Mousehole is a village of fishermen and boatmen, and was the residence
of Dolly Pentreath, the last person in Cornwall who spoke the Cornish
language, as also of some of the unfortunate sailors who joined Captain
Allan Gardner in 1850 in his ill-fated missionary expedition to South
America. All the members of the mission died of starvation in Tierra del
Fuego.
[Illustration: St Michael's Mount]
Newlyn has become noted as a place of residence of a school of artists.
It is on the wide and beautiful Mounts Bay over against St Michael's
Mount.
[Illustration: Kynance Cove and the Lizard]
Penzance ("the Holy Head") has become a great resort of residents for
the winter, owing to the mildness of the climate. Marazion or Market Jew
does not derive its name from "the Bitter Waters of Zion" as has been
absurdly asserted; Marazion has the same significance as Market Jeu
(i.e. Jeudi), Thursday Market. Here is a submerged forest. St Michael's
Mount is a rock that rises out of the sands and can be reached, when the
tide falls, by a causeway. It is incomparably inferior both in elevation
and in the dignity of the buildings that crown it to the Mont St Michel
in Normandy, but is nevertheless a picturesque adjunct to the scene.
Some writers suppose that it is the Ictis to which the natives conveyed
the tin and trafficked with the Phoenicians, but it is totally unsuited
by nature to serve as a market-site, and there is no certain evidence
that the Phoenicians ever came to Cornwall. About Marazion daffodils,
narcissus, and violets are cultivated largely for the London market. At
Perran Uthnoe the cliffs again appear, and we reach Prussia Cove, once
the haunt of smugglers. Inland, Godolphin and Tregonning's granite hills
are conspicuous, and near the coast is Pergersick Castle, a picturesque
ruin of which strange legends are told. Porthleven is a small fishing
village, where the people live on the annual arrival of the pilchards.
Loe Pool is a beautiful sheet of water cut off from the sea by a bar of
sand. It was when standing on this bar, and watching the wreck of a
vessel close in shore when those on the land were unable to communicate
with it, that Henry Trengrouse conceived the idea of a rocket apparatus,
to be not only employed on land, but also to be carried by every ship.
He, of course, met with opposition from the Board of Trade and the
Government, and he spent his life and his fortune in experiments, and in
endeavours to push his apparatus.
[Illustration: Mullion Cove]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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