quantities, especially after stormy weather.
This may be the reason why, as we observed during our short stay
here, several mornings after it had blown something hard in the
night, the sands were covered with country people running to and
fro to see if the sea had cast up anything of value. This the
seamen call “going a-shoring;” and it seems they do often find good
purchase. Sometimes also dead bodies are cast up here, the
consequence of shipwrecks among those fatal rocks and islands; as
also broken pieces of ships, casks, chests, and almost everything
that will float or roll on shore by the surges of the sea.
Nor is it seldom that the voracious country people scuffle and
fight about the right to what they find, and that in a desperate
manner; so that this part of Cornwall may truly be said to be
inhabited by a fierce and ravenous people. For they are so greedy,
and eager for the prey, that they are charged with strange, bloody,
and cruel dealings, even sometimes with one another; but especially
with poor distressed seamen when they come on shore by force of a
tempest, and seek help for their lives, and where they find the
rooks themselves not more merciless than the people who range about
them for their prey.
Here, also, as a farther testimony of the immense riches which have
been lost at several times upon this coast, we found several
engineers and projectors–some with one sort of diving engine, and
some with another; some claiming such a wreck, and some such-and-
such others; where they alleged they were assured there were great
quantities of money; and strange unprecedented ways were used by
them to come at it: some, I say, with one kind of engine, and some
another; and though we thought several of them very strange
impracticable methods, yet I was assured by the country people that
they had done wonders with them under water, and that some of them
had taken up things of great weight and in a great depth of water.
Others had split open the wrecks they had found in a manner one
would have thought not possible to be done so far under water, and
had taken out things from the very holds of the ships. But we
could not learn that they had come at any pieces of eight, which
was the thing they seemed most to aim at and depend upon; at least,
they had not found any great quantity, as they said they expected.
However, we left them as busy as we found them, and far from being
discouraged; and if half the golden mountains, or silver mountains
either, which they promise themselves should appear, they will be
very well paid for their labour.
From the tops of the hills on this extremity of the land you may
see out into that they call the Chops of the Channel, which, as it
is the greatest inlet of commerce, and the most frequented by
merchant-ships of any place in the world, so one seldom looks out
to seaward but something new presents–that is to say, of ships
passing or repassing, either on the great or lesser Channel.
Upon a former accidental journey into this part of the country,
during the war with France, it was with a mixture of pleasure and
horror that we saw from the hills at the Lizard, which is the
southern-most point of this land, an obstinate fight between three
French men-of-war and two English, with a privateer and three
merchant-ships in their company. The English had the misfortune,
not only to be fewer ships of war in number, but of less force; so
that while the two biggest French ships engaged the English, the
third in the meantime took the two merchant-ships and went off with
them. As to the picaroon or privateer, she was able to do little
in the matter, not daring to come so near the men-of-war as to take
a broadside, which her thin sides would not have been able to bear,
but would have sent her to the bottom at once; so that the English
men-of-war had no assistance from her, nor could she prevent the