XII St. Agnes
If you want to visit the little island of St. Agnes, you had better choose a fairly calm day, for the coast is so rocky that in rough weather it is not easy to land.
There are two ways of getting there from St. Mary’s: either in your own hired sailing-boat, when you can choose your own time; or else you can be “delivered with the mails” by the steam-launch, in which case you must be ready for starting soon after the arrival of the steamer from Penzance. Very energetic people can also go in the launch when she fetches the mails, leaving St. Mary’s at 6.30 in the morning.
The launch is naturally more independent of the weather than the sailing-boats, but even she has been known to come to grief in a high gale, and has been ignominiously towed in by a trawler; and if you do venture out in her when there is a lot of sea on, she may take up or land her mails and yet refuse to run the risk of landing you. Mails can be thrown, but you cannot; and her dinghy does not long keep its coat of royal blue paint amongst the rocks around St. Agnes.
The whole past history of this island is one of a series of shipwrecks; and we cannot wonder at this when we see the gaunt and grim monsters that lie in wait for storm-driven or befogged vessels to the west and south-west. The very names of some of them are significant: Hellweathers, Old Wreck Ledge, Tearing Ledge, and the Crim Rocks (I am told that “crim” in Cornish means a creeping, trembling, shuddering feeling, as from fear).
But who would ever expect to be wrecked on islets bearing the innocent names of Daisy and Great and Little Rose? And yet these rocks have also had their toll of human lives; in fact, there is scarcely one but serves as tombstone to some poor fellow—a tombstone which has brought him to the grave it marks.
Heath makes a quaint comment on the frequency of wrecks near this island; “which,” says he, “makes the Inhabitants of it some Amends for their Forlornness of Abode.”
There are stories that in the old days the islanders recognised so keenly the value of this “Amends” that they would drop propitiatory pins down St. Warna’s Well, praying to her to “send a wreck before morning.” This Saint, who is said to have come all the way from Ireland in a coracle of wicker and hides, was supposed to be instrumental in sending the wrecks, and generally to preside over and direct the good fortune of the islanders. She seems a much more suitable patron-saint for the stormy little island than the meek St. Agnes with her lamb. But how came this bold, adventurous dame to be accredited with such a weakness for pins?
There are stories still more sinister: of ships lured to their destruction by false lights; of a lantern tied between the horns of a cow to lead mariners astray by its wandering gleam; and of other devices of the devotees of St. Warna, who evidently believed in the maxim of Æschylus, that the gods help those who help themselves. But whatever strange and wild doings there may have been in the past, nowadays none are more ready than the men of St. Agnes to risk their own lives in endeavouring to save others.
They have a life-boat of their own, which is launched from a slip just below the church—a slip which they claim to be the longest in the world!
The lighthouse is much the oldest in the islands, and one of the oldest in the British Isles, having been built in 1680. For more than two centuries it formed a guiding-star by night, but at first it was lighted merely by a coal-fire, which was sometimes allowed to go out. In 1790 oil-lamps and reflectors were fixed, which supplied a brilliant light. But recently it was found to be in need of much repair, so it has been placed on the “retired list,” and its work of warning and guidance is now given over to the new tower erected on Peninnis.
In past times the inhabitants of St. Agnes were frequently cut off from all communication with the outer world for weeks together, and had to depend very much on their own resources. They had to grind their own corn with round stone hand-mills, or “querns,” and often they ran short of bread altogether, and had to make up with potatoes. They had no fuel but the dried bracken, fetched in boat-loads from the neighbouring isle of Annet unless a chance wreck provided them with firewood; and fish-oil and seal-oil, prepared by themselves, were all they had for artificial light. One old lady still speaks feelingly of the privations of her early days. “I never could abide potatoes for breakfast,” she says, “but there was often nothing else to be had.” The seals’ blubber for candles was boiled down out of doors, for the smell was too abominable to have in the houses. Seals weighing six or seven hundredweight and “nearly as big as bullocks” have been caught round the islands. Nowadays any that are caught are sold to the Governor at 5s. a head, large and small alike.
Early potatoes are still grown on St. Agnes for export, and now a good deal of business is also done with the flowers.
As the launch draws near the landing-place in Perconger during the flower-season, you may see a long string of carts and barrows following each other down the hill to the sea-shore. These contain the wooden boxes of flowers which are to be loaded on the barge and towed back to St. Mary’s ready for the next day’s steamer.
We found very comfortable quarters on the island with the wife of the pilot’s son who so distinguished himself when the “T. W. Lawson” was wrecked, as described in another chapter. The accompanying illustration shows their little three-year-old girl trying to help her parents in the tying-house.
The very names on St. Agnes seem to be suggestive of the wild and rocky character of the island—names such as Camperdizl Point, Campergurling, and the Carns of Kestillier.
And is not Wingletang Down a picturesque and suggestive name?
A heather-clad stretch of open down, dotted with bushes of “whin,” or gorse, and with a fringe of “tang,” or seaweed, washed up all round it; great boulders of granite strewn over its surface, and bare patches of the living rock showing here and there through the soil—that is Wingletang Down, in the middle of which stands the strange rock called the Giant’s Punch-bowl.
In the sands of the little bay at the edge of the down it is the custom to search for beads, just as one searches for beads in the sands of the Egyptian desert. But these are not mummy-beads! only wreck-salvage from a vessel that was lost over two hundred years ago, and its wreckage was washed up in what has since been called “Beady Pool.”
On Wingletang Down one may, perhaps, see large blocks of granite drilled with rows of holes ready for quarrying. Until recent times the blocks were severed by driving wooden pegs into these holes, and wetting them until their swelling forced the stone asunder—just the same method as was used in ancient Egypt thousands of years ago! Nowadays slips of steel take the place of the wooden pegs.
The bay on the south of St. Agnes is known as Santa Warna Bay, because there, according to tradition, the Saint put in, in her little coracle, on her arrival from Ireland. On its shore is Santa Warna’s Well, now an insignificant little hole almost choked with dead bracken and weeds, and half-covered with a flat stone, but once considered the most important spot in the island. For, formerly, every year on the day after Twelfth Day, the well was cleaned out by the islanders and devotion paid to the Saint. This was still done in Heath’s time, and he says they used “certain superstitious ceremonies in their thanksgiving, which being ended they make a general feasting and rejoicing throughout the island.” It was here that, in the old wild days, the young girls used to come on foggy nights, before going to bed, and drop pins down the well, chanting—
“Good-night, father; good-night, mother;
Good-night, friends and foes;
God send a ship ashore before morning.”
There is a tradition that the destruction by drowning of the entire population of St. Agnes, as recorded by Leland in the sixteenth century, was a judgment on a long course of wrecking.
The little church of St. Agnes stands by Priglis Bay, which is sometimes called Pericles Bay, and is supposed to be a corruption of Portus Ecclesiæ. Scillonians have a way of softening the sound of words; thus Porth is nearly always reduced to Per; so it is easy to see how Portus Ecclesiæ became Priglis.
Leland says there was a chapel here in his time, from which the island took its name. This is supposed to have been beaten down by the Parliamentary forces. It lay in ruins many years, and then, on the same spot and with the same materials, was built a dwelling-house, which was washed away by a high tide in 1744. People still living in 1794 could remember having seen the chancel arch of the old church standing, built of fine freestone, in the same way as the arches in the ruins of Tresco Abbey church.
Another church was built in 1685, with salvage money received for saving a French vessel. This fell into decay, and was replaced by the present building early in the last century.
Just outside the church wall the men of St. Agnes make and stack their crab-pots. One may sometimes see a mountain of these creels piled up by the life-boat slip, and a group of men hard at work making more; others, perhaps, standing by and looking on with their hands in their pockets; waiting, with the unequalled patience of the fisherman, for some job to turn up.
Whenever there is a fog in the islands, whether by day or night, you will hear every five minutes a loud booming roar, like the report of a gun, sounding across the sea from the south-west. This warning comes from the Bishop Lighthouse, four and a half miles from St. Agnes, and is caused by the explosion of “tonite,” a kind of gun-cotton. It serves to warn off ships when the light is quite hidden in the dense fogs, which sometimes last for days.
Think what it must be for those men in the lighthouse to have this roar sounding close to their ears every five minutes for days together!
The Bishop Lighthouse is the tallest in the world, besides being one of the most exposed in situation. The first attempt to build a tower on this rock was made in 1849, but before the building was complete a heavy sea swept away the wrought-iron rods and columns of which it was formed.
A masonry tower was next built, and finished in 1859. It was 120 feet high, but even at this height the sea would actually be breaking over the lantern for many hours together during a heavy gale; so after a time the tower was encased with additional masonry, and raised to its present height of 167 feet. It sways like a tree in the wind during one of the terrific storms which sometimes beat upon it.
Altogether there are seven sea-lights to be seen gleaming out round the islands after night has fallen. There is this of the Bishop, away among the western rocks; the new light on Peninnis; the ruby glow from Round Island; the light-ship moored by the Seven Stones; the “Wolf” Lighthouse, half-way between Scilly and the mainland; and the lights of Longships and Pendeen, off the Cornish coast.