Under these interesting social conditions the ancient semi-independence of Western Cornwall remained, little impaired. Many still spoke the older Cornish language; the majority of folk referred to Devonshire and the country in general beyond the Tamar as “England”—the inference being, of course, that Cornwall itself was _not_ England—and smuggling was as usual an industry as tin and copper-mining, fishing, or farming. Indeed the distances in Western Cornwall between sea and sea are so narrow that any man was commonly as excellent at farming as he was at fishing, and as expert at smuggling as at either of those more legitimate occupations. This amphibious race, wholly Celtic, adventurous, and enthusiastic, was not readily amenable to the restrictions upon trade imposed by that shadowy, distant, and impersonal abstraction called “the Government,” supported by visible forces, in the way of occasional soldiers or infrequent revenue cruisers, wherewith to make the collectors of customs at Penzance, Falmouth, or St. Ives, respected.
“The coasts here swarm with smugglers,” wrote George Borlase, of Penzance, agent to Lieut.-General Onslow, in 1750. Many letters by the same hand, printed in the publications of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, under the title of the “Lanisley Letters,” reiterate this statement, the writer of them urging the establishment of a military force at Helston, for “just on that neighbourhood lye the smugglers and wreckers, more than about us (at Penzance), tho’ there are too many in all parts of the country.”
The Cornish of that time were an unregenerate race, in the fullest sense of that term, and indulged in all the evil excesses to which the Celtic nature, untouched by religion, and wallowing in ancient superstitions, is prone. They drank to excess, fought brutally, and were shameless wreckers, who did not hesitate to lure ships upon the rocks and so bring about their destruction and incidentally their own enrichment by the cargo and other valuables washed ashore. Murder was a not unusual corollary of the wreckers’ fearful trade, partly because of the olden superstition that, if you saved the life of a castaway, that person whom you had preserved would afterwards bring about your own destruction. Therefore it was merely the instinct of self-preservation, and not sheer ferocity, that prompted the knocking on the head of such waifs and strays. If, at the same time, the wrecker went over the pockets of the deceased, or cut off his or her fingers, for the sake of any rings, that must not, of course, be accounted mere vulgar robbery: it was simply the frugal nature of the people, unwilling to waste anything.