There is a tradition that a ship of the Armada was wrecked off the coast of St. Agnes (at how many points of the British coast is there such a tradition!), and it is said that some of the Spaniards who escaped with their lives made that little island their home. According to the old chronicler Leland, St. Agnes was entirely depopulated somewhere about the beginning of the sixteenth century, the five families who lived there being all drowned on their way back from a marriage feast at St. Mary’s; so it is possible that if the Spaniards landed here they found a free field. The present inhabitants of St. Agnes are a fine race, but quite distinct in character from the rest of the islanders; and I have heard it said that when they get excited or angry “you can see the old Moor coming out as plainly as anything.” St. Martin’s men are tall and fair and handsome, and seem to show signs of Scandinavian descent. That a purer English is spoken on the islands than on the mainland has been explained by the fact that a Bedfordshire company of soldiers was left behind in garrison here during the Commonwealth, and in time was completely forgotten. The soldiers intermarried with the island women when they had given up all idea of being recalled. I do not think that any one who has ever heard the true Bedfordshire twang could credit this story as an explanation! But there is little doubt that fresh blood has been introduced into the islands by such intermarriages. Duke Cosmo III. of Tuscany was driven by contrary winds to put into St. Mary’s Harbour in 1669, and he reports that “corn of late began to be scarce, in consequence of the increase of the population produced by marriages of the soldiers of the garrison with the islanders, but this has been remedied for some years past by forbidding them to marry!” The isolation of the islanders led in past times to intermarriage between the same families again and again, but the results do not appear to have been as unfortunate as might have been expected. There is this result, on the off-islands especially, that the same surname is repeated over and over again, so that nicknames have to be resorted to, to distinguish one man from another. On St. Agnes every man is a Hicks, unless he is a Legge. On Tresco, Bryher, and St. Martin’s, Jenkins, Pender, Ashford, and Ellis are the typical names. It happened once on St. Agnes at the signing of the parish books that the names of the four signatories (the churchwarden, the two overseers, and the auditor from London) were all the same--Hicks! There are traces of prehistoric man in nearly all the islands--kitchen-middens, with heaps of limpet-shells and other refuse, and great numbers of sepulchral barrows of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages.