THE START AND ITS TRAGEDIES—LANNACOMBE—CHIVELSTONE—EAST PRAWLE—PORTLEMOUTH
The Start looms up prominently from here, but it is a long scramble up
out of Hall Sands and round by the coastguard path to that weird spot.
The uncanny-looking Start has impressed itself upon the imaginations
of most of those who have seen it. Polwhele, the historian of Devon,
led to the thought by the fantastic solemnity of the rocky headland,
and by the sound of its name, gravely assures us that here, in the dim
dawn of history, stood a temple of the Phœnician goddess, Astarte,
the “Ashtoreth” of the full-blooded Scriptural denunciations of the
“worshippers of strange gods”; the more suave and worshipful Venus
Aphrodite of the Greeks, fair goddess of the sea.
The Start—Start “Point” is a redundancy—has, however, nothing to do with
heathen mythology, suitable though it be, above all places, for altars of
hungry sea-gods. The name of the headland is the Anglo-Saxon “Steort,”
which itself means simply a point or tail; as seen in the name of the
Redstart, or “redtail”; but to the fanciful, these cruel rocks, the
scene of so many fearful wrecks, seem not unlike the sacrificial altars
of some blood-stained superstitious cult.
The Start projects far out to sea, a dark mass of gneiss rock with quartz
veins. It is in the uncomfortable shape of a razor-backed ridge, with
demoniacal-looking humps, spires, and spines of iron-hard rock, ranging
from prominences like the vertebræ of a crocodile’s back to sharp points
in the likeness of hedge-stakes. The weird imagination of Doré never
conceived anything in scenery more shuddery than that of the Start, and
the coastguards, who declare that you have not seen England until you
have come to the extremity of this difficult point, are not without some
reason for their cryptic saying.
[Illustration: THE START.]
It behoves the stranger to be careful how he comes to his exploration,
for this, Λ, is the section of the Start. Sloping sides of short slippery
grass at an alarming angle descend dangerously to the sea from the
serrated skyline, and a false step will send you rolling down to those
rocks that have proved fatal to full many a shipwrecked mariner.
It is some sixty years since the lighthouse at the extremity of the point
was built. The lantern of it is two hundred feet above the sea; and shows
two lights, lit every evening, ten minutes before sunset: a revolving
beam once every minute for vessels out in the Channel, and a constant
fixed gleam for shore-going boats, to warn them off the Skerries bank.
But, for all these safeguards, the Start remains a fatal point. When
a “snorter” from the south-west, or a fog, sends vessels out of their
course upon this coast, they are doomed. The lights are next to useless
in foggy weather and at such time the fog-horn, bellowing in unearthly
manner, is fraught with every kind of tragical suggestion.
Among the many wrecks of modern times is that of the _Spirit of the
Ocean_, March 23rd, 1866, when twenty-eight out of thirty were drowned,
the _Gossamer_, China tea-clipper, driven ashore between the Start and
Prawle Point in December 1868, when thirteen of a crew of thirty-one were
lost; the _Emilie_, laden with saltpetre, broken up during a fog in June
1870; and the _Lalla Rookh_, a large vessel, coming home from Shanghai,
laden with 1,300 tons of tea and 60 tons of tobacco, wrecked in March
1873 near Prawle Point. Shortly before the vessel struck she ran so close
to the rocks that four of her crew jumped on to them as she flew by; but
this was a wreck which did not touch the deepest note of tragedy, for in
the end, all but one of those on board were saved. There was, however, a
woeful waste of cargo, and the little beaches near by, and the long three
miles of Slapton Sands, were for days strewn in places with the wreckage
of the _Lalla Rookh_, and ridges of tea eleven feet high, and trails of
tobacco of almost equal size, were piled up at high-water mark by the
waves.
Most dramatic was the wreck of the steamship _Marana_, in the wild
blizzard of March 9th, 1891. As night closed down upon the wild scene
off the Start, the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, looking forth from behind
a window, upon that seething world of torn sea and whirling snowflakes,
thought she saw a vessel drive through the smother of it, under the
lighthouse. No help was possible, and the vessel was gone like a ghost.
The tale that was afterwards told was a pitiful one.
Just before the vessel struck, and was broken in two, amidship, the crew
made for shore, twenty-two of them in the lifeboat and four others in
a smaller. The surf in Lannacombe Bay was so great that they dared not
attempt a landing, and made for Prawle, where the lifeboat was smashed to
pieces on the Mag Ledge. Most of the unfortunate sailors were drowned,
only four surviving to tell the tale. A fifth, who had managed to
drag himself, bruised and bleeding, from the rocks to land, lay down,
exhausted, for shelter, and died out there in the snow. It was not until
a fortnight later that his body was found.
It was on the same occasion that the _Dryad_ was totally wrecked at the
extremity of the Start at midnight, and all hands lost. One survivor was
seen at daybreak, clinging to a rock, but before help could reach him he
was washed away.
The neighbourhood of the Start is an unsatisfactory place to be in
on a day threatening rain, for it is outside roads, and the more
than knee-high bracken of the coastguard paths is at such times a
supersaturating growth. And the way up-along and down-along and round
this way and that, past Pear Tree Point, where there are not any
pear-trees (and I dare swear there never were any) is toilsome. Beyond
the Point is the yellow strand of Lannacombe, famous for Lannacombe
Mill and its miller, who, when French privateers were here, there, and
everywhere in the old rumbustious days and visited him one night, flung
his money-bag out of window and found it, safe enough, the next morning,
suspended in an elder-bush. The guide-books tell how the ruins of the
mill may be seen, but they shyly hide themselves from some, and the other
Lannacombe Mill, up the combe, which may not be historic in this small
sort, is at any rate picturesque enough to be excused a story. If one
were not afraid of getting wet through on a moist afternoon, here by
the clucking water-wheel and the moss-grown walls and the clear-running
mill-leat should some hours be whiled away.
[Illustration: CHIVELSTONE: A RAINY DAY.]
But the day that had gloomed at length grew damp, and necessity compelled
a double-quick to the most accessible village: that of Chivelstone.
On the way to it, that fine rain characteristic of Devonshire came
down like smoke from the hills. “’Tes what us carls a miz-wet,” said a
farm-labourer, trudging home contentedly beneath a thick covering of
potato-sacks; and they do not call it amiss, for the mist is undeniable,
and there is no mistaking the wetness of it.
A traveller’s curse upon all landowners who suppress inns, and all
villages without spirit sufficient to maintain one. Here the “Seven
Stars” inn of guide-books, the only inn of Chivelstone, was not in
existence, and this obviously was no resting-place. So to East Prawle,
along a featureless road, in a wet and swirling fog, the way made musical
with the howls and trumpetings of the Start fog-horn.
East Prawle ceased its growth in the act of developing from a farm-yard
into a village; so that there are cottages where there should be ricks
and cow-byres, and muck where there should be houses. Grass grows and
liquid manure lies in the road, and stones and rocks in the pastures;
and, altogether, Prawle, which is a very undesirable spot of earth, is a
splendid example of matter in the wrong place.
But gentility of a kind has come to Prawle. You can never tell: the wind
bloweth where it listeth; overmantels and preposterous photograph-frames,
to say nothing of spiky articles of furniture in bamboo-ware, all
projections and easily overset through the window, are to be found in the
unlikeliest places. And that is how—Heaven help them and us!—they spell
gentility at Prawle.
The Point—well-known by name to diligent readers of the shipping news
in the daily papers—is crowned at Hurter’s Top with the Lloyd’s signal
station, where the vessels going out and home are “spoken.” It is a rude
and jagged Point, and its rugged character lends it an air of greater
height than it possesses. It rises suddenly out of a down, sloping
towards the sea, and may be compared with the appearance of a hacked and
uneven quarter of a round Dutch cheese. Off this point H.M.S. _Crocodile_
was wrecked, and on the next westerly headland, Gammon Head, two Spanish
galleons.
All the way round from this point the great dark mass of Bolt Head shows
finely, away across the arm of the sea running up between Portlemouth
and Salcombe. Portlemouth, although of so impressive a name, is a meagre
place on the very crest of the rugged upland overlooking Salcombe and the
Kingsbridge River, and consists of merely a farmhouse with a few cottages
grouped round the ancient church of St. Onolaus, otherwise, abating
that Latinised form, the early sixth-century British St. Winwaloe.
The horribly plastered exterior of the tower would dissuade many from
seeking a further acquaintance with the church, by which the finely
carved and painted thirteenth-century rood screen would be missed. In the
churchyard, to the north-west of the tower, is a grim slate headstone,
with a still more grim epitaph, on one “Richard Jarvis, of Rickham in
this parish, who departed this life the 25th day of May 1782, aged 79:—
“Through poison he was cut off
And brought to death at last.
It was by his apprentice-girl,
On whom there’s sentence past.
O may all people warning take,
For she was burnèd at the stake.”
The interesting person, who thus cheated the unfortunate Richard Jarvis
of the few years that probably, in the course of nature, would have
remained to him, was one Rebecca Downing, who was executed at the end of
the following July at Ringswell, Heavitree, near Exeter; the old-time
spot where Devonshire criminals and martyrs suffered; but this was really
not quite so fearful an execution as it looks, for she was first hanged
and her body then cut down and burnt. The exceptional treatment of
hanging and then burning the body of the criminal was owing to the crime
being, over and above that of murder, the particularly heinous one, in
the eye of the old laws, of _petit treason_, the murdered person being
the master of, and person in authority over, the assassin.
Coming down a breakneck path from Portlemouth to the ferry, you find
yourself come, not only to an out-of-the-way spot, but to a place where,
for the first time, you have a foretaste of the Cornish way of speech.
Some one aboard the ferry-boat compares this arm of the sea with Fowey.
“Aw, my dear man,” says the ferryman, “’tes wider yur than ’tes tu Foy:
ees, feth.”
That is a kind of middle-marches compromise between the Devon talk and
that of Cornwall, where, instead of say “yes, faith,” they say, “iss,
fay.”