In the course of some little time the absent sailor made his appearance dripping wet. In a drunken frolic he had first fallen into the fire at a low beer shop or “Kiddle-e-Wink,” and subsequently he fell out of the boat into the sea.
“To us our Queen, who in the central earth, Midst fiery lavas or basaltine seas, Deep-throned the illimitable waste enjoys, Enormous solitude, has given these Her subterraneous realms; bids us dwell here, In the abyss of darkness, and exert Immortal alchymy.
“Each devious cleft, each secret cell explore, And from its fissures draw the ductile ore.”
_The Mine: a Dramatic Poem_—JOHN SARGENT.
“An ancient story I’ll tell you anon, Which is older by far than the days of King John; But this you should know, that that red-robed sinner Robbed the Jew of the gold he had made as a tinner.”
There is scarcely a spot in Cornwall where tin is at present found, that has not been worked over by the “old men,” as the ancient miners are always called.
Every valley has been “streamed”—that is, the deposits have been washed for tin; over every hill where now a tin mine appears, there are evidences, many of them most extensive, of actual mining operations having been carried on to as great a depth as was possible in the days when the appliances of science were unknown.
Wherever the “streamer” has been, upon whatever spot the old miner has worked, there we are told the “Finician” (_Phœnician_) has been, or the Jew has mined.[45]
There is much confusion in these traditions. The Jew, and the Saracen, and the Phœnician are regarded as terms applied to the same people. Whereas the Phœnicians, who are recorded to have traded with the Cornish Britons for tin, and the Jews, who were the great tin miners and merchants in the days of King John, are separated by wide periods of time; and the “Saracens,” who some suppose to have been miners who came from Spain when that country was under the dominion of the Moors, occupy a very undefined position. Tradition, however, tells us that the old Cornish miners shipped their tin at several remarkable islands round the coast. St Michael’s Mount has been especially noticed, but this arises from the circumstance that it still retains the peculiar character which it appears to have possessed when Diodorus wrote. But Looe Island, St Nicholas’s Island in Plymouth Sound, the island at St Ives, the Chapel Rock at Perran, and many other insular masses of rock, which are at but a short distance from the coast, are said to have been shipping-places.