire, December 2nd, 1755. There were three keepers. Their efforts at subduing the flames were useless, the molten lead from the roof driving them into the crannies of the rock; where they went through such terrors of exposure to the cold and the waves on the one hand, and the cascades of melted lead on the other that one, raving mad, plunged to death in the sea. Two actually survived the occasion, but one of these was thought a lunatic by the rescuing party. He declared that while he stood looking up at the flames, some molten lead had run down his throat. In the course of twelve days he died, and his incredible story was proved by nearly eight ounces of lead being found in his stomach. Incidentally, Lovett was ruined.

The third lighthouse was begun by the mortgagees of Lovett’s estate, in June 1757. This was the famous stone structure designed and built by Smeaton. Although the building was hindered by Smeaton’s men being every now and again seized by the Press Gang, it was completed in October 1759, and would probably still be standing except for the curious fact that the rock it stood upon was showing signs of weakness. In 1807 the building lease lapsed and the lighthouse became the property of the Trinity House, when the tallow candles, which, up to that time had been the sole illuminant, were exchanged for oil. A newer building, the existing lighthouse, was decided upon in 1877, and built on an adjoining reef. Begun in 1879, it was completed in 1882. It is circular, constructed of Cornish granite, and rises to a height of 130 feet.

The streets of Plymouth and its sister towns are a good deal more crowded than even those of London. It is among the busiest of places, and with its vast naval dockyards at Devonport and Keyham, its military interests, and its great commercial importance, is in a good many districts grim and unlovely. The centre of Plymouth—the municipal centre—is, however, strikingly beautiful, and is the outcome of a movement dating from about 1867, having for its object the creation of a group of municipal buildings worthy of a place with so long and stirring a history. What the old Guildhall was like may still be seen, for it survives in the dirty, dark and inconvenient building thought good enough for the Public Library, though not for the town Councillors. It was a worthy and brilliant idea to build a new group of Guildhall and offices for the governance of the town; a majestic group that should harmonise with the ancient Gothic church of St. Andrew, and form with it three sides of a spacious square. The opening of the Guildhall took place in 1874, when the then Prince of Wales performed the ceremony. The Great Hall, used for concerts and public functions, is a noble building, with fine hammerbeam roof, and an excellent range of beautiful stained-glass windows, recounting in spirited and well-coloured designs the Departure from Plymouth for France of the Black Prince, in 1355; the Breton raid upon the town in 1404; the enquiry at Plympton Priory as to the incorporation of Plymouth, 1440; the Landing of Katharine of Aragon, 1501; Captain Fleming announcing the Armada in sight, 1588; Drake inaugurating the Water Supply, 1592; the Arrest of Raleigh, 1618; Sailing of the Mayflower, 1620; Final Repulse of the Royalists from the town, 1643; Proclamation of William of Orange as King of England 1688; Cookworthy and the Plymouth Club House, 1772; and Napoleon on the Bellerophon at Plymouth, 1815.

The series ends with a window representing the opening of the Guildhall itself, August 15th, 1874, by the Prince of Wales, who is shown in stained-glass, taking part in the ceremony attired in conventional silk hat, frock coat, and lavender-coloured trousers. It is a weird and uncanny use for stained-glass, and the thing is not less grotesque because it thus perpetuates what now seems the ridiculous fashion in hats, coats, and trousers obtaining in 1874. The Prince is shown holding a wand, symbol of his then honorary office of High Steward of the borough of Plymouth; within the other hand the key used for the opening. In the background of this highly remarkable work of art, which would certainly astonish the mediæval craftsmen, could they return and see it, are represented those who strutted their little parts on the local stage in that day. They are duly pictured in their robes as Town Councillors, and are happier in that fact than the Prince is in his everyday gear. Prominent among them you see a face like a Dutch cheese with whiskers; probably intended for the mayor.

St. Andrew’s Church is a striking feature in this group of municipal buildings. It “suggested” the group: it was the keynote whence this architectural symphony was developed, and in the continual modernising of Plymouth, it remains one of the very few old, and characteristic Devonian buildings in the Three Towns. The tower, built in 1460, is the latest part of the church.

An odd punning epitaph within is worthy a note. It is to the memory of one “Mrs. Mary Sparke,” whose light was quenched in 1665:—

Plymouth’s other old church—although not so very old—has a romantic story. It is one of the four churches in England dedicated to “King Charles the Martyr.” Begun in the reign of Charles the First, it was abandoned during the troubles that led to the execution of the king, and was completed and dedicated in 1664.

CHAPTER XXVIII
THE HAMOAZE—THE VICTUALLING YARD AND DOCKYARD—THE TAMAR

Undoubtedly the best way of obtaining the fullest general idea of the size of Plymouth and its satellite towns of Devonport and Stonehouse—to say nothing of the newer towns of Stoke Damerel and Morice Town—is to voyage by one of the steamboats leaving the West Hoe Pier for Saltash. You pass the Great Western Railway docks at Mill Bay, and, rounding Devil’s Point—named originally after an entirely harmless French Protestant refugee, one Duval—come in sight of that immense range of buildings, the Royal William Victualling Yard. The particular Royal William who gave his name to this establishment was William the Fourth, whose great ugly statue in granite, thirteen feet high, presides like some nightmare realised in stone, over the entrance. There is, if you do but consider it, a peculiar appropriateness in the long, long stony frontage of the Victualling yard being placed here, at Stonehouse, and possibly a legend will be created dating the inception of the name to the period when this establishment was built; but the real original “Stone House,” was one built by a certain Joel, Lord of the Manor in the far-off time of Henry the Third.

Sir John Rennie, who designed and built the massive range of the Victualling Yard, built for all time. There are fifteen acres of it; comprising cattle-lairs and cold-meat stores, gigantic corn and flour stores, bakeries, rum stores, and dozens of other departments from which the Navy is supplied.

Beyond the yard, the long creek, infinitely muddy, of Stonehouse Lake opens out, and, across the entrance, the military headquarters, Mount Wise; semi-rural in appearance, its grassy slopes crowned by signalling station and semaphore. The name of “Mount Wise,” is no satirical nickname holding up to ridicule the invincible incapacity of the War Department, but a survival from the time of Charles the Second, when the Wise family owned the place. Another survival here is the wooden signal semaphore, last of a line of thirty-two that formed a “telegraphic” communication between Plymouth and London in the days before the electric telegraph was invented. To apply the term “telegraph” to a series of wooden semaphores sounds grotesque, but it is on record that the arrival of Napoleon as a prisoner in Plymouth Sound, in 1815, was “telegraphed” to London in fifteen minutes.

Here we are come to the great dockyard, forming, with its recent extension at Keyham, a continuous frontage facing the Hamoaze, of over two miles. I suppose there are some five thousand men employed here by the Government in the building and repairing of ships: a vast development since 1691, when “Plymouth Dock,” was first established. “Plymouth Dock,” the neighbourhood remained until 1824, when the town that had sprung up around the dockyard received the newly-coined name of “Devonport.”

The steamers call at North Corner, hard by the dockyard, where the grim streets of Devonport, rich in pawnbrokers’ shops and public-houses, dip down to the water, and dozens of naked boys splash about on summer days in a longshore mixture of sea water, mud, orange-peel, corks, and all the miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam of a great town.

North Corner is a busy place, and from the steamer pontoon you look out upon all the activities of the Hamoaze, with perhaps a great modern battleship close inshore, come home, weather-stained, from a long commission, and flying, from her topmost truck, for all to notice, the paying-off pennon; a ribbon of amazing length, reaching to the waterline. Sailors, overjoyed to be home again, come ashore with kitbags like great bolsters on their shoulders, and look so bronzed, healthy and happy that you are struck with astonishment when, in some lowering, beetle-browed waterside tavern, you hear them grumbling and advising civilian and shore-going friends, with blazing emphatics, “Don’t you never wear three rows of tape round your neck,” which is a highly technical way of saying, “Don’t join the Navy,” the blue-jacket’s jumper being ornamented with three thin white lines.

“A.B.’s no bloomin’ catch. All right for petty orf’cer or articifer, fine thing to be a snotty, or a lewtenant, an’ finer to be captain, or one o’ them admirals what ye see in the photograph shops, cuddlin’ their telescopes under their arms, and lookin’ as if they’d just come out o’ Sunday School; but—well, here’s yours, my sonny.”