  It would, perhaps, be invidious to say that Cornwall has produced men of more brilliant and varied achievements than any other county in England, but she can certainly show a very notable roll of honour. As might be expected from her geographical position, aided by good harbours, she has produced some great seamen who have done gallant service for England. At the head of these must come Sir Richard Grenville, hero of the Revenge, whose action off the Azores in 1591 has rendered him one of England's immortals. Trapped by the huge Spanish fleet off Flores, Sir Richard had many of his crew sick on shore, but declined to leave till they had been brought on board. The Revenge engaged fifteen large Spanish men-of-war and stood at bay from three in the afternoon all through the night till the following morning, when the last barrel of powder was spent. Ralegh told of it, as did Gervase Markham in 1595, and Tennyson nearly 300 years later in the stirring lines:— "Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came, Captain Bligh Captain Bligh Cornwall being a land of mines has developed machinery and furthered invention in this direction. The most notable of the inventors she has produced is Richard Trevithick, who first made the high-pressure engine, and is still more remarkable as the early pioneer of motor traffic, putting his road locomotive on the Camborne highway on Christmas Day, 1801, and obtaining a speed with it of 12 miles per hour. In 1812 he laid before the Navy Board his invention for a screw propeller for ships, only to meet with a refusal. Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, born in 1793, also ran steam-motors on the roads until they were forbidden by Act of Parliament, and the work of a lifetime and his fortune of £30,000 vanished into thin air. The oxy-hydrogen blowpipe and the steam-jet Sir Humphry Davy Sir Humphry Davy More than one distinguished traveller finds place among Cornish worthies. Richard Lander, the son of a Truro innkeeper (1805-34), stands at the head of them. He went with Clapperton to Sokoto and on his death took up his work, tracing the mouth of the Niger on a second expedition, and dying on a third at Fernando Po. Peter Mundy, born about 1596 at "Penrin, a pretty towne in Corne Wall," as he describes it, was one of the most remarkable travellers that the West of England has produced, whether in virtue of his long trading voyages to the Far East, or of his continental wanderings, of which he kept a not less careful record. James Silk Buckingham, who died in 1855, wrote eighteen books of travel, but was mainly noteworthy for his endeavours to do away with the monopoly of the East India Company. Among statesmen must be noticed Sir John Eliot, born at Port Eliot in 1592, and at one time friend of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, with whom he later broke, and taking up a strong line in the Parliament of 1628 against arbitrary taxation helped to force the Petition of Right from Charles. He was ultimately committed to the Tower, where he died three years later in 1632. To give an adequate sketch of the life of Sidney Godolphin would be to give the history of the times of Charles II, James II, William of Orange and Anne, with each and all of whom he was closely implicated. An extraordinarily able financier, his character Samuel Drew, the "Cornish Metaphysician," who was born at St Austell, had been a smuggler and a shoemaker in his earlier days, but developed into a Wesleyan preacher and became the author of an essay on the Immortality of the Soul. Of more normal mould was Humphrey Prideaux, born at Padstow in 1648, who wrote a Life of Mahomet, and The Old and New Testament Connected, which reached its 27th edition only a few years ago. He became Dean of Norwich and died in 1724. Cornwall has produced several local antiquaries, as the Rev. Richard Polwhele, who died in 1838; the Rev. William Borlase, d. 1772; William Hals, the historian of the Duchy; and William Sandys, who died in 1874. She has had but few true poets, but the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, though not actually born in Cornwall, spent all his life there and may certainly come under this heading. He became Vicar of Morwenstow in 1834, and remained there till his death in 1875, having during this time transformed his parishioners from a set of lawless wreckers to a decent community. His poems were almost all connected with Cornish subjects, and one of the best known of them is that on Bishop John Opie John Opie "A wondrous Cornishman, who is carrying all before him" is Sir Joshua Reynolds' description of John Opie the painter, who was born the son of a poor carpenter near Truro in 1761, became an R.A. and portrait-painter of great note, and died in 1807. His second wife was Amelia Opie the novelist, daughter of the Norwich physician, Dr Alderson. Henry Bone, the enamellist, is also of sufficient distinction to deserve mention here. Of the astronomers of modern times few have attained the eminence of John Couch Adams, the discoverer of the planet Neptune, who was born at Laneast in 1819. As a shepherd boy he loved to lie on his back and watch the stars, and he at once devoted himself to the study of astronomy when he was sent to school at Saltash. He became Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1843, and soon after taking his degree, being struck with irregularities in the motion of Uranus, he made a series of calculations and observations which resulted in the discovery of the new planet, the French astronomer Leverrier having simultaneously recorded its existence. A distinguished geologist and one of the pioneers of scientific cave exploration was William Pengelly, whose great work was the thorough examination of Kent's Cavern near Torquay, a labour which lasted from 1865 to 1880. Last, but by no means least worthy of mention in our list, must come Davies Gilbert, a great discerner of rising genius, to which he was ever ready to lend help and encouragement. The patron of Davy, Trevithick, Horn-*blower, and Goldsworthy Gurney, he was himself a man of remarkable and varied abilities, scientist, mathematician, and antiquary, and President of the Royal Society. He died in 1839. |
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