LUNDY
It is curious in this twentieth century of ours, when every corner of
the habitable globe is docketed, measured, mapped, and surveyed, when a
railroad runs across "darkest Africa," and the great ice-wall of the
Antarctic cannot keep its inviolability from the feet of those resolute
and heroic explorers who go with camera, microscope, and theodolite,
against such forces of Nature as would daunt anything but the resolute
human heart--it is curious to come across small corners of the world
where the law of nations seemingly does not run, and the current of the
modern world sweeps by, leaving them in a backwater, strangely aloof
and undisturbed.
Such is the island of Herm, in the Channel Isles; such are one or two
volcanic rocks in the Greek Archipelago, which you may purchase for a
song, and live on if you can, though their barren waterlessness under
the midsummer suns will compel you to put out to sea again for all the
dangers of swift currents and black crags; such, too, I imagine, are
some of those enchanted small islands in the South Seas of which Conrad
writes: "It was as if the earth had gone on spinning, and had left that
crumb of its surface alone in space"; such, too, is Lundy.
But Lundy is only fourteen miles from the English coast, this populous
and organized England, and in the mouth of the Bristol Channel, in the
direct track of all the shipping of the West--sighted, it is estimated,
by at least a million vessels a year in their business up and down the
world--and yet, to within the last generation, it was almost as
inaccessible as in the days when the de Mariscos built their castle
there and defied the King and all his armies.
Even now, though in the summer pleasure steamers run from Ilfracombe
and Minehead, and land their noisy crowds on the south-eastern corner
of the island, the narrow peninsula of Lametor, it is during barely
three months of the year; they have ceased before the coming of the
October gales, and the island goes back to its solitude, and the wild
clamour of its innumerable sea-birds, while its few inhabitants wait
their bi-weekly post, and the coming of the Trinity boat on the 1st and
15th of the month, for news of the outside world.
For Lundy is a great rock, about three and a half miles long, and
averaging half a mile in depth, cutting the strong tidal stream which
runs round the south coast of Wales and up the Bristol Channel, with
steep cliffs and outlying crags and peaks of rock over which the surf
is flung ceaselessly, even on still summer days, and with a dangerous
tidal race at its northern end and the south-west and south-east
angles. It stands, too, in the highway of the winds as well as of the
waters, and is so scored and buffeted by gales that hardly any trees,
except the stunted dwarf-elder, can survive the winter fury on its open
slopes. When a westerly gale is blowing, many ships run in under its
lee-shore for shelter; but its only landing-place is at the south-east
angle by Rat Island, and that becomes dangerous in an easterly wind, so
that boats have to be beached on the south or west side, though with
difficulty and some danger. Add to this that the road from the
landing-stage is so narrow and steep that it could be held by two men,
and its suitability as a robber stronghold becomes clear.
It is a land of romance, singular in every aspect: in the formation of
its rocks, in the birds that haunt its cliffs and the beasts that haunt
its caves, in its antiquities, and the whole course of its adventurous
history. It is a granite rock, with here and there patches of
clay-shale, notably at the south-eastern corner; but the granite is
differentiated from the granite of Devon, to which it is so proximate,
and of so marked a character that it can be traced in many buildings
along the northern coasts of Devon and Cornwall, principally in towers
and churches, proving that quarries must have been worked on Lundy at
some time during the Middle Ages, and before the fifteenth century; for
there is comparatively little building of churches after that date. A
company was formed in 1863 to work the Lundy granite-quarries, and it
was intended to use this stone in the building of the Thames
Embankment; but the difficulty of shipment from so inaccessible a spot
proving insuperable, the enterprise was abandoned.
But apart from the height and boldness of these granite cliffs, rising
in places almost sheer to a height of more than seven hundred feet,
with outlying reefs and insular rocks bristling black and jagged
through the foaming waters, with gully, creek, and cave, worn by the
action of rain and sea, there is a further wildness given to the island
by a great series of clefts or fissures, running for a considerable
distance in a line irregularly parallel to the cliff, sometimes from
ten to twenty feet across, and as much as eighty feet deep, where they
can be measured; at other places too narrow for sounding, but seeming
to strike right down into the bowels of the earth. Locally this
phenomenon is called the "earthquake," and the popular tradition of the
island ascribes its appearance to the great earthquake at Lisbon in
1755; but it is certainly older than that date. However, the shock of
that great disturbance may have further rent the granite and displaced
the mighty boulders. It extends for about two miles from the southern
coast, running in a northerly direction, and where the slate formation
meets the granite it is fractured in the same sharp manner. Some
upheaval of the earth's crust in far-off prehistoric times must have
cracked the granite and made these mighty chasms; the wildness and
singularity of their appearance, and the confined locality in which
they occur--for there is no trace of such disturbance elsewhere in the
island--make one wonder if it were no imprisoned demon or angry god,
chained in the blackness under Lundy, who, stretching his mighty sinews
to be free, so contorted and rent the solid granite above him. The
absence of legend or ancient tradition (for the tradition of the Lisbon
earthquake is comparatively recent) about so arresting a spectacle I
ascribe to the condition of Lundy's history; there has been no
continued habitation of the simple people of the land to pass on, from
generation to generation, the ancient names and the ancient stories of
their dwelling-place, untouched by the changes of rule and ownership
which go over them.
For this reason another strange phenomenon of Lundy, about which the
imagination of an earlier people must have lingered, passes barely
remarked. There is a great promontory on the coast, opposite the reef
called the Hen and Chickens, which is pierced by a sort of tunnel about
eight hundred feet in length and sixty feet in height, through which a
boat can sail on calm days at high-water; and in the centre of the
tunnel, bubbling up through the sea, rises a perpetual spring of fresh
water. This is called the Virgin's Well, and I can discover no story
or legend with which it is connected, though the name may possibly
contain some earlier myth, not based upon Christian worship.
[Illustration: Lynton: The Devil's Cheesering]
The names of other remarkable features of the island, the great rocks
which are piled along its coasts, are all descriptive and not legendary
names--the Devil's Chimney, the Cheeses, the Templar's Rock, the
Gannett Rock, the Mousehole. These names will have been given in
comparatively recent times, at least since the Saxon invasion, for they
show a different mentality from the Celtic names which are found widely
in Cornwall, Devon, Wales, and Northumberland, and which have a poetic
and imaginative quality. Such is the difference between Heddon's
Mouth, "the Giant's Mouth," or Dunster, "the Tower on the Hill," and
such names as I have quoted above. The very name of Lundy itself,
which is "Lund-ei," the island of Lund, as Caldy is "Cald-ei," the
island of Cald, show a Teutonic origin, perhaps Scandinavian, but not
named so by the Celts of Britain or Ireland.
But "there were great men before Agamemnon"; certainly there were great
men on this island before the adventurer Lund landed upon it and gave
it his name.
In 1850, in digging foundations near a farmhouse in the southern part
of the island, a great grave, or series of graves, was discovered.
There were two stone coffins, made of hewn blocks of granite, just deep
enough to contain a body, and with the covers sloped and cut each from
a single block. One was ten feet in length, and contained the huge
skeleton of a man, over eight feet high; the other was eight feet long,
and contained a skeleton well over six feet, which "was imagined to be
that of a woman," but on what grounds I cannot discover, as it does not
seem to have been carefully examined, and is therefore probably mere
conjecture, based upon its juxtaposition to the larger coffin. In the
account of the excavation a "macabre" incident is recorded. One of the
workmen, seizing the shin-bone of the giant, placed it against his own
leg, and found that it reached halfway up his thigh; whereupon, taking
up the lower jawbone, he fitted it easily over his own lower jaw,
though he was a burly man and bearded.
"To what base uses a man may return, Horatio! . . ."
"Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw."
For that these were the bones of a man mighty in his day the
workmanship of his coffin goes to prove. For he lay with a stone rest
for his head and feet, made each of a cubic block of fine granite, and
a deep depression hollowed in his pillow to take his head, resting
sideways towards his shoulder. As these great blocks were cut and
squared and hollowed with stone tools, the labour which they betoken
may be imagined; and none, I suppose, but an imperious Caesar could
have exacted it. The skeleton was covered and surrounded by a mass of
limpet-shells. There were seven other skeletons buried in a line with
these two, but without coffins, and they were not of the race of
giants; and then, at a little distance, there was a great pit, filled
with the bones of men, women, and children, as if a slaughtered
multitude had been flung into a common grave. In this pit were found
some beads, light blue in colour, some sherds of red glazed pottery,
and a few fragments of bronze. Over all was scattered a vast heap of
limpet-shells.
Here is one of the fascinating problems of archaeology, which comes
with the touch of romance to the dry study of minutiae: When were these
burials made? Are they of two different dates? The giant of the stone
coffin perhaps belonged to the far-off Stone Age, already grown dim and
legendary to these later peoples, who knew of the working of metal and
the making of glass. And were they sacrificed to him, as a dark hero
or demi-god of the past, to propitiate him against plague or conquest?
And what is the magical significance of the limpet-shells, which cover
them and him alike? These questions, and many others, will, I am
convinced, be answered by the patient research of archaeology within
comparatively few years. The suggestion that this interment is Danish,
and is the remnant of the force defeated by Alfred the Great outside
Kenwith Castle, is, I think, untenable; the bones of women and children
being found with those of men alone disproves it, apart from the
inaccessibility of Lundy and the very great antiquity of the stone
coffins.
But whoever they may be who left their bones here, it is certain the
story of their lying there is a tragedy, of bloody sacrifice or more
bloody massacre, like all the histories of wild animals and of
primitive peoples.
Not far from the Giant's Grave, as this site is locally called, is
another relic of hoary antiquity, in the shape of a tumulus, which,
when opened, laid bare a kistvaen, or sepulchral chamber, formed of a
great block of granite, weighing nearly five tons, resting on two
upright granite slabs, and enclosing a space about six feet square.
This method of burial is well known throughout the old world; such
burial chambers have been found in Greece, and in considerable numbers
in Ireland, where they are primitive Celtic. In the Lundy kistvaen no
skeleton was found, nor anything, indeed, save a small fragment of
pottery, though "there was a rank odour in the cavity, very different
from that of newly turned earth."
There is a logan-stone on the eastern side of the island, which, within
the memory of Mr. Heaven, the last owner of the island, was a true
logan-stone, and could be rocked with the hands, but has now slipped
from its socket. But the whole question of these logan-stones is
controversial, some claiming them as relics of antiquity of whose use
and meaning we are ignorant, and others as the chance product of the
natural forces of rain and weather.
The same also may be said of the "rock-basins," of which a very perfect
example may be found in the Punchbowl Valley, being a granite basin of
four feet in diameter, with a uniform thickness of six inches, with
both the concave and convex surfaces segments of a perfect sphere.
Later opinion inclines to a human, and not a chance, origin for these
interesting phenomena.
But, leaving the dim and still conjectural paths of archaeology, let us
turn to the history of Lundy. Here again we are confronted with facts
which a conscientious historian would hesitate to assert, save as
legend. For this singular land, where the King's writ does not run,
which is not assimilated even yet to municipal government, was for
centuries, even down to the eighteenth century, a robber stronghold,
from which, as from those castles on the Rhine, and still earlier and
more powerful castles of the Aegean lords, built athwart the peninsulas
of the trade-routes, the garrison swooped maraudering upon the peaceful
occupations of unprotected folk.
Lundy is supposed, not upon very certain authority, to have been called
"Herculea" in Roman times; and there is no record, nor even tradition,
of how it came by its present name, only a vague conjecture of a
Scandinavian origin, of which I have already spoken. But there are
evidences of a much earlier occupation than the Roman--indeed, so far
as I know, there have been no Roman remains found yet upon the
island--and it is no unlikely supposition that the great skeleton of
the Giant's Grave was some such feared and piratical chieftain as the
first recorded lord of the island, the fierce de Marisco. These
Mariscos were a branch of the great family of Montmorency, and they
were ever a thorn in the side of their liege-lord, whether in England,
Ireland, or Lundy. They must have owned Lundy since the days of the
Norman Conquest, if they had not seized it before; for the great castle
Marisco, built upon the extreme verge of the cliffs, commanding the bay
and the landing-place, and overlooking in a wide sweep all the southern
coast of the island, was already built in the eleventh century. From
this impregnable fortress, with its massive walls nine feet in
thickness, its squat, strong Norman turrets, its encircling fosse, and
the perpendicular cliffs by which its seaward wall was made unscalable,
Sir Jordan de Marisco used to sally with his retainers, making war on
all alike, levying toll--_blackmail_, if ever there was, in the true
meaning of the word--disobeying the laws of the land, and outraging the
dictates of common humanity. So that, though he had married a
Plantagenet, a blood relation of the King's, Henry II declared his
estate of Lundy forfeited, and granted it to the Knights-Templars.
Whether peace was made between Sir Jordan and Henry, or whether Henry
was not strong enough to enforce his edict (though he was a powerful
and determined monarch), I do not know; but in 1199, in the reign of
King John, Sir Jordan's son William following in his father's evil
ways, the grant of Lundy was confirmed to the Templars.
But this fortress was a hard nut to crack. The only approach is from
the south-eastern corner, by a steep and narrow path commanded by the
castle, and held by Marisco's men, and it was no light undertaking for
the invaders to beach their boats and effect a landing against wind,
weather, and attack. So that, although a tax was levied upon Devon and
Cornwall to support an undertaking for the siege of Lundy, it does not
appear to have been taken; for it was granted to Henry de Tracy (of the
famous family of Tracy, cursed since the murder of Becket), and a few
years later to one Robert Walerand. Then for some years de Marisco
seems to have found even its mighty walls and granite cliffs too
insecure, for he is found fighting among the French, and in 1217 was
taken prisoner in a sea-fight, when Eustace the Monk, the pilot of the
French fleet, was slain. Yet a few months later, in November of the
same year, he was reinstated in possession of Lundy, and his wife, his
sons and daughters, who had been seized by Henry III as hostages, were
restored to him. Now favoured, now disgraced, but turbulent to the
last, he died in possession of Lundy, but in the very year of his death
having paid ransom to Henry of 300 marks.
His grandson, also William de Marisco, filled up the tale of violence
and ill-doing, and forfeited at length the family inheritance, by his
share in the attempted murder of the King at Woodstock. This is
Westcote's account of the plot, given in his "View of
Devonshire": . . . "Only Matthew Paris speaketh of one William de
Marisco who, conspiring the death of Henry III, persuaded a Knight
sometime of his Court to murder him, and with that intent got at night
by a window into the King's bedchamber; but He, in whose protection the
lives of princes are, disappointed him, for the King lay elsewhere. He
seeking from chamber to chamber with a naked weapon in his hand, Mrs.
Byset, one of the Queen's women, sitting late up at her devotions,
shrieking at the fearful sight of him, awakened the King's guard, who
presently took him."
The unhappy and probably demented youth was put to death, and de
Marisco fled to his island, which he further fortified, and there,
attaching to himself a band of outlaws and malefactors, lived by
piracy. Retribution came in its due course, for, having made himself
detested by all decent men, many knights and nobles joined against him,
and contrived to take him by strategem. He was brought to London,
tried, and condemned to death with sixteen accomplices, dragged from
Westminster to the Tower, and there hanged. "When he had there
breathed out his wretched soul," he was drawn and quartered--a literal
account of which, as given in Matthew Paris, I forbear to set down--and
the quarters of his body sent to the four principal cities of England.
His father, Geoffrey, fled to France, and the island came under the
government of Henry de Tracy for the Crown.
Yet in the reign of Edward I, one of the Irish branch of the Marisco
family was reinstated in possession for a few years, though Edward II
gave it to his favourite and his worst enemy, Hugh Spencer. It was
there also, be it remembered, that he purposed taking refuge from his
Barons, but was driven to Wales by contrary winds. In the time of
Edward III the island came to the Luttrells, the great family that
owned Dunster, Minehead, and many manors on the North Somerset coast;
in the time of Westcote, in the reign of James I, it was in the
possession of the Grenvilles.
It is difficult, and perhaps tedious, to attempt to follow in detail
the many families who had, or laid claim to, possession of Lundy
throughout the course of history; it is clear that it was a stronghold
of importance, from the frequent references to it in our records. It
was claimed and loaned and bought and held in fee from the eleventh to
the nineteenth century. It was the scene of a wild and fantastic
adventure in the reign of Charles I, when three Turkish pirate-ships
swooped upon it, and made slave-raids into Devon and Cornwall, taking
sixty men out of a church one Sunday morning, and carrying them away
prisoner. "Egypt was never more infested with caterpillars," wrote the
captain of a ship of war in 1630, "than the Channel with Biscayers."
The Turks sailed south with their human booty, but the Channel and the
Devon coast became the prey of an English buccaneer, the famous Admiral
Nutt, who was more boldly and splendidly piratical even than the
buccaneers of "Treasure Isle," and who faced the King's navy and got
clear to his stronghold of Lundy, though they dropped thirty great shot
among his fleet, of which Nutt received ten through his own ship. What
became of the Admiral I do not know; he was not captured and hanged,
and so may have sailed away to the Barbadoes or the Mediterranean, and
there have met his death and scuttled his ship in a last fight against
odds, or perhaps been marooned by a mutinous crew, or set adrift in an
open boat to die of hunger and thirst, or been stabbed in a drunken
scuffle over a bottle of rum.
He passes away from the history of Lundy, but now a French man-o'-war
and now a Spanish made raids up the Bristol Channel and upon Lundy,
until Thomas Bushel held it for Charles I and established some measure
of order. It was claimed from Bushel by Lord Say and Sele as his
"inheritance," and he wrote to the King for permission to deliver it
up, but proposing:
". . . If your Majesty shall require my longer stay here, be confident,
sir, I shall sacrifice both life and fortune before the loyalty of
"Your obedient humble servant,
"THOMAS BUSHEL."
Bushel received the following letter from Charles, which I transcribe
because of the light which it throws on the King's character, a letter
written in answer to a faithful and disinterested servant in a mood of
petulant self-pity. ". . . Now, since the place is inconsiderable in
itself, and yet may be of great advantages to you in respect of your
mines, we do hereby give you leave to use your discretion in it, with
this caution, that you do take example from ourselves, and be not
over-credulous of vain promises, which hath made us great only in our
sufferings and will not discharge our debts." This letter, more than
any single document I know, shows the hopeless weakness of the Stuart
character, and the unhappiness of serving the Stuart cause; this letter
might have been written by Mary, Queen of Scots, or by James II, or by
the Old Pretender, or by the Young Pretender; in all alike we find what
this letter shows, a certain gracious melancholy, a lack of moral
courage, a great self-pity, and a great selfishness.
Thomas Bushel gave up the island into the hands of Colonel Fiennes, a
Parliamentarian soldier, and the father of the intrepid young lady,
Celia Fiennes, who, a few years later, travelled through the length and
breadth of England on horseback, and wrote an account of her
journeyings. Lord Say and Sele, who claimed the island, was her
grandfather on the mother's side.
After the Restoration, and under the corrupt administration of Charles,
the Dutch ravaged the shipping of the Channel, as the French did in the
reign of William and Mary and Queen Anne, and as pirates did at all
times, whenever a body of desperate men could establish themselves on
Lundy, and from there make raids on the coastal traffic. The last and
worst pirate of all, the most inhuman, as the meanest, a trafficker in
human misery for the sake of gold, false even to the partners in his
base contract, was Benson, a rich man by inheritance, and belonging to
one of the oldest Bideford families, the leading citizen of Bideford
and Appledore, and a member of Parliament for Barnstaple.
In 1747 he entered into a contract with the Government for the
exportation of convicts, and gave bond to the Sheriff to transport them
to Virginia or Maryland, which was the horrible method of treating
criminals then in common use. But in 1748 he leased Lundy Island from
Lord Gower, and, transporting the convicts there, began building walls
and cultivating the island with this slave-labour. The great wall,
called the Quarter Wall, on Lundy was built by these unhappy convicts.
After a few years, however, Benson was discovered in smuggling, and a
large quantity of tobacco and other goods was found in caves and
chambers cut out of the rock. For this he was fined 5,000 pounds; but
when his importation of convicts was discovered, and he was taxed with
it, he excused himself by declaring that to send them to Lundy was the
same as sending them to America, so long as they were transported
anywhere out of England. The termination of his villainous career in
England was owing to a conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, a
vulgar and inglorious crime without the element of danger and adventure
which in some slight degree may be said to have invested the exploits
of the other pirates who have infested Lundy.
Benson, having laded a vessel called the _Nightingale_ with a valuable
cargo of pewter, linen, and salt, insured her heavily before she
sailed, ostensibly, for Maryland. But he had arranged with her master,
Lancey, to put back at night and land the cargo at Lundy, and then to
burn and scuttle the _Nightingale_. This was accordingly done, and the
crew took to the boats and were picked up by a homeward-bound ship;
but, as usual in these circumstances, one of the crew, animated by some
personal pique, "blew the gaff," in the parlance of roguery. Lancey
was taken, tried, and hanged, and Benson escaped to Portugal.
Little more remains to be said of the history of Lundy. In 1834 it was
purchased by Mr. Heaven, and remained the property of his family for
over sixty years, till 1906, when it once again came on the market, and
was bid for by Germans, but was withdrawn from sale, and remains in
English possession.
But I cannot close this short account of the island without a brief
reference to the wild life which abounds on the pinnacles of its
inaccessible rocks, on the fern-covered, steep slopes, and in its
numberless sea-washed caves, which are haunted by seals, or were until
within the last few years; for the brutality and selfish carelessness
of chance visitors allowed to land by the courtesy of the owner have
driven away much of the timid wild life which had taken refuge against
the advancing tide of civilization. Seals used to be observed in fair
numbers, particularly at the southern end in a great cave called Seal
Cave, and walruses were occasional visitors. But lobsters and crabs
are still caught in very great numbers, and, together with the
innumerable conies which breed on the island, form the staple industry
of the island.
Lundy is also the last stronghold of the original old English "black
rat," which has been invaded and destroyed throughout England and
Scotland by the common Scandinavian brown rat; Rat Island, at the
south-eastern corner by the landing-stage, commemorates in its name
this last fortress of a dying race.
But it is for its birds that Lundy is perhaps most notable. To those
who first approach its mighty cliffs it might appear to be the haunt of
all the birds in creation. There are gulls of many varieties, falcons,
kestrels, ravens, crows, cormorants, kittiwakes, puffins; there is the
razor-billed auk, and that now extinct bird, the Great Auk, was seen on
the island no later than the last century.
But, indeed, it was no surprise to me to hear of this extinct species
lingering on Lundy; the strangeness and wildness of the place might
lead one to expect it to be the haunt of the Dodo, or that monstrous
and fabulous bird of the "Arabian Nights," the Giant Roc.
The hoopoe, the pretty little Southern bird which haunts the gardens of
Greece, sings its "tio, tio, tio, tio, tix" of Aristophanes' comedy on
this wind-swept Northern isle; the rose-coloured starling, that rare
and beautiful bird of a warmer clime, has been seen here in the spring;
the eagle and the golden eagle hover above its crags; the sparrow-hawk
and the great gyrfalcon prey upon the small birds and little rodents;
even the wild and shy osprey was known to build its eyrie upon Lundy to
within the last half-century.
Many of these birds are visitors only, and do not breed here; for in
the spring and the autumn, when the great tides of migration set north
and south, Lundy lies in the track of their going, and here the birds
alight, in their hundreds of thousands, to rest the wings tired with
the going and coming from Africa or Asia across the miles of water.
But whether in winter or summer, spring or autumn, any bold walker who
ventures round the cliffs and coves of Lundy will find himself
surrounded with such a crowd of screaming sea-fowl, diving, swooping,
poising, or darting, in such myriads as if the foot of man had never
yet scared them from their breeding-places, as the sea-fowl swooped and
screamed from their inviolate heights when the first Norsemen ran their
beaked ship on to the desert beaches of Iceland.