THE SCILLIES
The Scillies were the home of at least one religious fraternity in
pre-Reformation days; and surely, when we consider the situation of
these islands, we may accept it as probable that the inmates of such
houses—following the usual rule—displayed some kind of nocturnal light
to aid vessels coming from the west or from Ireland. But this is only
surmise; the first we hear of a project for erecting a lighthouse on the
Scillies is in 1661. The Trinity House then condemned the scheme, but
twenty years later itself proposed an exactly similar thing, and obtained
from the crown a patent to carry it out and to gather toll for its
support. It so happens that at this latter date Sir John Clayton had also
suggested a lighthouse in the Scillies, and he naturally wrote a stinging
letter to the Trinity Board, taxing them with activity in the good work
only when they feared that some one else would undertake it; but with
that we need not trouble ourselves. The corporation, as we have said,
got the patent and built the lighthouse. Some of the incidents in its
building, and in the first few years of its existence, are interesting
and characteristic, and illustrative of the life and spirit of Western
England.
One of the first steps that the Trinity House took in the work was to
write to Sir William Godolphin, then Governor of the Scillies, asking him
to recommend to the surveyors being sent out, persons of local knowledge
whose word could be relied on and who were not wreckers. This was
certainly a wise step, for the surveyors found, on arriving, that most of
the islanders regarded them ‘with an evil eye,’ and cared for lighthouses
no more than they did for ‘crowners’ inquests.
By the middle of May, 1681, all was ready for the surveyors’ start: plans
and drawings of the proposed lighthouse were prepared, and government
so far assisted in the undertaking that it gave the Trinity House
opportunity of purchasing any materials required from the naval stores
at Plymouth; it also furnished the surveyors with one of her majesty’s
yachts to convey them to Scilly.
The lighthouse to be erected was to be certainly substantial—brick-built,
circular, four storeys high, with walls six feet thick at the base, and
all timber used was to be ‘of the best English heart oak.’ Its solidity
has paid, for the lighthouse at St. Agnes, Scilly, of to-day is, in the
main, that put there more than two hundred years ago.
Altogether it was quite the most important lighthouse undertaking on
which the Trinity House had as yet embarked, and it was with considerable
anxiety that it awaited the arrival of the surveyors’ first report; this
reached the board on July 20, and told that all had so far gone well, and
that a site for the building had been selected at ‘Agnes,’ some three
miles from ‘the Bishop and Clerk rocks.’ The superintendent of the works
was not over-pleased with his lodging, which, though the best the island
afforded, he considered dear at half-a-crown a week, for it was, he said,
but ‘little better than a hogsty.’
Before the end of September the board heard of the completion of the
lighthouse, and that a fire had been lit upon it, which was plainly seen
from the Land’s End. Eighty chaldrons of coal were ordered from Swansea,
and the regular lighting was fixed for October 30 next, due notice to
that effect being given in the _Gazette_, and at Billingsgate and the
Custom House, whilst letters announcing the fact were also written to
the English merchants in the Canaries, Spain, and Portugal. Last, but
not least, collectors were appointed at the different southern ports to
collect the dues from incoming or outgoing ships.
[Illustration: ST. AGNES LIGHTHOUSE, SCILLY ISLES.
(_From a receipt for lighthouse dues in the possession of Lord Kenyan,
dated December 19, 1690._)]
The old receipts for the payment of such dues are interesting, from the
representation they give of the lighthouse in question. The light was
given, as the reader will notice, from a coal fire enclosed in a lantern,
having a funnel in the roof: this is the earliest instance of one of
these enclosed coal fires. It was not successful, as we know, for the
smoke collected in the lantern and dimmed the light, and the fire needed
constant attention to keep it bright; it was, however, continued here for
a long time, because it was economical.
But the Trinity House, before the year was ended, had to consider a
difficulty in connection with the Scilly lighthouse much more serious
than an insufficient or dim light—it had to consider the conduct of
an unfaithful servant. It had wisely declined to appoint as keeper
any one born and bred in islands where it was well known that the
inhabitants preyed on human life and lured mariners to shipwreck; but it
unfortunately did not suspect danger from one who had only gone out to
live there since the lighthouse had been in progress, and this want of
suspicion led to the appointment of a man who before three months had
elapsed proved himself to have become a _wrecker_.
One dark and rainy night, just before Christmas, 1680, the fire on the
Scilly lighthouse, which home-coming vessels had been told to expect, did
not shine forth. On came a richly laden ship, sure of her position and
safety, as no light was visible, and only when too late was warned by
the sound of the waves as they broke upon the rocks, of her proximity to
the reefs that lie around the Scillies. To attract attention and bring
help she discharged her cannon, and then, but not till then, the fire on
the lighthouse shot up bright and clear. Doubtless the keeper and his
accomplices had watched the lights of the approaching vessel, and allowed
the fire to slumber till she was actually upon the rocks: then, in the
hope, perhaps, of escaping condemnation, should the matter reach the ears
of his employers, he fanned his fire into flame. But his ruse did not
succeed, nor could it well have done so, since he was found, but a few
hours after, in company with the greedy band of wreckers on the rocks,
and much of his plunder was subsequently discovered hidden in the heap of
coal that stood ready for use beside the lighthouse.
Similar troubles ensued with subsequent keepers, though no such flagrant
case was discovered; but it was often needful to caution those engaged
in looking after the lighthouse to avoid ‘meddling with wrecks,’ which,
despite the presence of a lighthouse, seem to have been not infrequent,
and to avoid ‘drinking’ and the company of wreckers. There is other
evidence that for a long time to come the keepers were too much hand and
glove with the inhabitants of the islands to avoid suspicion. Altogether
this first lighthouse that the Trinity House had built for fully fifty
years, and certainly the most elaborate one, cost the board a good deal
of annoyance and a good deal of money; so much of the latter, that the
Duke of York, then master, was asked soon after its erection graciously
to ‘forego’ his annual allowance on account of the poverty of ‘the
House,’ which he graciously did.
It will be remembered that in the autumn of the year 1707 Sir Cloudesley
Shovell’s vessel, and the fleet accompanying it, were cast away on the
Scillies, Sir Cloudesley and many others perishing. On that occasion the
keeper of the lighthouse took time by the forelock, and, quite as soon as
news of the disaster reached London, there came from him an assurance as
to the ‘goodness’ of his light when the wreck occurred. The board made
no answer till it had heard some of the sailors who escaped, and these
all agreed that, on the occasion, the light was dim in the extreme, owing
they believed, to ‘the foulness of the glass.’
The admiral’s body was carried by the tidal current to Porth Hellick,
and there found burial till it was exhumed and removed to its present
more dignified resting-place in Westminster Abbey. If you go to Porth
Hellick, the fisher-people round about will show you the very spot of
his temporary burial—not a blade of grass grows upon it! If you ask them
they will tell you the reason. A Cornish sailor, on board the admiral’s
ship, warned the officer in command of the nearness of the rocks of
Scilly, and bid him beware. This was intolerable, and the man, though
he had ventured, from his local knowledge, to tell his superior of
approaching danger, was judged by Sir Cloudesley guilty of a gross breach
of discipline, and ordered forthwith to be hanged at the yardarm. Here
he was hanging when the vessel struck the rocks. Of course tradition
says that the disaster was but a due punishment of the admiral for his
injustice and a response to the curses of the sailor, who had before his
execution repeated the 109th Psalm, and made its imprecations applicable
to those at whose hands he was dying. Sir Cloudesley, so the story goes
on, was not drowned in that shipwreck, but was washed ashore, exhausted
from exposure, close to the spot in question. On his finger glistened
a diamond set in a most precious ring: the man who found him could not
resist this wonderful heaven-sent gift, and, lest the wearer should
hinder him from getting it, battered out of him the little remaining life
he possessed, and buried him in the sand.
There is a common Cornish superstition that over a sinner’s grave the
grass will not grow; and that is why the ground which covered the
admiral’s body still lies bare. Mark the deliciously national sentiment
displayed in the story. The murdered man, not the murderer, is the
sinner! It was no crime in the wrecker’s law to slaughter a man, or a
woman either, on whose body was valuable jewelry or costly raiment; the
worth of that jewelry or raiment was regarded, as Sir John Killegrew told
Carleton, as ‘God’s grace’ sent to them!
If you dip into Cornish legend you will see this illustrated over and
over again. And more: not only was it no murder to kill the living man or
woman who might hinder you from gathering in the harvest of the sea—the
harvest that God sent you: it was no murder to kill the revenue officer
who tried to stop you in gathering the harvest your illicit trade sent
you. The graves of some of these officers used, a couple of generations
ago, to be shown in the Cornish churchyards, bare of grass, and the
reason was that those who lay beneath them were murderers—murderers
because in doing their duty to their king and country they had brought to
the scaffold some notorious smuggler who likely enough, as a wrecker, had
slaughtered some half-drowned victim of shipwreck to strip his body!
But this is a digression; let us resume our narrative of St. Agnes
lighthouse.
As a result of the lax keeping of the lights, Whiston’s mad proposals
were made to Parliament in 1716; he suggested that from one of the Scilly
Islands there should be discharged into the air, at intervals throughout
the night, huge fire-balls, to warn mariners of their whereabouts. But
people only laughed at his suggestions, and nothing came of them.
Later on we hear that the ‘badness’ of the Scilly lights was ‘the talk
of the Exchange’; and indeed it seemed that each successive keeper fell
more or less into the evil habits of his predecessor: the idle life led
many into drunken habits, and that probably accounts a good deal for
the lax keeping. ‘You drink so much,’ wrote the Trinity House Secretary
to one keeper, ‘that you are not fit for business.’ This was in 1740,
and the particular keeper was no doubt the man referred to by Robert
Heath—a writer on the Scilly Islands in 1750—as having kept his fire so
badly that often it was scarcely visible on the neighbouring island of
St. Mary. ‘Some,’ continues Heath, ‘think that often this keeper left
his fire _unlit_ all through the night,’ or else kept it so low that by
daybreak nothing but lifeless embers filled the grate.
However, things mended soon after this: the Trinity House placed
better-class keepers at St. Agnes—men of better education and less likely
to be contaminated by the ill-example of the inhabitants of the islands;
and after the closed-in coal fire had been changed, in 1790, for a
powerful oil lamp, we hear no more complaints about the Scilly lights.
The then owner of the islands bought the cradle, or grate, in which the
coal fire had burned, and turned it into a flower-stand, which he placed
in the wonderful gardens at Tresco, where it may still be seen—certainly
it is an interesting relic.
[Illustration: THE BISHOP’S ROCK LIGHTHOUSE.]
The lighthouse at St. Agnes remained the most westerly in England till
the year 1858, when that on the Bishop’s rock was erected; it is a
massive structure of grey granite. A much less solid erection—similar
in construction to that upon ‘the Smalls,’ of which I shall presently
speak—was all but completed some eight years before; but on the night of
February 6, 1850, the whole affair was demolished by the force of a storm
which snapped off the iron supports that had been fixed into the rock, as
though they had been so much matchwood.