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The Maritime History of Cornwall

University of Exeter Press

Introduction

Helen Doe, Alston Kennerley, Philip Payton

Writing in 1963, Richard Pearce in his The Ports and Harbours of Cornwall observed what he termed the 'fundamental significance' of Cornwall in the maritime history of the British Isles. 'Cornwall was the most typical and the most "maritime" of all our counties', he asserted, 'the one whose people were the most intimately associated with the sea', and whose 'known contribution to the nation's rich maritime life' had been 'more varied than that of any other'. This, as Richard Pearce recognised, was (even if somewhat overstated) a powerful argument for a maritime history of Cornwall that in 1963 had yet to be written, and would not be for another half century. But it was also, as he no doubt intended, a passionate insistence that, to appreciate fully the historical experience of Cornwall and the Cornish, one had first to understand its all-pervasive maritime dimension.

Moreover, although he did not say so, an understanding of that maritime history would also underpin a broader appreciation of Cornwall's place in the wider Atlantic, and ultimately global, world to which it belonged and whose histories it had helped to shape. As A.C. Todd argued four years later, in 1967, 'Cornwall opens a window on the world in a way that no other county' in Britain could: 'Geographically it points to the New World'. For voyagers from across the Atlantic, he said, Cornwall's 'off-shore rocks and lighthouses are the first glimpses' of Britain, while for those travellers departing these shores Cornwall is 'the land's end and the ocean's beginning'. More recently, Barry Cunliffe, who has charted the creation in early times of 'an Atlantic identity' (which included Cornwall), has added that: 'To stand on a sea-washed promontory looking westwards at sunset over the Atlantic is to share a timeless human experience.' As he has explained, tracing that dramatic interface between land and ocean, 'four great bastions stand out against the sea' – Cornwall, Brittany, south-west Wales and south-west Ireland – 'each with its most westerly extremities creating the headlands familiar to sailors for hundreds of generations – Pointe du Raz and Ile d'Ouessant in Brittany, Land's End in Cornwall, St David's Head in Wales, and the many daunting crags of Co. Cork and Co. Kerry'. In ancient and medieval times, when the Mediterranean was the fulcrum of European civilisation, the Atlantic represented the edge of the known world, albeit one whose limits were ever probed and extended. By the early modern period, however, the Mediterranean had been eclipsed, and the Atlantic was now the great highway through which the expansion of European power and influence would achieve global reach. As Cunliffe has put it: the 'Atlantic, once the end of the world, was now the beginning'.

The maritime environment

Cornwall, so integral to that burgeoning Atlantic world described by Cunliffe and hinted at by Todd, and with its sentimental if not yet clearly defined 'fundamental' place in popular imaginings of Britain's maritime heritage, is quintessentially a maritime region. Its maritime identity is deeply rooted in its history – and prehistory – but these in turn have been shaped by the geographical, geological and environmental milieu in which Cornwall exists. Surrounded on three sides by sea and on the fourth almost cut off by the River Tamar, Cornwall is nearly an island. Moreover, it is 'geologically and scenically unique' in Britain, according to geographer R.M. Barton, a structural inheritance that accounts, among other things, for the 'spectacular coastline' that E.B. Selwood, E.M. Durrance and C.M. Bristow described in their The Geology of Cornwall in 1998.

The oldest Cornish rocks are on the geologically complex Lizard peninsula, but most of Cornwall consists of strongly deformed sediments which were intruded by granites in the late Carboniferous or early Permian periods, about 300 million years ago. Earlier, in the main Carboniferous and Devonian periods, most of Cornwall was submerged beneath the sea. Then, in a complex series of geological events, sedimentary material was laid down on the seabed. At the end of the Carboniferous period two landmasses collided spectacularly, forcing this material up into a great mountain range. Some of the seabed caught in the early phases of this collision became the Lizard peninsula. Elsewhere, huge quantities of debris resulting from the collision slipped into what is now part of the southern Cornish coast, in the Roseland peninsula and along the southern side of the Helford River towards Mullion. Ten million years later came the granitic intrusion. A huge mass of molten granite welled up in a line from what is now the Isles of Scilly to Dartmoor. Subsequently erosion laid bare the granite (the Cornubian batholith, as it is called by geologists), forming the granite backbone of Cornwall that we recognise today. In the far west the coastline is itself granitic – with sheer granite cliffs meeting the full force of the Atlantic ocean – and in much of the rest of Cornwall, if we may generalise, the cliffs are composed of metamorphic slate, sedimentary material heated and hardened by the granitic intrusion. Additionally, along the southern coast, are the sunken tidal estuaries or 'rias', created by the twin effects of glacial incision of river valleys during the Pleistocene period and later rises in sea level.

Although Cornwall faces the fury of south-westerly gales from the Atlantic, especially during winter, Cornish weather in geologically modern times has been generally clement, especially compared with other parts of Britain, with temperatures correspondingly higher (and with less variation towards extremes) than elsewhere. This mild, equable climate owes its existence in part to the Gulf Stream, which reaches Cornwall before other localities and contributes to the fact that the western coastal areas of Britain are on average warmer than the eastern. Originating in the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf Stream is a warm and extremely powerful ocean current that exits via the Strait of Florida and makes its way swiftly along the eastern seaboard of North America to Newfoundland, before turning eastwards across the Atlantic. For Cornwall, one of the several beneficial effects of the Gulf Stream has been the encouragement of various species of fish into Cornish waters, not least the ubiquitous pilchard, which was to play a major role in the Cornish maritime economy for several centuries.

The western extremity of Cornwall lies midway between Brittany and Ireland in a wide expanse of sea often referred to as the 'Western Approaches' or 'Celtic Sea'. It is an area exposed to the distant fetch – measured in thousands of miles – of wind, waves and oceanic circulation, which has a major impact on the Cornish peninsula. Roughly congruent with these limits lies the edge of the continental shelf, at a depth of about 100 fathoms (200 metres). It is situated approximately 200 nautical miles from Cornwall and separates the relatively shallow, ecologically rich region from the deep ocean. Indeed, under international agreement that confers national ownership of coastal waters lying within 200 nautical miles of a country's mainland, Britain claims a wedge-shaped sea area in the Western Approaches largely defined by the shape of Cornwall.

The seabed around Cornwall is generally less variable and less rugged than the formations found on adjacent land. The slope from the Cornish coast to the north is more gradual compared with the slope to the south, where the depth contours are closer together. Depth is also a factor in determining where different forms of marine life are to be found. Varying temperature layers exist, for example, in which cold-water creatures are found below warm-water species. Cornwall also marks something of a divide between marine life adapted to colder water to the north and that adapted to warmer water to the south. Thus pilchard cellars are found mainly on the south coast of Cornwall. It has long been observed that pilchards and other species appear and disappear in irregular cycles separate from annual cycles. Recent research has shown that a variation of as little as half a degree in seawater temperature affects the presence (or not) of the zooplankton on which these fish feed.

The Western Approaches benefit from the oceanic circulation pattern called the north Atlantic drift, whose Gulf Stream brings warm-water species which find shelter in the varied form of Cornwall's coastline, with its cliffs, sandy beaches and estuaries. Of course, Cornwall divides these waters and the species they carry, some passing to the north into the Bristol Channel and Irish Sea and others to the south into the English Channel. In both areas the seabed gradually shelves and becomes narrower, the rate of change over distance producing differing effects in the tidal movements of the waters between north and south. These vary principally with the lunar cycle in terms of tidal rise, fall and range. Indeed, tidal stream direction and rates are the most regular and predictable patterns affecting maritime activity, notably fisheries and the movement of shipping, influencing vessel design, harbour usage and port technology. For example, at Padstow the spring rise of tide is about 20 feet (7 metres) and the neap rise 15 feet (5 metres), while at Fowey it is 15 feet (5 metres) and 12 feet (4 metres). Tidal streams average about a knot along the Cornish coast, rising to two knots off headlands such as the Lizard and more for waters among the Scilly Isles.

Less predictable are the effects of non-tidal currents – arising from oceanic circulation, weather, wind and waves – which can be extreme. Coming up from the Bay of Biscay, for example, is a local variable current that runs northward across the Western Approaches. Before the development of electronic navigation systems many ships, ignorant of their positions owing to days of overcast skies and driven by the Biscay current, were wrecked on the Scilly Isles or the coasts of Cornwall. Similarly hazardous are oceanic waves, which, having travelled long distances, suddenly become more conspicuous and dangerous when constrained by shoaling and narrowing waters. Wind-driven waves are much more local, and follow the wind direction. However, they are often amplified by the seabed, making them a danger to coastal locations and structures.

Cornish maritime activity, lying in the path of temperate zone cyclonic depressions, and with prevailing winds coming from westwards, has always been conducted within a familiar if variable environmental context. Meteorological and oceanographic factors may well have been understood in the oral tradition from ancient times, enabling early mariners to cope with this environment. Yet the maritime environment has always impinged upon the safe operation of shipping of all types, large and small. Eventually, local pilotage knowledge would no longer be adequate to deal with the rapidly increasing number of ship movements, requiring numerous advances in navigational aids. In early times, however, such aids were few and navigation of the waters around Cornwall remained an especially demanding and potentially dangerous task.

Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age

Cornwall's peninsular location at the south-western tip of Britain projects it into the Western Approaches and the Celtic Sea in a manner that distinguishes it from other parts of maritime Britain. To the immediate west, of course, is the Atlantic, that window to a wider world, and to the south are the Channel and the nearby lands of Iberia, Brittany and northern France. To the north is Wales and, to the north-west, Ireland. In historic times this geographical location deeply influenced Cornwall's fortunes: as hub of an Atlantic maritime trading and cultural zone reaching out to its near neighbours (and ultimately far beyond), but also, paradoxically, as a peripheral appendage of an emerging English (later British) state with its political centre located in London and the metropolitan south-east. At times Cornwall has been the point of first defence against would-be invaders of the realm; at others it has been the place of first departure for economic or military adventure abroad. Both pivotal and peripheral, Cornwall's location in British history has so often appeared an uneasy, even contradictory balance between these two imperatives - strategic importance in trade and warfare, and distance (even independence) from the metropolis.

As Caradoc Peters explains in his contribution, the strategic maritime location of Cornwall was already important in prehistoric times. By the end of the early Mesolithic period (c. 8000 BC), the new era of 'hunter-gatherers', Britain had been cut off from continental Europe by rising seas, and it is here that we detect the origins of maritime Cornwall. Features that are familiar today, such as the sunken tidal estuaries and creek systems of the Fal and Helford, had formed as the ice-cap melted. Encroaching sand dunes (towans) advanced inland, a process still observable in medieval times when sites such as Gwithian and St Enodoc were threatened or engulfed. Likewise, inundations from the sea continued until perhaps as late as the eleventh century: the Isles of Scilly had been essentially a unitary block until about that time, when it fragmented into the archipelago we recognise today. The stumps and roots of submerged forests in places such as Mount's Bay, revealed when winter storms washed away the covering sand, were also enduring evidence of inundation. Such traces perpetuated folk memory of the rising seas, and tales of a 'lost' land of Lyonnesse somewhere off the western coast of Cornwall may be of remarkably early provenance.

Similarly, a prehistoric belief in river-spirits and sea-gods may also be detected in the enduring themes of Cornish folklore. In 1865 the antiquarian Robert Hunt recorded an eerie tale which told of a recurring incident on Porthtowan beach. A lonely voice was heard calling from the sea in the dead of night: 'The hour is come, but not the man'. Then, it was said, a figure shrouded all in black appeared on the cliff above, pausing briefly before rushing down the slope, across the sands and into the sea. The point of the story was straightforward: the sea-god, which sustains life through the bounty of the sea, demands perpetual appeasement, and it is the lot of maritime communities to offer that sacrifice – fishermen lost at sea, for example, or mariners drowned in shipwrecks. Mermaid stories, such as that of Zennor, where unwary locals are enticed beneath the waves by seductive sirens, may also betray the lasting influence of such prehistoric thought.

Archaeological evidence of settlement in the Mesolithic period includes the important Gwithian site, with its advantageous estuarine situation, and other north-coast locations such as Trevose Head and Bude where 'microliths' – small stone tools – have been uncovered. By the Neolithic period the domestication of animals was increasing and people had learned how to cultivate land and harvest crops: hunter-gatherers had become farmers. This growing sophistication was reflected in expanding trade, including a maritime dimension that may well have included contact with Brittany and Wales and other parts of littoral Britain. In the Late Neolithic era (c. 2700 BC) the 'Beaker Culture' arrived from continental Europe, bringing with it new artefacts (including the distinctive pottery after which it was named) and new cultural practices. This was the eve of the Bronze Age, a period that saw the all-important introduction of metalworking. It was not until c. 1400 BC that bronze – an alloy of tin and lead with copper – was in everyday use for weapons and tools but before that it was a precious commodity used for display and prestige by local elites. Earlier still, around 2000 BC, prestige items were more likely to have been made of plain copper or gold. Gold lunulae (crescendic collars), such as those discovered at Harlyn and Gwithian on the north coast, were 'Irish' in style but made of Cornish gold, suggestive of an 'Atlantic' cultural and trading zone that was by now in the making.

Mineral-rich Cornwall had abundant deposits of tin, copper and lead – and even some gold – key generators of wealth in this period. Frustratingly, as Caradoc Peters notes, only limited evidence has been uncovered thus far for extensive mineral extraction in prehistoric Cornwall. Nonetheless, archaeologists point to Cornwall (and neighbouring Dartmoor) as the probable source for tin in British bronze artefacts of the period, while tin of probable Cornish provenance has been found in objects in places as far distant as the Netherlands and Bavaria. By the Late Bronze Age Cornwall had become the hub of maritime trading routes that stretched to Iberia and the Mediterranean, and from Ireland to south-east Britain and continental Europe. It was within this complex set of contacts that two new cultural innovations made their way to Cornwall: the use of iron in metalworking, and the speaking of a 'Celtic' language.

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Excerpted from The Maritime History of Cornwall by Philip Payton, Alston Kennerly, Helen Doe. Copyright © 2014 University of Exeter Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Exeter Press.
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