It is quite vain nowadays to seek for the smugglers’ caves at Mount Pleasant. They were long ago filled up.
In these times the holiday-maker, searching for shells, is the only feature of the sands that fringe the seaward edge of the Warren. It is a fruitful hunting-ground for such, especially after rough weather. But the day following a storm was, in those times, the opportunity of the local revenue men, who, forming a strong party, were used to take boat and pull down here and thoroughly search the foreshore; for at such times any spirit-tubs that might have been sunk out at sea and carefully buoyed by the smugglers, awaiting a favourable time for landing, were apt to break loose and drift in-shore. There was always, at such times, a sporting chance of a good haul. But, on the other hand, some of the many tubs that had been sunk months before, and lost, would on these occasions come to hand, and they were worth just nothing at all: long immersion in salt water having spoiled their contents, with the result that what had been right good hollands or cognac had become a peculiarly ill-savoured liquid, which smelt to heaven when it was broached. The revenue people called this abominable stuff, which, as Shakespeare might say, had “suffered a sea-change into something new and strange,” by the appropriate name of “stinkibus.”
CORNWALL IN SMUGGLING STORY—CRUEL COPPINGER—HAWKER’S SKETCH—THE FOWEY SMUGGLERS—TOM POTTER, OF POLPERRO—THE DEVILS OF TALLAND—SMUGGLERS’ EPITAPHS—CAVE AT WENDRON—ST. IVES
CORNWALL is the region of romance: the last corner of England in which legend and imagination had full play, while matter-of-fact already sat enthroned over the rest of the land. At a time when newspapers almost everywhere had already long been busily recording facts, legends were still in the making throughout this westernmost part of the island. We may, in our innocence, style Cornwall a part of England; but the Cornish do not think of it as such, and when they cross the Tamar into Devonshire will still often speak of “going into England.” They are historically correct in doing so, for this is the unconquered land of the Cornu-Welsh, never assimilated by the Saxon kingdoms. Historically and ethnologically, the Cornish are a people apart.