the start looms up prominently from here, but it is a long scramble up out of hall sands and round by the coastguard path to that weird spot.
the uncanny-looking start has impressed itself upon the imaginations of most of those who have seen it. polwhele, the historian of devon, led to the thought by the fantastic solemnity of the rocky headland, and by the sound of its name, gravely assures us that here, in the dim dawn of history, stood a temple of the phœnician goddess, astarte, the “ashtoreth” of the full-blooded scriptural denunciations of the “worshippers of strange gods”; the more suave and worshipful venus aphrodite of the greeks, fair goddess of the sea.
the start—start “point” is a redundancy—has, however, nothing to do with heathen mythology, suitable though it be, above all places, for altars of hungry sea-gods. the name of the headland is the anglo-saxon “steort,” which itself means simply a point or tail; as seen in the name of the redstart, or “redtail”; but to the[210] fanciful, these cruel rocks, the scene of so many fearful wrecks, seem not unlike the sacrificial altars of some blood-stained superstitious cult.
the start projects far out to sea, a dark mass of gneiss rock with quartz veins. it is in the uncomfortable shape of a razor-backed ridge, with demoniacal-looking humps, spires, and spines of iron-hard rock, ranging from prominences like the vertebræ of a crocodile’s back to sharp points in the likeness of hedge-stakes. the weird imagination of doré never conceived anything in scenery more shuddery than that of the start, and the coastguards, who declare that you have not seen england until you have come to the extremity of this difficult point, are not without some reason for their cryptic saying.
it behoves the stranger to be careful how[211] he comes to his exploration, for this, λ, is the section of the start. sloping sides of short slippery grass at an alarming angle descend dangerously to the sea from the serrated skyline, and a false step will send you rolling down to those rocks that have proved fatal to full many a shipwrecked mariner.
it is some sixty years since the lighthouse at the extremity of the point was built. the lantern of it is two hundred feet above the sea; and shows two lights, lit every evening, ten minutes before sunset: a revolving beam once every minute for vessels out in the channel, and a constant fixed gleam for shore-going boats, to warn them off the skerries bank.
but, for all these safeguards, the start remains a fatal point. when a “snorter” from the south-west, or a fog, sends vessels out of their course upon this coast, they are doomed. the lights are next to useless in foggy weather and at such time the fog-horn, bellowing in unearthly manner, is fraught with every kind of tragical suggestion.
among the many wrecks of modern times is that of the spirit of the ocean, march 23rd, 1866, when twenty-eight out of thirty were drowned, the gossamer, china tea-clipper, driven ashore between the start and prawle point in december 1868, when thirteen of a crew of thirty-one were lost; the emilie, laden with saltpetre, broken up during a fog in june 1870; and the lalla rookh, a large vessel, coming home from shanghai,[212] laden with 1,300 tons of tea and 60 tons of tobacco, wrecked in march 1873 near prawle point. shortly before the vessel struck she ran so close to the rocks that four of her crew jumped on to them as she flew by; but this was a wreck which did not touch the deepest note of tragedy, for in the end, all but one of those on board were saved. there was, however, a woeful waste of cargo, and the little beaches near by, and the long three miles of slapton sands, were for days strewn in places with the wreckage of the lalla rookh, and ridges of tea eleven feet high, and trails of tobacco of almost equal size, were piled up at high-water mark by the waves.
most dramatic was the wreck of the steamship marana, in the wild blizzard of march 9th, 1891. as night closed down upon the wild scene off the start, the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, looking forth from behind a window, upon that seething world of torn sea and whirling snowflakes, thought she saw a vessel drive through the smother of it, under the lighthouse. no help was possible, and the vessel was gone like a ghost. the tale that was afterwards told was a pitiful one.
just before the vessel struck, and was broken in two, amidship, the crew made for shore, twenty-two of them in the lifeboat and four others in a smaller. the surf in lannacombe bay was so great that they dared not attempt a landing, and made for prawle, where the lifeboat was smashed to pieces on the mag ledge. most of the unfortunate sailors were drowned, only four[213] surviving to tell the tale. a fifth, who had managed to drag himself, bruised and bleeding, from the rocks to land, lay down, exhausted, for shelter, and died out there in the snow. it was not until a fortnight later that his body was found.
it was on the same occasion that the dryad was totally wrecked at the extremity of the start at midnight, and all hands lost. one survivor was seen at daybreak, clinging to a rock, but before help could reach him he was washed away.
the neighbourhood of the start is an unsatisfactory place to be in on a day threatening rain, for it is outside roads, and the more than knee-high bracken of the coastguard paths is at such times a supersaturating growth. and the way up-along and down-along and round this way and that, past pear tree point, where there are not any pear-trees (and i dare swear there never were any) is toilsome. beyond the point is the yellow strand of lannacombe, famous for lannacombe mill and its miller, who, when french privateers were here, there, and everywhere in the old rumbustious days and visited him one night, flung his money-bag out of window and found it, safe enough, the next morning, suspended in an elder-bush. the guide-books tell how the ruins of the mill may be seen, but they shyly hide themselves from some, and the other lannacombe mill, up the combe, which may not be historic in this small sort, is at any rate picturesque enough[214] to be excused a story. if one were not afraid of getting wet through on a moist afternoon, here by the clucking water-wheel and the moss-grown walls and the clear-running mill-leat should some hours be whiled away.
but the day that had gloomed at length grew damp, and necessity compelled a double-quick to the most accessible village: that of chivelstone. on the way to it, that fine rain characteristic of devonshire came down like smoke from the hills. “’tes what us carls a miz-wet,” said a farm-labourer, trudging home contentedly beneath a thick covering of potato-sacks; and they do not[215] call it amiss, for the mist is undeniable, and there is no mistaking the wetness of it.
a traveller’s curse upon all landowners who suppress inns, and all villages without spirit sufficient to maintain one. here the “seven stars” inn of guide-books, the only inn of chivelstone, was not in existence, and this obviously was no resting-place. so to east prawle, along a featureless road, in a wet and swirling fog, the way made musical with the howls and trumpetings of the start fog-horn.
east prawle ceased its growth in the act of developing from a farm-yard into a village; so that there are cottages where there should be ricks and cow-byres, and muck where there should be houses. grass grows and liquid manure lies in the road, and stones and rocks in the pastures; and, altogether, prawle, which is a very undesirable spot of earth, is a splendid example of matter in the wrong place.
but gentility of a kind has come to prawle. you can never tell: the wind bloweth where it listeth; overmantels and preposterous photograph-frames, to say nothing of spiky articles of furniture in bamboo-ware, all projections and easily overset through the window, are to be found in the unlikeliest places. and that is how—heaven help them and us!—they spell gentility at prawle.
the point—well-known by name to diligent readers of the shipping news in the daily papers—is crowned at hurter’s top with the lloyd’s signal[216] station, where the vessels going out and home are “spoken.” it is a rude and jagged point, and its rugged character lends it an air of greater height than it possesses. it rises suddenly out of a down, sloping towards the sea, and may be compared with the appearance of a hacked and uneven quarter of a round dutch cheese. off this point h.m.s. crocodile was wrecked, and on the next westerly headland, gammon head, two spanish galleons.
all the way round from this point the great dark mass of bolt head shows finely, away across the arm of the sea running up between portlemouth and salcombe. portlemouth, although of so impressive a name, is a meagre place on the very crest of the rugged upland overlooking salcombe and the kingsbridge river, and consists of merely a farmhouse with a few cottages grouped round the ancient church of st. onolaus, otherwise, abating that latinised form, the early sixth-century british st. winwaloe. the horribly plastered exterior of the tower would dissuade many from seeking a further acquaintance with the church, by which the finely carved and painted thirteenth-century rood screen would be missed. in the churchyard, to the north-west of the tower, is a grim slate headstone, with a still more grim epitaph, on one “richard jarvis, of rickham in this parish, who departed this life the 25th day of may 1782, aged 79:—
“through poison he was cut off
and brought to death at last.
[217]
it was by his apprentice-girl,
on whom there’s sentence past.
o may all people warning take,
for she was burnèd at the stake.”
the interesting person, who thus cheated the unfortunate richard jarvis of the few years that probably, in the course of nature, would have remained to him, was one rebecca downing, who was executed at the end of the following july at ringswell, heavitree, near exeter; the old-time spot where devonshire criminals and martyrs suffered; but this was really not quite so fearful an execution as it looks, for she was first hanged and her body then cut down and burnt. the exceptional treatment of hanging and then burning the body of the criminal was owing to the crime being, over and above that of murder, the particularly heinous one, in the eye of the old laws, of petit treason, the murdered person being the master of, and person in authority over, the assassin.
coming down a breakneck path from portlemouth to the ferry, you find yourself come, not only to an out-of-the-way spot, but to a place where, for the first time, you have a foretaste of the cornish way of speech. some one aboard the ferry-boat compares this arm of the sea with fowey. “aw, my dear man,” says the ferryman, “’tes wider yur than ’tes tu foy: ees, feth.”
that is a kind of middle-marches compromise between the devon talk and that of cornwall, where, instead of say “yes, faith,” they say, “iss, fay.”
