Scilly Islands

“ Let us visit the islands on an April day, and see for ourselves [Pg 13] this harvest of gold and silver. For once we will be day-trippers in fancy though we would scorn to be in fact.
Here in Scilly we find land and sea flooded with spring sunshine, while on the “adjacent island” which we have just left every one is lamenting the cold and the rain. The flower-harvest is nearly over, yet still there are wide fields of dazzling white and yellow, and many hundreds of boxes will yet leave the quay for the mainland. ”

“ The Scilly Isles, just off the Land's End, are very numerous, but only five are inhabited; some are mere rocks in the sea, and, counting ihose, they are said to be a hundred and fifty. The largest is St. Mary's, and the dwellers on it are apt to look with contempt on the inhabitants of the other islands (the Off Islands) . The word Scilly is sometimes derived from Sulleh, rocks dedicated to the sun, and sometimes from Sillyas, a conger. ”

“ Whether or not these stories have a foundation of truth, no one can say; but there is certainly a general resemblance in character and formation between Scilly and the Land’s End.
The whole of the islands are composed of granite, which is seen cropping up everywhere through the soil. Huge blocks and boulders of it lie scattered all along the coast, many of them of weird and fantastic shapes. The strangest have been given special names, more or less appropriate. On the peninsula of Peninnis, St. Mary’s Island, there is the “Tooth,” a slender conical rock 30 feet high ”

“ The Scilly Islands are not less remarkable for rock-scenery than the mainland, and weirdly imitative piles of granite abound. There is a rock, or rather a heap of rocks, on Peninis Head, called the "Pulpit Rock," which at evening looks less like a pulpit than a naval gun; and elsewhere are the "Punch Bowl," on St. Mary's, the "Nag's Head," on St. Agnes, and many others. Not least among these is the Logan Rock, on Peninis Head, which weighs over three hundred tons, and "logs" in a most satisfactory manner, when once started. ”

“ It sways like a tree in the wind during one of the terrific storms which sometimes beat upon it.
Altogether there are seven sea-lights to be seen [Pg 168] gleaming out round the islands after night has fallen. There is this of the Bishop, away among the western rocks; the new light on Peninnis; the ruby glow from Round Island; the light-ship moored by the Seven Stones; the “Wolf” Lighthouse, half-way between Scilly and the mainland; and the lights of Longships and Pendeen, off the Cornish coast. ”

“ Martin’s seems to be less visited than the other islands. It certainly is not less attractive, and those who go there soon find that it has a charm of its own. Its inhabitants are very proud of their island, and very willing to give a welcome to strangers.
There is at least one man on St. Martin’s who has never been to the mainland, and to whom motor-cars and trains would be a great novelty. For motor-cars are never seen in Scilly except in the form of wreck-salvage! ”

“ Averages produce an impression of uniformity, whereas they conceal the most obstreperous changes—and a small difference, such as you observe between the temperature of the Scilly islands, and these inclement and impossible districts of Canada or Kamtchatka, means that though all are on the same latitude, they are as diversely adapted for modern life as the tropics and the north pole. Why are the Scilly islands adapted for tulips and spring peas, when Manitoba yet sleeps in snow? ”

“ There are about four dozen bunches to a box, and 240 boxes to a ton. Often the packing is continued all night and into the early hours of the morning. Steam-launches bring laden boats in from the out-islands by nine o'clock in the morning, and an hour later there are perhaps fifty tons of flowers aboard the steamer.
Such are now the chief activities of the Scilly Isles, and they, with fishing and piloting, make up the entire life of the archipelago. Formerly it was new potatoes, and before that a little kelp-burning, and before that a good deal of smuggling kept the islanders alive. ”

“ I shall pass over the history of the tin trade of the Phœnicians, the Greeks, the Gauls and the Romans, respecting which only scanty and doubtful information is to be found in the works of the ancients, but in those of the moderns a greater number of hypotheses. The situation even of the Cassiterides islands cannot with certainty be determined, though it is supposed in general, and not without probability, that they were the Scilly islands, which lie at the distance of about thirty miles from the most western part of the English coast ”

“ Nor do the islands lack variety. There are downs covered with the golden glory of the gorse, with the pink of the sea-thrift, with the purple of the heather; there are hills clothed with bracken breast-high in summer, and changing from green-gold to red-gold as the year advances; there are barren rocks on which the sea-birds love to gather; there are lovely beaches of white sand, strewn with many-coloured shells and seaweed; there are clusters of palm-trees growing with Oriental luxuriance, next to fields and pastures where the sheep and cattle feed ”

“ This island is about three miles long and twelve from the coast of Devonshire, consisting mainly of granite with a little of the Devonian formation, and the presence here of peculiar insects can only be due to isolation with special conditions, and immunity from enemies or competing forms. When we consider the similar islands off the coast of Scotland and Ireland, with the Isle of Man and the Scilly Islands, none of which have been yet thoroughly explored for beetles, it is probable that many similar examples of peculiar isolated forms remain to be discovered. ”

“ Formerly Scilly was a favourite breeding-place for birds, but now they no longer employ it for this purpose, or do so to a very minor degree.
There are traces of streaming for tin in some of the isles, but no mineral veins are now known to run through the Scilly granite. Ferns abound, but [Pg 337] the islands are a little disappointing to the botanist, though to a florist they are a paradise.
To give a true idea of Scilly I must quote from Armorel, for such as have not the book:—​
“The visitor who comes by one boat and goes away by the next thinks he has seen this archipelago. ”

“ The desire for local bits of news must have been very much fostered in the islands by the difficulty there used to be in obtaining any from the outside world. It is said that Queen Elizabeth had ascended the throne for several months before the news of the death of Queen Mary arrived in Scilly! Nowadays the telegraph keeps them well in touch with everything that is going on, and acquaints them with the state of the markets for their produce. ”

“ Geologically, we are still on the mainland when we reach the isles of Scilly; they belong to the axis of the Cornish peninsula, and are in what may still be called, comparatively, the narrow seas. The hundred-fathom line lies far beyond them; these waters, though thoroughly oceanic in character, are not oceanic in depth. We may regard the islands as the last upward thrust of the granitic backbone that runs, at a diminishing gradient, from Dartmoor to Land's End, while the submarine plateau follows a similar gradient. ”

“ The inhabitants succeeded in escaping with their property to an island near the shore, where they founded New Tyre, which soon surpassed, both in commerce and shipping, the city they had abandoned. The Phœnicians seem now to have advanced with their system of colonization farther to the south upon the coast of Africa, and farther to the north upon the coast of Spain. They discovered the Cassiterides—now the Scilly Islands—upon the coast of Cornwall, and retained the monopoly of the trade in the tin which they found there. ”

“ Five of the islands are inhabited; the rest may be generally described as masses of rock, wonderfully varied in shape and size. Inland, in the larger islands, the earth, where it is not planted or sown, is covered with heather and with the most beautiful ferns. Potatoes used to be the main product of Scilly; but the disease has appeared lately in the island crops, and the potatoes have suffered so severely that when we filled our sack for the return voyage, we were obliged to allow for two-thirds of our supply proving unfit for use. ”

“ THE FLOWER INDUSTRY IT is barely thirty years since first the sweet flower-fields began to cover the islands; but it is possibly nearly a thousand years since the original bulbs were introduced.
There are several reasons why it is thought likely that Scilly owes her semi-wild narcissus to the Benedictine monks, who brought some with them, so it is supposed, from the South of France, and planted them on this alien soil to which they have taken so kindly. ”

“ The true Gulf Stream does not come within a thousand miles of Britain. There is, however, a surface-current of warm water carried north-eastward from hot latitudes, and this materially affects not only Scilly, but the entire western coast. Although so mild, the climate is dry and bracing; there are no unwholesome damps. Longevity is the rule on the islands, and the single doctor has little to do beyond assisting sturdy young Scillonians on their entrance into the world. ”

“ It is easy to understand why strangers might not be imported; but since Scilly was supposed to be over-populated at that time, why were the islanders not allowed to leave? This was indeed turning the islands into a prison, and giving a real ground for Heath’s quaint supposition:—
“Here is no prison,” he writes, “for the confinement of offenders, which shows that the people live upright enough not to require any, or that the place is a Confinement of itself.”
Smuggling was a very popular employment. ”

“ He may then come to believe that when saints of old legend touched on Islands of the Blest, situate somewhere westward of Europe, they may really have simply [Pg 210] drifted on Scilly, and have found its loveliness like that of the "island-valley of Avilion." Some small concession must be made to actuality. Large portions of the isles are treeless down, salt-marshes, sand-hills; we must not look for the wondrous native vegetation of an English country-side. Sub-tropic plants cannot wholly compensate for such a lack. But if trees are scarce, plants like the fuchsia grow to tree-like luxuriance ”

“ It is not yet finished. The central figure is myself. You see, it is as yet only sketched in. I am going to sit for him, but he has caught a good likeness, has he not? It will be a lovely picture when it is completed, and I am going to give him permission to flatter me as much as ever he pleases. The scene is among the outer rocks of Scilly. We will go there some day and sail about the Western Islands, and I will show you Camber Rock and the Channel, and Castle Bryher and Menovawr and Maiden Bower, and all the lovely places where I lived till I was sixteen years of age. ”

“ In the clear water below these crags fish are so plentiful that whoever takes the trouble to cast is likely to reap a rich reward.
But he who would fall in love with the Scillies before seeing them had better read the first half of Besant's Armorel of Lyonesse. The novelist was at his best when he wrote these pages. There is also good literary use of the islands in Mr. Mason's Watchers. It is possible that the first arrival will disappoint; it should not be expected that Scilly can compare with the magnificent coast scenery of the mainland, or with the verdant luxuriance of richer soils. ”

“ For then the men, women, and children would gather and build the kilns—pits scooped in the sand, measuring about seven feet across and three feet deep in the centre. While the men finished lining the sides of the kiln with stones, the women and girls would leap into it with armfuls of furze, which they lighted, and so, strewing the dried ore-weed upon it, built little by little into a blazing pile. The great sea-lights which ring the islands now make a brave show and one which the visitor carries away as the most enduring, most characteristic recollection of his sojourn ”

“ Under it the shipbuilding grew into an important industry, and only declined with the introduction of steam.
In those days the services of pilots were still much in request. The “Road” was often full of merchantmen, who had put in for repairs or supplies, or to wait for orders; and since every harbour in Scilly has its reef of rocks at the entrance, and around the islands the sea hides many a sunken ledge, a pilot was always signalled for at the earliest opportunity. ”

“ For more than twenty years it has had a claim to be reckoned as one of the inhabited islands, since two men are always living on its rocky summit. They are the keepers of the lighthouse, which flashes forth its ruby light as soon as darkness begins to fall.
Scarcely a blade of grass will grow on this barren rock; and it is said that the few rabbits which exist there have learnt to gnaw bones like a dog, on account of the scarcity of other food. ”

“ In the islands of Scilly it was customary of late years at this season for "the young people to exercise a sort of gallantry called goose dancing, when the maidens are dressed up for young men, and the young men for maidens; thus disguised they visit their neighbours in companies, where they dance, and make jokes upon what has happened in the island; when every one is humorously told their own without offence being taken; by this sort of sport, according to yearly custom and toleration, there is a spirit of wit and drollery kept up among the people. ”