De Tourville’s fleet itself, before detaching vessels for the attack upon and destruction of Teignmouth, lay here in full sight of the terrified inhabitants, who fled inland in fear of capture and confinement in French prisons or the galleys. In later years the bay and neighbourhood, with its coves and creeks, provided just the kind of retirement and shelter beloved of the smugglers, whose daring exploits made the Devon and Cornish coasts famous at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. It was in Torbay, too, that the _Bellerophon_, commanded by Captain Maitland, with the captive Napoleon aboard, anchored in August of 1815 to permit the prisoner’s transfer to the _Northumberland_, commanded by Admiral Sir George Cockburn. It will, therefore, be seen that the bay has played its part in the drama of history, even though it has missed its destiny as the centre or base of extensive commerce, or naval activity and life. Brixham is but a short half hour’s sail in a good breeze from Torquay. It is a picturesque (if somewhat “fishy”) little town with the houses set West Country-wise, in the sides of a chine, and the principal street, known as Fore Street, descending steeply to the harbour itself. Like Torquay, Brixham was originally an agricultural village, which, as time went on, gradually crept down to the water’s edge, until its foundations were almost set in the sea, the result being that its inhabitants in time abandoned the tilling of the soil for the harvest of the sea. Nowadays these number nearly nine thousand, most of whom are fisherfolk, or in some way connected with the fishing industry. The Brixham trawling fleet has been painted so often, that it must be perfectly familiar to most readers. Of its picturesque charm for both brush and camera, there can be little question. In the little harbour, which unfortunately for yachting folk is dry at low water, there is no room for the upwards of two hundred and fifty trawlers which, with their graceful lines and red-brown sails, form such paintable groups at their moorings in the outer harbour, just off the Victoria Breakwater, where they are obliged to lie. Brixham was anciently a manor in the possession of the Pomeroys of Berry Pomeroy, but on its sale at the end of the seventeenth century was split up into a number of small lots, not a few of which were acquired by the more wealthy farmers, merchants, and fisherfolk. These portions were, as time went on, subdivided and split up again either by sale or other means, till at the present time the ancient manor is held by some two hundred persons, all of whom are known as Quay Lords or Quay Ladies, according to their sex.