Distances in and around Plymouth are most remarkably deceptive, and the local geography is full of surprises. The famous Plymouth Sound is from two to four miles wide, but the clear air and the heights on either side give an impression of smaller scale. As you round the hilly coast from Wembury and come within the Sound, you enter upon a panoramic scene, where the great Breakwater, itself nearly a mile and a half long, with a sea-passage on the hither side of a mile’s breadth, rests upon the blue waters like some pigmy undertaking, and the ironclads seem quite trivial. The ordinary vision is altogether at fault at Plymouth, and requires careful adjustment to an unfamiliar scale of things; and in the meanwhile the stranger, walking round the coast, discovers that in tramping these last miles the way is quite twice as long as it seems. Plymouth town lies distinctly in sight, but you seem for a long while never to approach any nearer, and meanwhile you tramp up coastguard paths and down, and round into coves and still more round headlands, gradually coming within the area of War Department activities; where old forts and middle-aged forts, and forts still in the making astonish the rabbits. The outstanding features of garrison towns are grittiness, barrenness, and glare, served up in squalor; and military strength is generally made to look silly by clothes-lines fluttering signals of washing day over the embrasures and the dry moats. Approaching Plymouth therefore by Bovisand and Staddon Forts, the heat and the glare make the very brains ferment in your head, the grit scarifies your feet, and the sordid garrison details, and then the slumminess of Turnchapel sear your very soul. But in between, there are some jewelled nooks: the green valley and woods of Bovisand and little unexpected baylets, with tiny sands that you look down upon suddenly, shamefacedly surprising young ladies bathing in a costume of little more than nothing, supplemented thinly by their native modesty, and piquantly surmounted with picture-hats. Convention would require them to be embarrassed, but the startled pedestrian’s blushes and the nymphs’ comparative unconcern outrange the expected feelings of the situation.

At Turnchapel the ferry steamer takes the wearied exerciser upon Shanks’s Mare across the Catwater to Phoenix Wharf and the old original Plymouth, adjoining the Barbican and Sutton Pool.

Every one knows the stream that comes down from Dartmoor and falls into the Laira creek as the Plym, but its original name was the Cad, and Plymouth was originally “Sutton”: still known as “Sutton-on-Plym.” It is found under this name in Domesday Book. The name Catwater, or Cattewater, as it is also spelled, may be a survival of the original name of the river, as well as being one of the numerous stretches of water with this prefix: the Cattegat, i.e., the “narrow gate,” at the entrance of the Baltic; Catford, near London, Catawade, on the river Stour, near Manningtree; all with the same meaning of narrowness.

There is some ground for supposing that the original name of Plymouth, or a portion of the vast site now occupied by the Three Towns of Plymouth, Devonport and Stonehouse, was in Saxon times “Tamarweorth,” and the present name only begins to figure in ancient documents of the mid-thirteenth century, in a tentative way, as “Sutton-super-Plymouth.” After that period it gradually rose to importance, being first represented in Parliament in 1298. Sutton Pool, the innermost basin of Plymouth, the old original harbour, and still the place to which the fishing smacks and many of the local steamers come, is bordered by the ancient quays and the queer old houses of the Barbican, once a district inhabited by merchant princes, but now pre-eminently “Old Plymouth,” and although exceedingly picturesque, scarcely a residential quarter. The Barbican took its name originally from the castle, now the citadel, which guarded the narrow entrance to Sutton Pool, across which was stretched every night, in the time of Henry the Eighth, a protective chain. From these defences the existing arms of Plymouth, four black castles between a green saltire, are said to derive. The pious motto of the town is Tunis fortissima est nomen Jehovah, but at the same time Plymouth is very strongly fortified in the military way.

Certain very definite and picturesque scenes arise out of the dim abysmal, grey and confused rag-bag of history here in this fishy Barbican. Most definite of all the last farewell to England of the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. On the pavement, by the quay, is a modest stone, inscribed, “Mayflower,” with the date; and near at hand, let into a wall, a less modest commemorative bronze tablet, with this inscription:—

There were forty-eight men and fifty-three women and children in this little band, and the voyage occupied sixty days.

The spot means much to Americans, for here the handful of emigrants for conscience’ sake definitely cast adrift from their native land, which denied them religious liberty, and made oversea to the coast of Massachusetts, there to found a nation anew. The little Mayflower had sailed originally from Boston, in Lincolnshire, and bade farewell to old England from the coast of Devon; and thus it seemed fitting to those stern voluntary outcasts that they should—still fondly looking back to their motherland—name their landing-place in the new world “Plymouth Rock,” and the earliest among their settlements “Boston.” There was, therefore, an exquisite fitness in the circumstance that it was into this Boston harbour in America, a hundred and fifty-three years later, that the colonists should fling the taxed tea, and thus begin the struggle whence the dependent New England colonies emerged as the sovereign United States.

Our sympathies go out, historically, toward those Pilgrim Fathers, but they would seem, viewed closely, to have been not quite so lovable as historic glamour makes them. Their religious fervency was undoubted, but by all accounts it made them ill to live with, and they would have been greatly improved by a little sense of humour. But then—it is a startling thought—if humour had entered at all into their composition they had never left their native shores at all, and the stern principles which led them to refuse to acknowledge James I. as head of the Church, and to expatriate themselves when that shambling travesty of a king declared that if they did not conform, the country should not hold both, would have melted into satiric laughter and an easygoing compliance.

But two autocrats may not reign side by side; as easily might a soliloquy be conducted by two or more persons; and a king with a fondness for omniscience and absolutism, and a people whose religious fervency had risen almost to the white heat of fanaticism cannot abide together; hence the voyage of the Mayflower, and this place of pilgrimage for descendants of those New Englanders.

The greatest point of vantage in all Plymouth is the great open space beside the citadel.

It is the Hoe. What the Rialto was to Venice, what the Hard to Portsmouth, the Sandhill to Newcastle-on-Tyne, the Broomielaw to Glasgow, that was the Hoe to Plymouth of old. From it, let us never forget, on a memorable day of 1588, the “Invincible” Armada was sighted; that proud fleet which was to conquer England, and place the foot of Spain upon our necks, and the spiritual domination of the Pope of Rome over our consciences. History tells us that the King of Spain was not making that unprovoked attack upon us which the simple legends of an earlier and uncritical age would have us believe, and we know that he was but seeking a very natural revenge for the piracies Drake and others had long practised upon his ships and foreign possessions; both sides played the same lawless game, only in those days Spain was the richer country and her treasure galleons the easier prey.

How did Elizabeth’s captains await the coming of the foe? Cheerily and calmly enough, though their ships were few and small, and parsimony at the fountain-head of State forbade the proper measures being taken in the teeth of this long-threatened danger. Stout hearts and ready seamanship, aided by the providential tempest that wrecked the stately ships of Spain, served our turn, and Old England came victorious through that time of storm and stress, as she has since come through many another, by favour of Providence and through the handiwork of brave hearts alone. Statesmanship and the proper preparations of Government had been to seek, as they commonly are. Was ever there another so happy-go-lucky—and so lucky—a country?

I like—and all Englishmen must needs like—to think of the proud spirit of that gallant company of captains assembled upon the Hoe at their game of bowls, when news of the Armada sighted off the Lizard, and coming with the south-westerly wind up Channel, gave them momentary pause. There were gathered together Lord, Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral of England, and with him were Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, and other great captains, among others of lesser fame. It was like to be a crushing force that was advancing toward our shores, for it numbered no fewer than one hundred and thirty-five men-o’-war, with crews of 8,000 men and 19,000 soldiers. But so confident were that gallant company of their capacity to resist invasion that—so the story from that time has run—on the suggestion of Sir Francis Drake, who boldly asserted that there was plenty time to finish their game first and thrash the Spaniards afterwards, they elected to complete their bout of bowls.

I will not seek the authority upon which that brave old tradition rests, and a malison, I say, upon all who would whittle away our most cherished beliefs. Cold-blooded commentators tell us that the famous expression, “The Old Guard dies, but never surrenders,” was not uttered, and declare, contrary from general belief, that the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo never said, “Up Guards, and at ’em!” and very likely some one, somewhere, has made hash of the heart-stirring tradition of Plymouth Hoe and claimed to prove something craven and mean. Sufficient for me, however, the story with which the Muse of History has hitherto been content.

For centuries the memories of that soul-stirring victory over the Invincible abode only in the minds of Englishmen and between the covers of history-books, but in these latter days, these post-heroic days of criticism and commemoration, when all the great men are dead and all the great deeds done, and we have for some time been engaged upon raising monuments to the deeds and to the men who wrought them, or criticising and explaining the why and the how and the uses, or the uselessness it may be, of those men and the work of their hands,—in these latter days, I say, an Armada Memorial has been set up upon the historic Hoe. It is a tall pedestal, embellished with bronze plates and medallions, and bearing the inscription, “He blew with His winds and they were scattered,” and with the virago figure of a helmeted Britannia rushing in tempestuous petticoats, atop. Close at hand is the statue of Sir Francis Drake, that brilliant member of a brilliant group of Devonian Elizabethans; one who, like Raleigh, in his time played many parts, was foremost among those scourges of Spain we bred in those spacious days, pirate, filibuster, patriot, benefactor, and the first to circumnavigate the globe. Little wonder, then, that the name of Drake is honoured, even yet, in Plymouth. They honour his memory so jealously every year, at the Corporation visit to the weirs, not because of his martial exploits and the services he rendered the nation, but for the benefit he conferred upon Plymouth by bringing its water-supply from the inexhaustible springs of Dartmoor; and thus, in piously exclaiming, “May the descendants of him who brought us water never want for wine,” the Mayor sinks the repute of the Imperialist of the Elizabethan age in that of the local benefactor.

The improving hand of modern times has indeed improved away much of the outward and visible romance of the Hoe, which, from the rugged cliff-top common of Elizabeth’s time, whence the great captains, roused from their historic game of bowls, first glimpsed the dreaded Armada, has been flattened out into trim lawns, and provided with broad gravelled promenade paths, like the veriest urban park or recreation ground. All the forces that make for the commonplace and the obvious have been let loose upon the Hoe, and much of its highly picturesque character has been lost under the treatment of the surveyor and the landscape gardener. But this historic spot can never be quite spoiled, so long as it continues to look out upon Plymouth Sound, and nothing less than a cataclysm of Nature can alter that outlook.

Consider how exceptional the site. A hundred and fifty feet above the sea, it looks straight out to the Channel, three miles away, with the many square miles of glorious Plymouth Sound in between, enclosed to right and left by the wooded heights of Mount Edgcumbe and the terraced hills of Mount Batten and Bovisand. Drake’s Island, immediately in front of the Hoe, and looking so near, is a mile away, and at the distance of another two miles is the famous Breakwater. The Hoe thus stands at the head of one of the finest harbours in the world: finest alike from the seafaring and the picturesque points of view; but it has yet another function—or had, in those days before the giant ordnance of modern times was dreamt of—for it is situated prominently between the further inlets of the Catwater and the Hamoaze, where, unsuspected by the ill-informed enemies of other centuries, lay the wealth of Plymouth. Then it was that the Citadel, built upon the Hoe, was capable of challenging the foe, wishful of sending exploratory keels up the many creeks and estuaries that run in every direction inland, like the spreading fingers of a hand. The citadel is a fine, impressive piece of late seventeenth-century work, and although it was obsolete as a defence centuries ago, appeals very strongly to the layman in fortification, to whom battlements and castellated architecture appeal more forcibly than the earthworks of yonder forts semicircling the crescented hills, from Staddon Heights and Bovisand in Devon, to Tregantle and Screasdon in Cornwall.

Off the Hoe, in the most commanding position, disputing, if need were, the entrance to Mill Bay, the Catwater and the Hamoaze, is the great crag now known as Drake’s Island. It is a kind of islanded Gibraltar, a nest of forts and batteries of a calibre not generally known, but reputed immensely strong. Drake’s Island is not accessible to the public, and like all mysteries, is looked upon with awe. In the old days, when it was St. Nicholas Island, the place made an ideal prison, as regicides and recusants discovered in the reign of Charles the Second.

That was a worthy and a noble idea by which Smeaton’s old lighthouse-tower, superseded from its watch and ward over the Eddystone, was rebuilt on the Hoe in 1882. From the gallery of it you may glimpse its successor, diminished by the distance of fourteen miles to the semblance of a tiny stalk rising lonely amidst the waste of waters. It was no reflection upon the stability of the tower that it was found necessary to remove it, after it had safely weathered the storms of a hundred and twenty years in that exposed situation. It was the reef on which it stood that had decayed. The interior of this wave-washed tower, come ashore again after so many years, is open to inspection, and there, around the cornice of what was the store-room, you read the expression of the piety of those who built, in the text, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it,” while above the lantern is the further inscription, “24th August, 1759, Laus Deo.”

Unhappily for the romantic associations of the Hoe, fifth-rate and utterly unhistoric streets and tramways conspire to render sordid the immediate neighbourhood, and the place-name has itself been, time beyond the memory of man, the sport of the H-less. It was H. J. Byron, the dramatist, who made a crushing retort to an actor, who, late for rehearsal, had excused himself by saying he had been for a “walk round the ’oe.” “Next time,” said Byron, “don’t wander so far. Take a stroll round the H.”