CHAPTER 22
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Simon Trezise
This chapter will focus on two Cornish stereotypes created mainly during the Victorian period but which still influence popular perceptions today. The evidence explored here will demonstrate that the fictional Smuggler is an especially complex figure, contributing to a traditional interest shared by the various nations within the British Isles in Robin Hood or Rob Roy, the ‘good outlaw’, a type that licenses rebellion within certain limits and can raise disturbing questions about legality, loyalty and morality. The fictional Wrecker, like the stereotype of the Irish ‘beyond the Pale’, is the figure who most violates moral convention and most resists assimilation to an English patriotic story. Each figure has its own genre and setting. The stereotype of the smuggler exists in a hybrid genre combining Romance, Satire, Religious Autobiography and the Novel of Education. It is to some extent a South West coastal phenomenon, moving, like many real-life nineteenth-century ‘free-traders’, between Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. Each stereotype will be unpeeled like an onion so that that we can discover what lies within the myth of the outer skin. Presented in this way, the stereotypes will enable us to focus on the role that the fiction writer plays in preserving or inventing history and identity.
The Smuggler
Smuggling on the south and south-west coast of Britain was at its most active during the period 1700–1850. The fictional representation of smuggling was mainly created towards the end of this period and after it (1840–1909), when many of those who actually took part in ‘free trade’ were no longer alive and those who survived might misremember or idealise the past. Street literature and popular theatre give us a sense of the origins of the smuggler as a romantic fictional figure.1 While such portrayals should not be accepted at face value, they are surely a more accurate representation of popular feeling than the comments of revenue men and ministers of the Church. In the latter the smuggler was a criminal whose activities meant that those of both high and low stations could enjoy cheap brandy and wear fine clothes. The tax man, who taxed a vast range of articles to pay for foreign wars, was perceived as the Sheriff of Nottingham, the smuggler as Robin Hood. This popular image thrived in spite of the fact that during the Napoleonic Wars some English smugglers assisted the French. In fiction, on the contrary, the romantic smuggler is usually presented as patriotic, reporting sightings of enemy ships to the Royal Navy and putting the needs of his country above his illicit trade in times of emergency.
Contrast the romantic smuggler with a stereotype that co-existed with him: the smuggler as an immoral villain. The type is chiefly found in the literature of the Methodists, who left such a mark on the culture of the South West. When John Wesley visited St Ives in 1753 he was shocked at the behaviour of his own followers: ‘I found an accursed thing among them: well nigh one and all bought or sold uncustomed goods.’2 ‘One and all’, the phrase used by the Cornish to celebrate their communal spirit, is here used by Wesley to condemn them. Fourteen years later in 1767 he felt compelled to write ‘A Word to a Smuggler’, a pamphlet designed to contribute to the propaganda war against the smuggling trade. Smuggling, says Wesley, is:
not only robbing the King, but robbing every honest man in the nation. For the more the King’s duties are dished, the more the taxes must be increased . . . Every smuggler is a thief-general, who picks the pockets both of the King and his fellow-subjects. He wrongs them all; and above all, the honest traders: many of whom he deprives of their maintenance; constraining them either not to sell their goods at all, or to sell them at no profit. Some of them are tempted thereby, finding they cannot get bread for their families, to turn thieves too.3
Here the smuggler is not only wicked but contagiously wicked, a threat to the foundations of society. Wesley makes no mention of the respectable classes who were among the smugglers’ customers and sometimes financed his activities. Wesley’s kind of moral disapproval of the smuggler influenced Mary Shelley’s little-known story of 1833, ‘The Smuggler and his Family’. The story is set on the Cornish coast and tells how a mother strives to ensure that her son does not become a smuggler like his father. Viewing the theme from a mother’s viewpoint, Shelley specifically considers and rejects the type of the Romantic Smuggler:
There is no system of illegal traffic more venial in most eyes than smuggling. The laws on this score are perpetually transgressed . . . The courage, the activity, and the resource -the hardships and the dangers attendant on his pursuit, paints a smuggler in Salvator hues, and imparts a kind of heroic elevation to him. But to the anxious mother all this wore a different appearance; the unmasked truth was replete with deformity. Habits of intemperance and vice -a savage readiness to inflict injury – which though somewhat redeemed by daring to meet the same, filled the heart with such hate and violence, as was at utter war with the charity and love which distinguishes a virtuous character; an aptitude for stratagem and falsehood – which might be called resource, but which coming in contact with the ingenuous and upright disposition of her son, she deemed a frightful pollution.4
The story as a whole, written to raise money for a poor family (one possibly associated with smuggling?), is designed to convert the reader from romanticising the smuggler to rejecting him. The story culminates in a storm that drowns the smuggler and almost drowns his son: God’s Providence punishes the sinner and lets the innocent survive.
More complex than the heroic or the villainous smuggler is the smuggler assimilated within the genre of Dark Comedy and Satire. One of the primary sources for this type is the literary work of the eccentric Parson Hawker of north Cornwall, vicar of the remote parish of Morwenstow from 1834 until his death in 1875. Some of Hawker’s older parishioners gave him access to the hidden world of smuggling, although it is worth bearing in mind that he enjoyed embroidering the truth with literary invention. The butt of Hawker’s satirical anecdotes about smuggling is never the smuggler, always the Gauger (exciseman), the Church, and inland, non-Cornish society. Hawker’s semi-fictional smuggler, named Tristram Pentire, likes Gaugers who can be bribed and loathes those who insist on doing their job. Consider the tale attached to an unmarked grave where no grass grew in Morwenstow churchyard. Tristram explains to the vicar that the lack of grass is due to the fact the occupant of the grave was hanged unjustly. When the clergyman asks what the man had done to deserve hanging, Tristram replies: ‘Done, sir! Done? Nothing whatever but killed the exciseman.’ In the smuggler’s creed it is against the laws of nature to punish such an understandable deed. Tristram explains that the smuggler was merely trying to kill a man who was trying to kill him.5
The only person that the smuggler hated more than the exciseman was the informer. This inspires the story of the parish feast. During this social occasion the local vicar is told that his congregation have a question for him on a ‘religious subject’. His flock want to know if there were some sins that the Almighty could never forgive. The surprised clergyman replies that he hopes any sin can be forgiven if it is truly repented. Whereupon the nature of the sin concerned is revealed: ‘we thought that if a man should find our where run goods were deposited and should inform the gauger, that such a villain was too bad for mercy’.6
In addition to a fly smuggler with a rural sense of humour and a wicked or corrupt customs official, Hawker’s smuggling tales also often feature an innocent and well-meaning clergyman. In one tale the smugglers, like their counterparts in real-life, choose the most respectable and holy of places to hide their contraband. Their cargo of kegs is placed underneath the benches and the tower stairs in the local church. It then becomes necessary to attend the next church service in order to keep an eye on the stolen goods. An elderly parishioner who sounds like Tristram explains:
The parson did wonder at the large congregation, for divers of them were not regular church-goers at other times; and if he had known what was going on he could not have preached a more suitable discourse, for it was, ‘Be not drunk: with wine, wherein is excess’.
This sermon on the evils of wine however, did not influence the behaviour of the audience. As the parishioner explains: ‘One of his best sermons; but there it did not touch us, you see, for we never tasted anything but brandy or gin’.7
As well as the innocent clergyman Hawker also shows us the knowing clergyman. In his best-known and most repeated smuggling tale a man from an ‘inland town’ happens to arrive on the Cornish coast when a ‘landing’ is taking place. The smugglers are drinking from a cask with whatever means comes to hand: one man is drinking from his shoe. Horrified at the sight, the townsman calls for a magistrate, only to discover that there is not one within eight miles. He then wants to summon the clergyman, only to discover that this gentleman is already present: he is holding the lantern so that his parishioners can see what they are doing!8
Hawker, like a professional comedian, has artfully arranged his stories with preparations and punch-lines, stooges and funny-men. Nevertheless, his comedy relates closely to the incomplete historical evidence of smuggling.. The most accurate part of his comedy is the way that it reveals the incorrigible attitude of the smuggler that his trade was no crime, that he was the victim rather than the villain.
Sabine Baring-Gould, ‘Squarson’ of Lewtrenchard on the Cornish side of Dartmoor, continues Hawker’s tradition of the comic smuggler in a way that may explain the failure of Wesley’s moral campaign. Baring-Gould’s novel The Gaverocks (1887) features a smuggler called Richard Carwithen who defends himself against the local squire’s criticism of his smuggling ways in a comic travesty of the Scriptures:
What is the sense, I ask you, of Squire Featherstone taking on, if I do lend a hand to the runners? I ain’t against Scripture. Show me the passage that condemns smuggling? Nobody can say. It’s the custom of the country. Wasn’t Levi an exciseman, and called away, because it was not a fit occupation for an apostle? Do you mean to tell me that the sons of Zebedee owned a boat and went all about the sea and brought across nothing but fishes? It is not human nature. It is not credible. I should not respect them if they were such fools.9
This brings us close to the way in which real-life smugglers, such as Harry Carter of Prussia Cove, reconciled their smuggling and their Methodism. Harry disciplined his crew for swearing and practises a code of honour among thieves, but for a period manages to continue in the smuggling trade while experiencing sincere religious feelings of guilt and unworthiness. This kind of paradox and contradiction escapes from the stereotype of the romantic and the heroic smuggler but is not far away from the comic smuggler of Hawker and Baring-Gould.
The Autobiography of a Cornish Smuggler is the life-story of Harry Carter of Prussia Cove. There is no subterfuge about Carter’s account, which was openly created at the request of Methodists anxious to continue Wesley’s work and win the propaganda war against smuggling. What could be a greater victory than a memoir proving that a member of a notorious smuggling family had finally recognised the error of his ways?
Accordingly, much of the memoir is not about the motives and possible justifications of smuggling but rather about Harry’s struggle to reach salvation. There are passages where we can hear an authentic Cornish voice, using Cornish dialect and revealing inside knowledge. Consider, for example, Carter’s account of what happened when he was trying to combine a public life as a Methodist ‘prechar’ with being wanted by the Law for smuggling. A ‘great man of the neighbourhood’ summons him and advises him to go to America before he is caught. Carter then quotes the ‘jent’ as saying ‘If you go there I will give you . . . a letter of recommendation from Lord ––––, which I think, may be very useful to you, or anything else in my power shall not be wanting.’ Here is a revealing glimpse, not only of the poor smuggler but also of the rich men who financed illegality and benefited from the risks that the smuggler took. Lord –––– and the ‘great man’ have so much to hide that they will pay Carter handsomely if he agrees to disappear. Carter however, receives some slightly different advice from his smuggling friends, whom he calls the ‘cove boys’:
22.1 Quiller-Couch based his smuggling ‘Mayor of Troy’, on a real case.
If you go to America we never shall see you no more. We are meaning to car on a little trade in Roscoff in the brandy and gin way, and if you go there you will be as safe as in America; likewayse we shall pay you for your commission, and you car on a little business for yourself, if you please.10
Carter prays devoutly to his God and then apparently decides, like Baring-Gould’s comic smugglers who combine scripture with crime, that a ‘little business’ in Roscoff, a port notorious for smuggling, is an acceptable choice.
The Wrecker
The figure of the wrecker, like that of the smuggler, sometimes plays a part in a dark and blasphemous comedy. Parson Troutbeck of the Scilly Isles was supposed to include the following among the litany recited in his church: ‘We pray Thee, O Lord, not that wrecks should happen, but that if wrecks do happen, thou will guide them to the Scilly Isles, for the benefit of the poor inhabitants.’11 While the poor person who takes advantage of a ship that is wrecked by chance on the nearby coast may be understandable, the wrecker who deliberately lures ships ashore and then murders its crew and plunders their possessions is as bad as the stereotyped ‘Wild Irish’ who live ‘beyond the Pale’. Unlike the glamorous sea-dog and the romantic smuggler, this figure is presented as the villain society cannot tolerate, the rogue who is inhuman beyond forgiveness. Daphne du Maurier’s popular romance Jamaica Inn (1936) leads the reader gradually towards this dreadful figure. The innocent Mary from Helston travels to wild Bodmin Moor in order to live with her mysterious uncle Joss Merlin. He seems to be a strange kind of inn-keeper with very few customers; then he seems to be the organiser of a smuggling gang who come and go across the moor by night, transporting stolen goods. Finally, in a fit of drunkenness, he reveals his real secret to the horrified Mary: he is a wrecker who lures ships with false lights, murdering the survivors who reach the shores and stealing their possessions. Perceptions formed by du Maurier’s influential novel were spread or reinforced by Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 adaptation of Jamaica Inn.
This twentieth-century text and film continue a tradition from the Victorian period. Consider the stereotype of the wrecker which appears in an article entitled ‘The Inconveniences of Being a Cornishman’, published in Dicken’s popular periodical All the Year Round (Anon, 1861). The narrator figure of the article, called Pendraggles, suffers for his Cornish identity. When Pendraggles goes up to Cambridge he finds it impossible to resist the stereotypes thrust upon him by his English companions. He is accused of being a wrecker or sea-vulture waiting to prey on the innocent occupants of Cambridge punts. The primary source for the villainous wrecker is the literature of Methodism. Wesley campaigned against wrecking by preaching and his nineteenth-century successors by means of novels. This is how a novel of 1877 presents the image of the wrecker:
the more industrious of the population in the villages round the Cornish coast had profited by . . . favourable weather, and made a good sum by selling the fish which it had enabled them to catch, but to the lazy and evil-disposed, who lived from hand to mouth, and whose real trade was smuggling and wrecking, it was by no means so welcome. The storms indeed which had heralded the approach of winter . . . had brought the Sennen wreckers a rich harvest; but all these ill-gotten gains had long since been spent on drink; women and children were famishing; men, gaunt and morose, hung around the alehouse, or lounged upon the beach, uttering curses upon the weather, the lighthouse or the parson, whichever at the moment seemed to them the cause of their present poverty and misery – never once reflecting that their own evil and idle conduct was alone to blame for this.12
These wreckers are so evil that they regard the building of lighthouses as an unfair way of depriving them of their trade. When ‘normal’ people are enjoying sunny weather these perverse sinners are wishing for storms that will cause wrecks. Notice that the text is arranged in such a way as to remove any excuse for these ‘lazy and evil-disposed’ types: they could easily have earned a living from the sea in an honest way without recourse to thieving from the unfortunate. The wreckers’ ill-gotten gains are not even put to good uses, such as building homes or feeding under-nourished children: they are used to fund drinking sessions while families are starving.
The stern Methodist view is complicated a little in Parson Hawker’s literary work. Consider Featherstone’s Doom, written in 1831. It is set at Black Rock, off Widemouth Bay in north Cornwall, a bleak and remote landmark that is, in Hawker’s words: ‘held to be the lair of the troubled spirit of Featherstone the wrecker, imprisoned therein until he shall have accomplished his doom’.13 Hawker returned to this theme in his poem ‘A Croon on Hennacliff’, inspired by the wreck of the Bencoolen, a ship bound from Liverpool to Bombay, off Bude in 1862.14 The poem was inspired by a real sense of anguish as he watched the crew of the ship die stranded. He wrote to a friend:
The Country rings with crys of shame on the dastards of Bude . . . I had the Life boat launched. I offered a Sovereign each to get men, and I offered to go myself with them. Only one man came at my call-next day the sea lulled and a calm-the scoundrels went on board with the same boat and robbed the vessel.15
Hawker implies that the Bude men were Featherstones, more interested in profit than saving life.
William Maskell of Bude, a reliable contemporary witness and admirer of Hawker, explains the matter differently:
No possible effort had been spared by which any chance of rescue or assistance could be given. To have attempted to rescue the ship with a life-boat improperly manned would have much more than a risk; it would have been a useless sacrifice of ten or twelve more lives.
The real cause of the tragedy, according to Maskell, was the Board of Trade’s decision to supply the lifeboat station with insufficient rocket lines to reach the ship. He calculates that if there had been four lines instead of two the stricken ship could have been reached and the twenty-nine men on board could have been saved. Here, then, is one example of how an imaginative and skilled poet with good intentions contributed to the slander of the Cornish. Nevertheless, as the witness explains, the wreck that brought death and grief also brought joy and life from a Cornish perspective:
Throughout the next winter full employment was given to the labourers of all the neighbouring parishes, who received fair wages for saving what the sea could not sweep away. The horses and carts of the farmers were also in great demand. And so, as regards all these, good came out of evil.16
What were the ‘facts’ behind the stereotype of the wrecker? There is a mass of evidence to suggest that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many Cornish people regarded ships wrecked by storms on the Cornish coast as a gift from Providence to alleviate the hardship of a life based on farming, mining and fishing. The ship’s timbers built houses; the cargo often meant a holiday from poverty or a chance to raise the funds for emigration to a place where life was easier. It is much more difficult to assess the truth behind the claim that the Cornish in general, and ‘the Mount’s Bay men’ in particular, were prone to ‘wrecking’ in the worst sense of the word: luring ships ashore, murdering those on board who survived and then stealing their belongings. ‘The Lanisley Letters’, one of the rare primary sources that brings us close to the authentic history of Cornish wrecking, make no mention of false lights and actual murder of shipwrecked victims. They do, however, suggest that savage mistreatment of shipwrecked people did take place during the eighteenth century. George Borlase, steward of the manor of Lanisley near Penzance, records in 1753 that axe-wielding tinners will ‘cut a large trading vessel to pieces in one tide and cut down everybody that offers to oppose them’. He begs for legislation to prevent the:
monstrous barbarity practised by those savages upon the poor sufferers. I have seen many a poor man, half dead, cast ashore and crawling out of the reach of the waves fallen upon and in a manner stripp’d naked by those Villains, and if afterwards he has saved his chest of any more cloath’s they have been taken from him.17
Charles Kingsley suggests that not all the Cornish behaved like Borlase’s tinners. Viewing Cornwall from north Devon in 1849, he casts the inland Cornish as villains and the coastal men as heroes:
an agricultural people is generally as cruel to wrecked seamen, as a fishing one is merciful. I could tell you twenty stories of the baysmen down there to the westward risking themselves like very heroes to save strangers’ lives, and beating off the labouring folk who swarmed down for plunder from the inland hills.18
When Parson Hawker organised the burial of the sailors from the wrecked Alonzo in 1843 a local newspaper praised him:
Conduct like this will soon redeem their country from whatever stigma the misconduct or slanders of past times may have attached to its name. Fifteen shipwrecked sailors have been buried in the churchyard of Morwenstow, in little more than thirteen months . . .19
Prior to 1808 the bodies of drowned sailors were not permitted a grave in a churchyard, so Hawker was leading the way to more civilised behaviour. This kind of evidence suggests that the stereotype of the wrecker was a combination of both slander and truth.
Fortunately, there is one rare source that enables us to partially disentangle the fact from the fiction. It was brought into being by Parson Hawker: the man who mis represented the Bencoolen incident has also enabled us to glimpse the reality of wrecking on the north coast of Cornwall. One of Hawker’s acquaintances was John Bray of Poughill, near Bude, a man who had worked for most of his long life as a salvage agent. He was one of those described by Kingsley who actually fought his fellow Cornishmen in order to protect the life and property on wrecked ships. In 1832, at the age of eighty-eight, and in spite of his dislike of writing, he was persuaded by Parson Hawker to create a record of his dealings with no less than thirty-seven wrecks off the Cornish coast from 1759 onwards.20
Bray’s uneducated writing preserves a voice that we normally cannot hear, the voice of the mass of illiterate or semi-literate people without the skills or the leisure to leave records of their experiences. This Cornish voice often has an eloquence that an educated voice cannot rival. Bray, in an understated way, makes his sense of justice clear. He did not regard every form of exploiting a local wreck in order to survive as a crime and is certainly no friend of the excise man, obviously enjoying the telling of the following story about the deception of a Customs Officer after a ship carrying alcohol was wrecked:
I was with my father’s plow [cart] which was loaded with two pipes [casks], the officer of Bude protecting the wine. The officer was riding on the fore part, sitting on one cask, whilst the country people were drawing wine from the same cask as he sat on and he did not know what was doing. When their pitchers was filled all walked off very well contented!21
Like a satirist, it is the exciseman’s vice of hypocrisy that Bray cannot stand – the fact that he will accept bribes from the wealthy or engage in a little wrecking himself, but hunt down the poor for minor offences.
On the other hand, in direct contradiction of the Methodist and literary stereotype, Bray is also an enemy of the most vicious form of wrecker, resisting those who would bribe him to conceal their wrecking activities. Bray’s honest account also shows that there were Cornishmen who were not wreckers at all, but life-savers. Bray describes how he rescued seven Portuguese sailors and, on being told that one other man was still drowning in the raging sea, then attempts another rescue:
I soon saw the poor man on his back at the bottom, lifting up both his hands, I sprung off my horse and seized the man by his jacket collar. He that moment seized my great coat sleeve, and held so fast as if he was sensible. I was under water at the time, but I held my breath and at the same time he held fast by the near stirrup. The moment I came above water, a very great route of sea knocked my horse with all four legs up, and I and the poor sailor under the horse. However by the providence of God, my horse was soon on his belly, and turned all about towards the shore and swimmed with the poor sailor to land.22
A man of eighty-eight might be tempted to idealise his youth, but within the context of the complete memoir the reader will find it difficult to disbelieve Bray’s version of events. This description is just as exciting as du Maurier’s fiction, but in this real-life story the Cornishman is the hero, not the villain. If Bray’s account was as well known as Jamaica Inn the modern Cornish could use it to help rewrite their history and readjust the stereotyping of the wrecker. Sometimes, however, it is not possible to resist a stereotype. It is Daphne du Maurier who has transformed a lonely inn on Bodmin Moor into a major tourist attraction, while Bray’s papers lie neglected.
In another part of his memoir Bray describes without scepticism a man in Hawker’s parish of Morwenstow who is warned by the ghost of a drowned sailor about a wreck. Bray was a man of action and a realist, but even he could not live on the wild and remote coast of Cornwall, within sight and sound of the waves, without superstition, without a propitiation of the mighty powers of wind and ocean. Behind du Maurier’s Joss Merlin is a Methodist melodrama, and behind that is Hawker’s more complex view. Behind them all, the very foundation, is the long after-life of the Celtic past in Cornwall, represented by the superstition as well as the courage of the Cornish life-saver John Bray.
The two stereotypes investigated here demonstrate the power of fiction to shape perceptions of places and people. In some cases the literature perpetuates myths that may be harmful; in others it leads us indirectly to the authentic evidence of the past. Since the historical record is incomplete historians as well as fiction writers use invention to help them, although with more of an eye on the evidence than the tale teller, whose primary duty is to entertain an audience. This paper not only raises issues about the pursuit of the elusive truth; it is also about the right of people to tell their own stories, to use invention as a means of asserting identity or of redressing the injustices that history records. The stereotype smuggler is part of an imagined, alternative Britain, from Rob Roy to Robin Hood, by which the actual Britain can be assessed. The wrecker is projected onto Cornwall from outside before being assimilated and returned to popular culture in a form with genuine Cornish roots. He is only one side of the Cornish experience but he becomes enlightening when linked with Celtic origins and John Bray. Learning how to decode literary stereotypes, to disinter their origins and to weigh the merits of their varying versions from a modem perspective enables us to focus with specificity not only on an understanding of the past but on those aspects of the past that we need to use or discard today.
Notes and References
1 See for example ‘The Smuggler King’ (1800) quoted in A. Coxe, A Book about Smuggling in the West Country 1700–1850 (Padstow: Tabb House, 1984), pp. 83–84.
2 John Pearce (ed.), The Wesleys in Cornwall (Truro: Bradford Barton, 1964), p. 115.
3 John Wesley, The Works of John Wesley, 14 vols (London: John Mason, 1830), vol. 11, p. 175.
4 Charles E. Robinson, Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 205.
5 R. Hawker, The Prose Works of Rev. R.S. Hawker (London: William Blackwood, 1893), pp. 27–28.
6 Hawker, The Prose Works, p. 34.
7 Ibid., pp. 32–33.
8 Ibid., pp. 34–35.
9 S. Baring-Gould, The Gaverocks (London: John Murray 1908), pp. 135–36.
10 J.B. Cornish (ed.), The Autobiography of a Cornish Smuggler: Captain Harry Carter of Prussia Cove, 1749–1809 (1884 rep. Truro: Bradford Barton, 1971), pp. 63–64.
11 A.K. Hamilton-Jenkin, Cornwall and its People (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1988), p. 50.
12 J.F. Cobb, The Watchers on the Longships: A Tale of Cornwall in the Last Century (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1877), p. 190.
13 R. Hawker, Cornish Ballads and Other Poems, ed. C.E. Byles (London: John Lane, 1928), p. 15.
14 Ibid., pp. 169–70.
15 C. Byles, The Life and Letters of R.S. Hawker (New York: The Bodley Head, 1906), p. 112.
16 W. Maskell, Bude Haven, Odds and Ends (London: James Toovey, 1872), pp. 50–53.
17 Thomas Cornish (ed.), ‘The Lanisley Letters’, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall 6:23 (1880), pp. 374–79, at p. 379.
18 F. Kingsley (ed.), Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1891), vol. 1, p. 245.
19 Byles, The Life and Letters of R.S. Hawker, p. 124.
20 I. Bray, An Account of Wrecks on the North Coast of Cornwall 1759–1830, written 1832, ed. A.K. Hamilton-Jenkin (Truro: Trevithick Society, 1975), p. 8.
21 Ibid., pp. 11–12.
22 Ibid., pp. 15–16.