A Study of the Quillers of Polperro and Q's Quiller Inheritance: Part One

By Andrew C. Symons

Preface

The 'Q Project' has centred its researches on Q and the Couch family because of the body of available source material. Of surviving Quiller material there is little and even less from their own hand. It is thanks to the pioneering work of Frank Perrycoste and Jeremy Rowett Johns on the surviving records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro, that any understanding of the Quiller family and their activities is possible.

This study endeavours to set the smuggling, privateering and trading family of the Quillers in the context of their age and location. It then aims to identify the influence of the Quiller family on Q and his writings. 

I. Introductory Studies

(i) Why the historical memory was lost and how it is being recovered

For two big-money enterprises involving all levels of society and of central importance to the economy of Cornish coastal communities, texts dealing with smuggling and privateering are difficult to come by. Even where extensive records existed, as with the papers of the smuggler's banker Zephaniah Job of Polperro and the attorney Christopher Wallis of Helston, little work was attempted, at least until recently.

Some years ago, while investigating family records, this writer came across a newspaper clipping, seemingly dated to about 1930, giving information related to the Carters of Breage and Germoe, one of Cornwall's most important smuggling families. It must have been either cut out by my grandmother, whose father was Thomas Carter of Germoe and whose grandfather was possibly one of those mentioned in Harry Carter's Autobiography of a Cornish Smuggler of 1894, or it was in the papers of Christopher Wallis investigated by Dr. James Whetter in his journal The Cornish Banner from 1998.

The other side of the family hailed from the valleys of the East and West Looe rivers. Some members at least must have been involved with the smuggling and privateering companies located at Looe and Polperro.

When I was young I heard only vague accounts of contraband having been secreted in deep caverns on the far side of Looe Island, with a tunnel running from the island to the mainland – although not how it was dewatered – and of a white horse which used to be galloped along Hannafore Cliff when the Excise entered Looe. Curiously, there was a tunnel between what we called Second Beach and Millendreath, which ran from a shallow sea-cavern for about twenty or thirty yards into the rock, ending in a smooth face. Although baffled when I explored it as a youngster, I now realise that it was most probably used as a safe place for newly landed contraband.

After the Napoleonic Wars a curtain of silence was slowly drawn across such activities, with local communities adopting the strategy of denial. History was dismissed as myth and oral accounts as old men's tales. When it comes to inconvenient and controversial material, whether at a popular or at an academic level, the word 'myth' is highly convenient, as it means something and nothing.

Published material regarding the subjects of smuggling and privateering appeared only intermittently, one of the first being Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro. But this material relied on accounts once heard, not upon any systematic investigation. Did Jonathan Couch not know of or at least suspect the possibility of records surviving from the time of Zephaniah Job? Or did he think it wisest 'to let sleeping dogs lie'?

It was a non-local man, Frank Hill Perrycoste, who tracked down, according to Jeremy Rowett Johns, 'half a hundredweight of material stored in a worm-eaten chest in the loft of Crumplehorn Mill' at the entrance of Polperro. Perrycoste's studies of the horde came out after his death in Gleanings from the Records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro in 1930, about the time my grandmother probably came across the newspaper account of the Carters.

After the publication of Gleanings the subject again fell into desuetude. Hamilton Jenkin published a fine introduction under 'The Smugglers' in Cornish Seafarers of 1932 but Perrycoste's detailed study was ignored or unknown.

This unsatisfactory state of affairs continued until Jeremy Rowett Johns of Polperro Heritage conducted a systematic re-evaluation of Perrycoste's work, re-publishing Gleanings and then in 1997 The Smuggler's Banker: The Story of Zephaniah Job of Polperro.

The subjects of smuggling and privateering and the place of the Quillers in this area have now been established on firm academic foundations. This enables us to evaluate Q's Polperro stories and the importance of the Quillers to him.

(ii) The historical and geographical context

This study commenced as an attempt to correlate all available references to the Quillers of Polperro from the time of their arrival in the town a little before 1700 to the close of their recorded business operations and the near extinction of the male line by 1823. Q descended from the female line, with the marriage of Jonathan Couch and Jane Quiller, his grandparents, in 1815.

It soon became clear that the Quillers needed to be placed within the context of the smuggling, privateering and trading companies of the Cornish coast from Plymouth to Penzance. A broader context then demanded attention, an arc of maritime activity extending from the east coast of America to Brittany, Iberia and the western Mediterranean. For smuggling the hub was the island of Guernsey. Most of Q's novels and short stories lie within this arc. 

Cornwall cannot be presented, as in virtually all standard histories, as the south-western extension of England, but as part of an international maritime community whose economic and intellectual life was significantly determined by events and ideas from North America and continental Europe. Pre-historians can now identify the place of mineral-rich Cornwall in trade routes from the Bronze Age, Cornwall looking south and latterly west.

A remarkable picture has gradually emerged with an interlinking of historical events and geographical locations. The American War of Independence, the French Revolution, Napoleon's Italian campaign and the Napoleonic Wars dramatically affected Cornish coastal communities in unique and unexpected ways. They swiftly had to adapt their activities, their boats and their trading associates to declarations of war and peace, to sudden changes of friend and foe, and to maritime regulation coming from London, Paris and elsewhere. The Quillers were successful because of their adaptability, in part because they had as their banker and local agent Zephaniah Job. 

Cornish smuggling, privateering and trading companies required financing and a breadth of expertise. These companies were share-based, with 'venturers' investing their capital and taking a percentage of the profit or loss. The major 'venturers' were local landowners and businessmen, the minor ones tradesmen and small farmers.

Cornish companies were allied to ones overseas, especially in Brittany and Guernsey. Guernsey companies often had offices in London and connections to London banks. Enterprises such as the Quillers of Polperro and the Carters of Mounts Bay were extensive, dealing in substantial sums. Privateering demanded considerable financial input initially, but small-scale smuggling could be run in conjunction with fishing, farming and mining according to season and perceived advantage. 

There were not only external but also internal forces at work, namely the Industrial Revolution and the Wesley missions. Cornwall, with its mineral wealth, was an area of early industrial development. However, Polperro lay outside of the mineralized zone. Nor was it a location frequently visited by John Wesley. The Couches were profoundly influenced by Wesleyanism, but, seemingly not the Quillers, who were probably essentially secular in outlook, even if nominally Anglican. Zephaniah Job was of their mind. 

At the Reformation Cornwall was Catholic and Celtic speaking. At the time of the English Civil War the Cornish army was Royalist and bilingual. At the opening of the Industrial Revolution Cornwall was secular and English speaking; yet rising from failure and defeat with vitality and increasing confidence. 

This study is built upon the writings of Jeremy Rowett Johns of the Polperro Heritage Press. His works are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the subject.

(iii) Cornwall in the age of the Quillers, 1700 to 1823: an approach to understanding

18th century Cornwall was a congeries of ideas, forces and influences, giving rise to talents as diverse as Sir Humphrey Davy, Richard Trevithicks Senior & Junior, Maria (Brontë) and Elizabeth Branwell, John Opie, Admiral Boscawen and Secretary of State John Carteret. George II described Carteret as 'a man of the greatest abilities this country has ever bred'. Williams notes:

'Like a true Cornishman, indifferent, as it is said, to what the rest of England is doing or thinking, he scorned the necessary condescensions of statesmen to secure the co-operation of fellow ministers, parliament or people . . . But, at least, to start with, he gave a resolute direction to the country's policy . . .' (Williams, p. 239).

To an extent, this statement applies to all the above, except for Maria Branwell, and to the Quillers of Polperro and the Carters of Mounts Bay. What Williams fails to appreciate is the degree to which the Cornish character is moulded by its maritime position. Cornwall in the 18th century looked less to London than to the trading ports of France, Iberia, Italy and America. 

The observation, for example, by Alexander Dumas about France in the 18th century applies in a modified form to Cornwall:

'In the eighteenth century men rarely dreamed of abstract things or aspired towards the unknown; they went straight to pleasure, glory, or fortune' (Dumas,1894a, p. 29).

English historians looking at the 18th century have tended to adopt a different perspective, starting with the intellectual and political elite and then seeing society reflected through them. Philosophers and science writers have been happy to follow in their wake. Abstract ideas, therefore, have been seen as central to the development of freedom and democracy, justice and the rule of law, science and technology. But Dumas doubted this. It can be argued that the Industrial Revolution, Wesleyanism, mercantile expansion, and even the abolition of the slave trade, changed society from the bottom upwards, having little to do with and invariably preceding Enlightenment ideas and controversies.

The major developments in society were the product of practical men applying themselves to practical problems and seeking practical solutions, profit and efficiency. Such men demanded a government and a legal system free from privilege, corruption and established religion, and engaged in protecting their perceived rights to patent and contract, free trade, capital, international tranquillity and freedom of worship.

The Cornish economy, dependent upon the export of metals, fish and agricultural products, along with a carrying trade between ports, demanded the sort of change intellectual ideas were incapable of producing. 

The second problem in any meaningful appreciation of the 18th century is related to the first. Commentators have tended to read history backwards from what they believe to be a superior 21st-century intellectual culture; at times selecting information supporting a stance in current debate. The 18th century has not been understood on its own terms. This erroneous notion is not only found in the  'Whig interpretation of history', Marxism and the history of science, but in much contemporary thought. A sort of determinism in reverse, seeing the past as a prelude to an intellectual and culturally more advanced present, is sufficiently pervasive to go unnoticed and unchallenged. 

The reticence of researching material that might challenge the idea of progressive enlightenment can be illustrated by the life of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), as it is only recently that any detailed investigation of his papers been attempted. Gleick writes: ' . . . he had not only been a secret alchemist but, in the breadth of his knowledge and his experiments, the peerless alchemist of Europe' (Gleick, p. 101). He was also a Bible literalist tending to Deism (ibid., p. 110).

Newton lived well into the 18th century when alchemy, Deism, astrology and witchcraft, largely unmentioned by standard historians, were commonplace. Jonathan Couch encountered such ideas, as he recounts in The History of Polperro, living well into the 18th century and even in the 19th century. Couch discovered letters on alchemy, dated to the 1770s, in the Polperro area, having previously believed the practice as belonging 'to an age somewhat remote' (Couch, J., 2004, p. 121-2). He encountered astrology as a still-living tradition in a local man called John Stevens (1757-1849) who 'was said to have predicted many things accurately' and 'was skilful as well as sincere', even to the point of refusing payment for his services. Couch did not brand Stevens as a fraud, but claimed that astrology 'led him to exclude God and His providence from the world, and to substitute the stars and an unavoidable fate' (ibid., p. 126).

Historians disregard these subjects, while scientists see them as contrary to the laws of science and the province of the gullible and the superstitious. Couch takes a different line, dividing the world into the rational, which we should adhere to, and the irrational, which should be avoided. Historical novelists such as Dumas, Scott and Q stand closer to the Couch position.

It is of considerable interest that the economist J. M. Keynes, who possessed an extensive Newton collection, 'stressed Newton's alchemical interests, and argued that in a certain sense his bent of mind gave him closer kinship with the preceding age than with the science of the future', in a paper given at Cambridge in 1946. Keynes and Q were fellow Liberals at a time when Keynes 'could not but observe the tendency towards Communism among the young at Cambridge' (Harrod, pp. 572 & 531). 

Alexander Dumas (1802-70) was the son of a revolutionary general who knew Napoleon and military affairs. It is intriguing that what Jonathan read about in the Sherborne Mercury, for instance the great frost of 1795 'by means of which the French were able to overrun Holland' (Couch, B., p. 13), and which Alexander Dumas described in The Whites and the Blues, General Dumas probably witnessed or helped facilitate.

To Jonathan the news from France must have been fascinating, but for the Quillers such news was essential. Napoleon's descent into Italy in 1796-7 directly affected ports that imported Polperro fish. Only later, when he joined the East and West Looe Voluntary Artillery (1806-11), captained by Thomas Bond, the Captain Aeneas Pond of Q's stories, did Jonathan have any direct contact with military affairs.

The rise of Napoleon is described in The Whites and the Blues II, including four chapters on an incident in Paris where Napoleon and Josephine independently consult a sibyl, Mademoiselle Lenormand. This was a parallel to Alexander the Great's visit to the oracle of Ammon at Siwah. At the conclusion of Chapter 31, Dumas writes in a footnote:

'We can vouch for the truth of this scene the more confidently because the details concerning Mademoiselle Lenormand were given to us personally by her admirer and pupil, Madame Moreau, who lived at the Rue de Tournon, No. 5, in the same house with the celebrated sibyl, and, who, devoting herself to the same art, met with very great success' (Dumas, 1894b, p. 52).

Dumas seems convinced of Lenormand's ability to read Napoleon's past, and to influence, without determining, his future actions (ibid., p. 144). This non-rational aspect of Napoleon's character is not a subject most historians, biographers and military historians like to dwell on, if they mention it at all. The Quillers also possessed a side that does not open to rational investigation, one which we encounter in Bertha Couch's Life of Jonathan Couch. 

No historian has more controversial material to work through than Peter Brown, Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton University, a leading authority on Late Antiquity. Brown's approach is not to lament the passing of the Classical world nor to glorify the rise of Christianity; it is not to read history backwards from the present nor to use the past as justification for a current stance; it is to understand how the people of the time experienced what was actually happening.

In one of his earlier works, The World of Late Antiquity Brown writes:

It is only too easy to write about the Late Antique world as if it were merely a melancholy tale of 'Decline and Fall'. What we often lack is a sense of what it was like to live in that world . . . I have concentrated on the manner in which the men of the Late Antique world faced the problem of change (Brown,1971, pp. 7-8).

Whether they faced it as a Roman senator, as a soldier or invading tribesman, as an ascetic and miracle worker at Tours, or as the 'Harvester of Mactar' is not the issue. Brown accepts the integrity of the main players. He watches how they respond and how those around them respond. What we receive from Brown is a tapestry of life, not an abstraction to suit a particular audience or a polemic. This brings Brown closer to Dumas, Scott and Q than to the Marxist, the secular materialist and the Christian apologist.

Important insights into Brown's thinking come in his recently published autobiography Journey of the Mind which Mary Beard reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement on 22/09/23. Peter Brown came from a modest Irish home, a fact of some importance in the framing of his later views, and proceeded through Oxford and London to Berkeley, California, which came to him as something of a liberation, before the final destination of Princeton University. Beard acclaims Brown as 'one of history's superstars for half a century, the author of more than a dozen groundbreaking books', resulting in a 'wholesale re-interpretation of the period between 200 and 700 CE' or 'Late Antiquity' (Beard, 22/09/23).

Writers from Edward Gibbon to Bertrand Russell, the 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970), have had a very negative view of Late Antiquity. In his History of Western Philosophy, Russell argues that philosophy began in the sixth century BC' but was 'submerged by theology as Christianity rose and Rome fell' (Russell, p.14), resulting in 'a period of darkness from the end of the fifth century to the middle of the eleventh' (ibid., p.16). 

Russell traces an intellectual elite of philosophers and scientists, starting with Thales, c. 585 BC, and ending with individuals such as himself. However, the 'final and complete triumph' of reason and science over religion, superstition, 'astrology' (see pp. 483 & 489), and alchemy (not mentioned after Roger Bacon c. 1214-c. 1294)) came with Isaac Newton (1642-1727) (ibid., p.520).

The Irishman who made his home in America had a very different view of life from the Earl. As Beard writes:

But Brown, more than anyone else, is credited with overturning the traditional view of those early Christian centuries as a period of decline, irrationality, rigid intolerance and cultural stagnation – replacing it with a view of transformation, cultural revolution and sophisticated religious and social debate, worthy of study in its own right.

She continues:

'Brown is offering a series of autobiographical reflections on how he came to think and write as he did: what did he read, where did the ideas come from, who changed his mind, and how was his work received . . . Brown is one of those rare scholars who demonstrate their own cleverness not by exposing the stupidity of others, but by finding pearls of wisdom in what the less clever write and say' (Beard 22/09/23).

No doubt it is Brown's Irishness, as with the Cornishness of Jonathan Couch and Q, which has helped free him from the rationalist and materialist parameters of Gibbon, Russell and many previous writers on Late Antiquity. Beard reveals two specific influences, both showing the importance to Brown of reading outside of the subject, a virtue not evident in all academic and scientific writers. Beard states that:

He traces, for example, the influence of the anthropologist Mary Douglas, both in person and in her writing, on his own views of the 'holy man' in Late Antiquity; and he credits Edward Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) with nudging him to rethink the role of Late Antique sorcery. The end result is a fascinating map of intellectual debts, of unexpected twists and turns . . . and of academic friendships across most of the globe' (ibid.)

Not everyone at Cambridge during Q's professorship, either initially or subsequently, accepted any breadth of academic understanding. One of the rising stars of physics and mathematics, later a Nobel prize winner, was Paul Dirac. He claimed that 'reading books interfered with thought' (Bird & Sherwin, p.52). 

In 1927, Dirac made that comment to Robert Oppenheimer, who from 1942 led the Los Alamos project to create an atomic bomb, as in Nazi Germany it was led by Werner Heisenberg: 'They tell me you write poetry as well as working at physics. How can you do both? In physics we try to tell people in such a way that they understand something nobody knew before. In the case of poetry it's the exact opposite' (ibid., p.62).

When in 1947 Oppenheimer was director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton, 'he continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequence'. For that reason he encouraged 'humanists' such as T. S. Eliot, Arnold Toynbee and Isaiah Berlin to join the Institute but had little encouragement from the mathematicians or from the 'maddeningly literal-minded' Dirac (Ibid., pp.377, 378, 384-6). 

This brings us to a third problem. Brown uses the word 'change', rather than progress or regress. He does not present himself as intellectually and morally superior to individuals of the past. Nor does he use the past as a weapon to support a belief and denigrate another.

There is an increasingly vocal current of opinion, found more in books on pre-history, evolution and genetics than in general histories, that before the coming of Charles Darwin everyone believed the world to have been created in seven days, with creation starting, because it was claimed by a certain Irish Calvinist, James Ussher (1581-1656), at 9 a. m. on 26 October, 4004 BC. The inference is that before Darwin the Bible was seen as the sole arbiter of truth, since which time science has superseded it, thus illustrating the fact of intellectual progress.

When checked against evidence from the 18th century, a very different picture emerges. A leading figure in Cornwall who concerned himself in such matters was the Rev. Dr William Borlase whose Antiquities of Cornwall (1754) and Natural History of Cornwall (1758) would have been known to Jonathan Couch. Borlase's methodology is set out in Pool's William Borlase: 'his reliability and conscientiousness, the accuracy of his records and observations, and the scrupulous distinction between speculation and proved fact' (Pool, 1986, p.178). 

What Borlase took from Genesis is what Darwin and contemporary scientists take unacknowledged from it, the unverifiable belief in linear, not cyclical or some other, time. Borlase would also have known II Peter 3.8: 'one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day'. This extends seven thousand days to seven thousand years, just have scientists have extended the life of the universe backwards. Modern science, from Newton until recently, has followed the Judeo-Christian, not the Classical tradition, in accepting time as a linear progression, a belief rather than a fact! 

What Pool says of Borlase's methodology is also true of Jonathan Couch and the teachings he encountered at the United Medical School of Guy's and St Thomas' between 1808 and 1810. It is the basis of the Couch approach which came down to Q.

In The Early Eighteenth Century 1700-1740, Dobree describes the retreat of traditional Christianity as 'revealed religion' and 'scientific discovery' bifurcated, making amongst the educated 'scientific discovery itself a basis for religion, which led, on the whole to Deism' (Dobree, p.27). Dobree then quotes from B. H. Fairchild : 

. . . puritan Protestantism gradually became permeated with latitudinarian views which are sometimes so 'broad' as to be indistinguishable from those of deism. Furthermore, their tendency to reject outward authority, and to regard God, or nature, or reason, or conscience, as a universal faculty of the human heart contains the seed of a new literature and a new religion (ibid., p. 31).

Dobree then quotes the lament of Bishop Butler in 1736:

It is come, I know not how, to be taken for granted, by many Persons, that Christianity is not so much a Subject of Inquiry; but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present Age, this were an agreed Point among all People of Discernment; and nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal Subject of Mirth and Ridicule, as it were, by Way of Reprisals, for its having so long interrupted the Pleasures of the World' (ibid., p.292).

At the parish level historians point to the woeful state of Anglicanism: pluralism, tithes used for personal income, indifference. An example of the Church of England at its worst is that of St Buryan where, from 1756 to 1793 the incumbent was the Hon. Nicholas Boscawen, youngest son of the 1st Viscount Falmouth who was said to be 'greedy, drunken and immoral' (Crofts, . Before him was A.A. Sykes who was 'more concerned about tithes than about soul' and employed a curate, Robert Corker, who preached against Wesley and according to William Bottrell was an astrologer (Bottrell., p.233). The parish after Boscawen suffered from non-residents, particularly FHR Stanhope from 1817-1864 who was 'ignorant and illiterate' and lived in London.

Of the working people, only the literate Dissenters, who were becoming increasingly latitudinarian, could read the Bible. In Cornwall, there was the counter-culture of the 'droll' teller, the conjuror, the astrologer, the privateer and the speculator. 

The notion, therefore, that prior to Charles Darwin everyone – secularists and rationalists. philosophers and French revolutionaries, Humeans and Deists – believed the world to have been created in 4004 BC in seven days, because, it is claimed, the Bible says so, is simply not credible. The notion plays into a current American debate between Darwinists and Creationists. Where Darwinists and Creationists agree is on the Judeo-Christian understanding of linear time, a scientifically unverifiable idea.

That this notion is then used as an example of 'progress' is even more incredible. The idea of progress should not be built upon a false notion of the past and then used as a weapon for winning a debate in the present.

This study aims at presenting the past as it was experienced by actors at the time as in the novels of Scott, Dumas and Q. The Quillers were very much a family of their age.

It is interesting to see the extent to which the Quillers of Polperro, traders, smugglers and privateers, epitomise their age. As with John Carteret they condescended to no-one; as with Napoleon 'they went straight to . . . glory (and) fortune' (Dumas, 1894a, p.29); as with the industrialists they desired a legal system that protected their perceived interests and not simply those of a landed and predatorial aristocracy; and as with them again they were practical men who disdained theory. They seem to have been essentially secular and materialistic, with any religion left on the harbour wall when they left port. They also had the capacity to experience phenomena outside of the rational.

A study of the Quillers does not so much take us into a parochial backwater as to throw open a window onto the age and how it was actually experienced by the people of the time. What probably distinguishes the 18th century from our own is the freedom of thought and action to which people aspired, so different from the demands of conformity supported by centres of wealth, power and information that the 21st century imposes, and which results in agenda-driven publications and spurious notions.

The Quillers of Polperro had recorded dealings with Roscoff, Guernsey, Tenerife and the Mediterranean. Their activities included licit and illicit trading and, during times of war, privateering  and contract work for the Royal Navy. It is possible that the Quillers operated before the time of John Quiller but records are absent. At the time of its prosperity it is best seen as a Quiller-Job business.

A seafaring family from further west was the Carters, centred at Prussia Cove in Mounts Bay. They employed Christopher Wallis, a Helston attorney, for their legal work. During his life, Captain Harry Carter visited Morlaix and Roscoff, where he and, for a time, his brother were imprisoned in the 'Terror'; New York after the American War of Independence; Dunkirk; Folkestone; Cawsand, where he nearly lost his life, and Leghorn in Italy. The Carters, like the Quillers, auctioned many of their 'prizes' at Fowey. The two families would have known each other.

It was probably the French historian Fernand Braudel who made the observation that the sea unites and the land divides. In 'The return of the English, 1572-1573' from The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (Braudel, pp. 621-24). Such routes seem to be remarkably ancient. Cunliffe in Britain Begins claims that from about 2500 BC, 'Devon and Cornwall were a major source of tin as well as producing copper and some gold' (Cunliffe, p. 204). So, by the 1570s the south-west had been exporting metals for over 4000 years. 

If we are to appreciate the 18th century, its ideas, its people, and its occupations, we must free our minds from a lot of 21st-century baggage, as Brown successfully has in his study of Late Antiquity. Maritime and mineral-rich Cornwall had a unique culture derived from a timeless history and an arc of trading including south-west Europe, the Mediterranean and North America. This makes a considerable demand upon the contemporary reader, but also a challenging and exciting one. 

(iv) The arc of trading and connectivity

If historians were to be asked to list the most important years in the recorded history of humanity, 1789 might come out towards the top. In The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, Eric Hobsbawm sees 1789 as central to a 'dual revolution', the political revolution in France and the Industrial Revolution in Britain (p. ix). Cornwall was directly influenced by both, as it had been earlier by the American War of Independence in 1775-83.

By 1789 mining, smelting and casting were mature industries from Dartmoor to West Penwith, while across the English Channel there were Cornish communities in the Roscoff-Morlaix area of Brittany as well as on the east coast of America, as at Marblehead. There were also trading links with Italy and Iberia. As Italy was a Catholic country and the Mediterranean 'fisheries provide only a modest yield' (Braudel, p.138), Cornish fish merchants, including Richard Couch of Polperro, found ready markets in Leghorn, Genoa and Naples. The important port of Fowey, from which Marblehead was originally founded (Keast, pp.34 & 37), had a trading arc of the eastern seaboard of America, the west coasts of France and Iberia, and Italy.

Reynolds argues that Britain in Anglo-American history should be seen: 'within the context of "Atlantic history", placing the British Isles in their proper historical place as part of a complex circulatory system' (Reynolds, p. xviii). Cornwall and Devon were very much part of the 'circulatory system'.

This Atlantic perspective is reflected in Q's novels. In Lady Good-for-Nothing, Captain Oliver Vyell, Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston, comes from the same stock as Sir Harry Vyell of Carwithiel on the north coast of Cornwall in The Ship of Stars, while Ruth Josselin is based on a fish girl from Marblehead. Poison Island opens in the village of Antony on the River Lyner, before moving on to the West African slave coast, then to the fisheries of Newfoundland and to an island in the Gulf of Honduras. Harry Revel opens in Plymouth before extending south to Portugal and Spain. Sir John Constantine opens in the parish of Constantine and concludes on the island of Corsica, from where Napoleon came.

W. P. Courtney has noted that the 'parliamentary boroughs in Cornwall were Launceston, Liskeard, Lostwithiel, Truro, Bodmin and Helston, all of them ancient towns inhabited by large numbers of people engaged in extensive commerce at home and abroad' (Courtney, p. v). Four of these were associated with the tin industry. As Hamilton Jenkin says:

...the four-and-twenty Stannators who made up the Cornish Tinners' Parliament were elected according to ancient custom by the Mayor and Council of Launceston, Lostwithiel, Truro and Helston, representing respectively the stannaries of Blackmore, Foweymore, Tywarnhail, and Penwith and Kerrier (Jenkin, p.36). 

The subject of connectivity and the Cornish arc of trading is being increasingly researched, with new evidence appearing in journals and books. To see Cornwall simply in terms of its relationship to London, an error common to academic historians in this country, would give too narrow a perspective. In fact, if Reynolds is correct, London should no longer be seen as central in terms of trade.

(v) The Industrial Revolution in Cornwall

Up until about 1700 the tin exported from Cornwall and Devon, and small quantities of gold, came from alluvial sources, essentially stream beds on the granite moors from Dartmoor westwards. After 1700 it became necessary to mine, first shallow excavations and then ever-deepening shafts, with tunnels to follow the tin lodes. Tin is found in 'lodes' or long cores that expand and contract and may run for a mile or suddenly disappear. The miner prises out the lode, taking as little as possible of the country rock, usually working to a percentage of the tin extracted, lower on a rich lode and higher on a poor one.

As with smuggling and privateering, mining was originally financed by venturers and then by London shareholders. Moorland landowners suddenly found themselves wealthy.

Deep mining for tin and copper followed the invention by Newcomen, in 1718, of a steam-powered pumping engine. It expanded with the introduction of the reverberatory furnace for smelting tin with coal. According to Pool:

Cornwall had its own industrial revolution half a century before the rest of the country (with) prosperity for mine owners, smelters and merchants, but squalor and misery for the working miners (Pool, 1986, p. 5).

Bottrell in his Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall introduces two of the last tin streamers on the Penwith moor, 'Uncle Matthew Thomas' and 'Jack Tregear'. They worked 'the stream leats and bogs of Trewe moors', above Zennor, and possessed a 'moor-house' with a false wall for storing mineral and contraband. At the moor-house the fox-hunting gentry and clergy would obtain refreshment.

The use of venture financing, and the drive and ingenuity that advanced mining, paralleled what was happening in ports such as Polperro.  Polperro lay outside of the mineralized zone, although ports such as Looe and Fowey were increasingly used for import and export, with a living to be made by families such as the Quillers and, who we shall later meet, the Pengellys. This trade is illustrated in Q's novel Hocken and Hunken. Zephaniah Job had commenced his working life in the St Agnes mining area; while John and Harry Carter had worked in the Breage-Germoe mining area – as did my great-grandfather Thomas Carter. Job later became the central figure in the development of Polperro-Looe. 

Many working people alternated between farming, fishing and smuggling/privateering according to season and perceived advantage, with mining in the west. The Quillers must have manned their privateers with farm workers and fishermen on a trip-by-trip basis. Women (although not from the more wealthy Quiller family) 'shoded' or crushed ore at a local mine, packed pilchards in a 'fish palace' and cut corn at harvest-time. If a husband was lost or severely injured when privateering or smuggling then they became the breadwinner. By the age of ten most children were in employment, although neither women nor children were permitted underground.

Pool is correct to point to disparities in wealth with 'squalor and misery' for many working people. Jonathan Couch must have come across distressing scenes on his medical rounds. Yet abject destitution only resulted from a failure of the grain harvest and or the fisheries. It was exacerbated by industrial injury, epidemics and old age. Few working people lived into old age, with most miners decrepit at forty. Many women, including Jonathan Couch's first wife, died giving birth.

Physical illness there was aplenty, but there is little evidence of mental illness, except for the occasional lunatic, who was invariably looked after in the village. One of Jonathan Couch's sons was thought of as a simpleton. For all its problems the age was thrusting, extrovert and robust, full of invention and ingenuity, along with free and independent thinking. There was no mass-media or centres of intellectual power and control.

Pool might have qualified his assertion of Cornwall's place in the industrial revolution, especially if high-pressure steam is taken as a yardstick, by saying that Cornwall was one of the first to experience development. There were other industrializing areas in the north and west, invariably associated with entrepreneurial engineers like Savary and Newcomen, Boulton and Watt, Josiah Wedgwood Senior, John Smeaton and Darby of Coalbrookdale.

Cornwall particularly benefited from the engines of Newcomen, there being three in operation by 1741. A 'phalanx of Cornish members of Parliament' ensured 'a complete drawback of duties on all coals brought by sea to Cornwall' for working them (Rowe, pp. 41-2). Boulton and Watt followed in 1776. By 1791 they were receiving 'over £76,000 in premiums in Cornwall from forty-two engines' (ibid., p. 79). Cornish engineers endeavoured to improve the engines, with inevitable disputes over patent rights.

In Cornwall, Richard Trevithick Senior and Richard Trevithick Junior, Edward Bull, once an employee of Boulton and Watt, Jonathan Hornblower Senior and Jonathan Hornblower Junior, William and Joseph Carne of Penzance, and the Harveys of Hayle led developments in steam-power, mining, smelting and forging. They were practical men, the Harveys having been Hayle blacksmiths, with independent minds and an empirical approach. The Harvey's humble forge gradually transformed itself into 'one of the greatest foundries in the kingdom' (ibid., p. 127).

These men rose from the bottom of society and transformed it in a way that the intellectual elite and the Enlightenment thinkers were incapable of doing. Around them arose other professionals whose skills were required. Even the smuggling and privateering trades needed accountants, bankers and attorneys, like Zephaniah Job of Polperro and Christopher Wallis of Helston. These people and their financial power could put pressure on Cornwall's 44 MPs. This was upward pressure, a pressure that academic historians seem oblivious to. It was this pressure, not the writings of the intellectuals, which few people probably read, that slowly transformed society.

Cornwall's rapid industrial and commercial progress at the time of the Quillers is particularly remarkable in that retaining able and productive young men and women in the workforce was problematic. This was for three main reasons: health, impressment into the armed forces, particularly at times of war, and emigration. 

Q was aware of and informed about all three. He describes, in the autobiographical Memories and Opinions, an epidemic of typhus at Bodmin about 1870 (Quiller-Couch,1944, p. 10). In the novella Ia, he explains the causes, notably malnutrition, poor housing and infected water, the progress from filthy quays and streets, and the consequences of epidemics of typhus and diphtheria in a typical Cornish village in the 1860s. 

Dr Richard Q. Couch, Q's uncle, published an analysis of mortality in miners which Q almost certainly read (see Richard Quiller Couch).

Equally disruptive to commercial and industrial life were the activities of the press gangs. Between 1793 and 1801 naval personnel increased from 15,000 to 133,000 largely from impressment, with coastal communities particularly at risk. In the 1740s, Methodists were very vulnerable. By 1812 the figure stood at one million. These were men removed from productive to unproductive employment. The press gang is a feature of Q's fiction from I Saw Three Ships to The Mayor of Troy.

The popularity of the voluntary companies, such as the East and West Looe Voluntary Artillery, which sprang into existence following the collapse of the Peace of Amiens in 1803, was in part because it provided some protection against impressment. Jonathan Couch joined on entering upon an apprenticeship with John Rice, surgeon of East Looe.

The third loss to the workforce came from emigration. Dr Jonathan Couch's great-grandfather was Samuel Couch of Talland, the youngest of twelve and the only one who remained locally. Some of the earliest Cornish photographs show Redruth Station crowded with emigrating miners; North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand were the main but not the only destinations. The descendants of Richard Trevithick emigrated to Japan to build railways; Jonathan's grandson from his first marriage, Richard C. Hitchens, settled in Valparaiso; both Sir Humphry Davy and Sir Harry Trelawney spent their final years in Italy. 

It is noticeable that after the thrusting 18th century a relative decline set in during the 19th century, particularly in relation to the United States, which in the 20th century led to something of a national eclipse. Historians have failed to take into account the loss of talent due to emigration which happened in Britain and which assisted America.

Some historians, of which O'Gorman is one (O'Gorman, pp. 311-1), see militarisation in the UK during the Napoleonic Wars as sealing a specific British identity. This view ignores impressment, death, mutilation, the class nature of the armed forces, the economic dislocation of maritime economies and the level of social unjustness which fuelled the rise of a radical agenda at the close of the Napoleonic Wars, just as it did with the close of the Second World War in 1945. The difference is that in 1945 a radical government was elected while, from 1815, as Q describes in his lectures on Byron and Shelley, it led to repression, one which could have turned to revolution except for the moderation and good sense of working people:

Sidmouth, Castlereagh, Canning, preoccupied with the immediate short-sighted business of driving the symptoms under . . . they were expediently successful, and that they won by a cleverness . . . in commanding the law, the justiciary, the magistracy, with the Horse Guards at call (Quiller-Couch, 1922, p.44).

Cornwall was an important battleground for the contending forces of change and reaction. In 1815, Cornwall returned 44 members to parliament, with the whole of Scotland returning only 45. East and West Looe returned two each, with the Buller family and Thomas Bond apparently pulling the strings.

Between 1815 and the Reform Act of 1832 there was a rising groundswell of Cornish opinion, supported by Jonathan Couch (and Humphry Davy), which increasingly and at times courageously challenged the status quo. At a higher level there was, possibly uniquely, the 'County Meeting', which had to be called, often with considerable reluctance by the County Sheriff. Distinguished families such as the Molesworths, the Robartes and individuals such as Charles Buller were for reform, and could lead working opinion, although they did not instigate it. 

Yet many left Cornwall for good, an exodus of skilled, intelligent, self-motivated people, for which in years to come the county and the country were to pay a heavy price. For this, the London establishment was largely responsible. 

(vi) Wesleyanism and the Industrial Revolution

Wesley's teaching on the Protestant doctrine of 'salvation by grace through faith', the personal experience of the believer, inevitably led, as his critics warned, to an independent religious spirit that, even in his lifetime, wanted to escape from the authority of the Church of England and even from the authority of Wesley himself – which in America it did at the time of the American War of Independence.

On June 14, 1791, three months after the announcement of Wesley's death, a group of 51 leading Cornish Wesleyans, including engineer John Budge, Richard Trevithick Senior, captain of Dolcoath mine; Paul Penrose, captain of Polgooth mine; and Thomas Daniell of Truro, merchant and mine adventurer, met at Redruth to call for lay control of Methodism (Rowe, pp. 266: 2-3). 

Reynolds says: 

Revivalism . . . Although not directly political [was] socially subversive and the potential threat . . . posed to the social order was evident when the Baptists hit Virginia around 1770. Traditional Anglican services there were largely the recital of the Book of Common Prayer; local parsons operated at the beck and call of the big landowners (Reynolds, p. 47).

The Establishment discredited revival meetings and preachers were threatened. Read 'Wesleyan' for 'Baptist', 1740 for 1770, and Cornwall for Virginia, and the rest is the same. Yet not all were similarly affected. John Quiller and Zephaniah Job had concerns other than Wesley's death or the Redruth meeting. In the month of Wesley's demise, and not far from where he lay, the Customs Board was demanding the impoundment of a Mevagissey sloop, newly constructed, on suspicion that it was unregistered and being used for smuggling (Johns, 1997, p. 38).

Losing such a state-of-the-art vessel on an arbitrary, although no doubt correct, decision from London would have been financially damaging to the Polperro enterprise. To the likes of Quiller and Job, and creative spirits such as Trevithick Junior and Hornblower, who regularly found themselves mired in patent legislation, the legal system favoured a powerful and repressive Establishment little respecting their interests. Rightly or wrongly, they demanded what they perceived as a level playing field. 

Wesleyan fish merchant Richard Couch was interested in the Redruth meeting, but would also have been anxiously scanning the Sherborne Mercury (the circulation of which reached far beyond Dorset as far west as Penzance) for government decisions regarding war with France, especially as he was having to pay for his son's schooling. Secure seaways to the Mediterranean were essential for his business.

The revivals in America and Cornwall, particularly the 'Great Revival' of 1814 which began at Redruth but whose influence was felt as far east as Polperro, affected both areas equally. The phenomena also affected other areas where industrialization and Wesleyanism combined. As Reynolds comments, revivals from the 1790s to the 1830s were 'religion forged in "the fiery furnace of democracy", and the heat was too intense for some of the older hierarchical churches'. The dual aim was to 'convert individuals . . . and . . . to reform society' (Reynolds, p.132).

Historians of America perceive the relationship between revivalism and politics which British historians ignore, just as the Anglican and landed Establishment endeavoured to ignore revivalism at the time. The Industrial Revolution, Wesleyanism and the expansion of trade proved the dynamic for political, social and legal reform. To interpret revivalism as emotion or hysteria, and Q is open to the charge of having done so in his novel The Ship of Stars, is unhelpful. 

Wesley's converts helped lead the Industrial Revolution in Cornwall, showing themselves to be highly intelligent, emotionally stable and economically astute. Before each missionary tour, Wesley composed a dozen or so sermons which he delivered in rotation or as appropriate, as he rode from location to location during the day. At the conclusion of the tour he edited the sermon for publication, so that today we have a good idea of the content. He used plain and simple English, without the sort of rhetorical devices used by, for instance, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan. 

How he had such a profound effect upon the likes of the Couches but not the Quillers and the Jobs is yet another aspect of 18th century life which remains a mystery.

(vii) London, war and trade

The Houses of Parliament in London were important to the industrial and trading communities in Cornwall and Devon as the arbiter of war and peace. In a maritime province, secure sea lanes depend on international concord and investment in naval ships. The loss of a merchant ship and its cargo could spell ruin, as fish merchant Richard Couch and trader John Quiller would know. 

Cornwall and Devon benefited from Robert Walpole's administration of 1721 to 1742, with Walter and William Borlase as two of his Cornish supporters:

Besides his economical management of the national finances, which itself promoted the country's prosperity, Walpole also gave more direct encouragement to the national trade and industry', which included being 'averse to war (Williams, pp. 191 & 212).

Where Walpole made a serious political mistake was in his excise reforms, especially the raising of duty on commodities such as tobacco and wine in 1733. As O'Gorman comments:  'The subsequent uproar took Walpole by surprise' especially the 'scare stories of hordes of excise officers intimidating innocent citizens' (O'Gorman, p. 81). Walpole had united legitimate traders and smugglers, along with those who benefited from smuggling, against him. The 'innocent citizens' were the smuggling community. Once in Parliamentary opposition, sometime Secretary of State Carteret and William Pulteney gained the support of many Cornish MPs. 

The Pelhams and William Pitt's 'Ministry of Reconstruction' also endeavoured to create conditions of peace. However, war seemed never far away: 1738 to 1748 with Spain; 1744 to 1748 the War of Austrian Succession; 1756 to 1763 the Seven Years War; 1776 to 1783 the War of American Independence; 1793 to 1815 the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. 

As Cornwall sent 44 members to parliament, including Horace Walpole, Robert's son, for Callington, the county was not without influence. According to John Rowe, 'By 1739 trading contracts, legal and illegal, between Cornwall and the Mediterranean were so extensive that William Elliott, the Receiver-General of the county, complained that the "Cornish people paid him in Portguese gold and moydors, a specie not current at the Exchequer or Bank" ' (Calendars of Treasury Books and Papers, quoted in Rowe, p. 38).

Although we have no knowledge of the Quillers prior to 1740, it was probably in the first half of the 18th century that the family business, inherited by John Quiller, was established. This is different from John and Harry Carter of Mount's Bay, who started from nothing.

The Pengelly family of Looe, from which Jonathan Couch's friend Sir William Pengelly the geologist came, was seafaring. William's father owned a coastal trader, while his brother dealt, at least in part, in contraband. In Q's novel Harry Revel, the Looe smuggling craft The Glad Tidings, Port of Fowey (all Looe boats have the Fowey registration FY), is captained by Onesimus Pengelly (Ch. X).

O'Gorman in The Long Eighteenth Century states that from 1714 to 1760 British tonnage increased by 30%, export value by 80% and imports by 40%, with a great expansion of 'coastal and overseas trade' encouraging the 'growth of ports'; Looe and Fowey must have been two (O'Gorman, p.109).

He makes a further point.:

The 'aristocracy and gentry . . . were often not inclined to take on the tedious and bureaucratic work involved in estate management, local government and electoral politics, preferring to devolve responsibility to their social inferiors (Ibid., 109).

Wealthy landowner the Rev. Sir Harry Trelawny, Bart., of Trelawne devolved responsibility for estate management to Zephaniah Job from 1786. This was in addition to Job's work for the smuggling, privateering and trading companies, and the management of other estates. While at Looe, local government and electoral politics, and much else, devolved into the hands of Thomas Bond, the town clerk of East and West Looe. Bond is the Aeneas Pond of Q's novel The Mayor of Troy, the 'deepest man in Looe'. Jonathan Couch knew him well. 

O'Gorman looks at licit trade; in Cornwall this made up a significant percentage of value, with all levels of society involved. The work of Johns, and before him, Perrycoste, reveals the complex nature of Cornish society, with this present work but scratching the surface.

O'Gorman probably gives us the clue for the growth of smuggling in the 18th century. A more numerous, wealthy and mobile population led to an increase in coffee houses, inns and taverns, all markets for the lower-priced smuggler. Rame Head, near Plymouth, is often mentioned in smuggling documents. This was because from 1700 to 1750 Plymouth's population rose from 9000 to 14,000. As it was a naval town with a naval dockyard and a military barracks, it must also have had a considerable shifting population on top of the official figure given. Rame Head, relatively isolated but surrounded by the sea and convenient beaches, was an ideal place for servicing the Plymouth market. No doubt the Quillers made full use of it because of its relative closeness to Polperro (ibid.,pp.110-113).

The Quillers would have drawn no line between licit and illicit trade as a boat could have carried legal and illegal goods. However, licit trade depended upon peace and secure sea lanes. This encouraged trading companies to refit their craft for the purposes of privateering, if finance could be raised, in wartime when traders and their cargo could be lost to enemy privateers with ruinous consequences. A government in London pursuing peace was a prerequisite of profitable legal trading.

Furthermore, a trader in mid-channel could have its crew stripped by a naval vessel even though the country's finances depended on trade and customs revenues. To the trader the government and its navy were both friend and enemy; while a foreign country could be both its enemy and friend. Trading companies easily saw themselves as independent entities serving their own interests.

General histories with a standard view of national borders and a standard understanding of legal and illegal trade invariably fail to understand the complexity of maritime life. The Quillers, the Carters and others saw themselves as independent traders following their own perceived advantage in a dangerous and hostile world.

(viii) London as a financial centre

Before about 1760 the Amsterdam Stock Exchange led Europe, with financing in London being conducted by bankers, brokers and financial houses, upon which the development of mining and smelting partly relied. In 1760 the Dutch supplied the capital to establish a Stock Exchange in London.

Lower interest-rates, arising from a good supply of capital, were a stimulus to inventiveness, to new enterprise, and to industrial as well as commercial expansion (Williams, p. 24).

Johns notes how Guernsey smuggling and privateering agents and companies, such as De Jersey and Commerell Lubbock & Co., had offices in London (Johns, p. 101). When he obtained a banking licence, Zephaniah Job worked in association with the Guernsey companies in London, and with Christopher Smith, Son & Co., a London merchant bank. Smith was an Alderman and later Lord Mayor of London. No doubt Christopher Wallis, who oversaw the Carter business, as will be discussed later, and others had similar contacts.

Exactly how all this worked has yet to be investigated. It is likely that enterprises outside of the industry had some access to finance, which maybe explains how expensive privateering ventures, involving purchasing, arming and manning, were paid for. Smuggling ventures could be financed locally.

(ix) Wealth, power and influence in Cornwall from Robert Walpole to the Great Reform Bill

Chapter Three of O'Gorman's The Long Eighteenth Century, 'Whiggism supreme, 1714-1757', is an investigation into the administration of Robert Walpole and the Pelhams, and into the great Whig families of Walpole, Pelham/Pelham-Holles, Fox, Pitt and Devonshire which dominated political life for most of the century. 

In his novel The Ship of Stars (1899) Q creates the character of Sir Harry Vyell of Carwithiel, an 18th-century Whig lingering into the 19th century. He is opulent, secular and educated, with a penchant for fox hunting, cock fighting and the theatre. If we turn to a later novel, Lady Good-for-Nothing (1910), Q gives the 'history' of the Vyells from Odo, who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066, up to Captain Oliver Vyell, Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston, Massachusetts. Oliver spends his infancy in Calcutta, his childhood with Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at Carwithiel in Cornwall, and his adolescence at Westminster School under the eye of Frederick Vyell, barrister-at-law. 

The first Baronet, William Vyell, made his money from the opening of tin mines on his estate; the second, Sir Thomas Vyell, was favoured by King William after the 'Glorious Revolution', holding lucrative posts in London until his demise in 1726. The third, Mr Thomas Vyell, entered Parliament as a Whig, having connections to the Walpoles, the Pelhams, Sir Thomas Pelham-Holles or the Duke of Newcastle, the East India Company, the Admiralty and the Royal Society.

The fictional Vyells are a 'true Whig family', educated, secular and materialistic. They would look with favour on Whigs such as the Boscawens and the Robartes, and at a lower level the Borlases and the Ustickes, but with disdain on Tory landowners such as Sir Richard Vyvyan and Lord Lansdowne. The Jacobite risings of 1715 and 1745 would have caused them some anxiety. Wesleyanism they would  treat with contempt. Horace Walpole, brother of Sir Robert Walpole, MP for East Looe from 1718 to 1722, would have been looked upon with special respect.

Massachussetts was a particularly appropriate place for a Whig like Oliver Vyell as it had an assembly with yearly elections and a wide franchise. In practice it was largely self-governing, seeing London as 'corrupt politics' (O'Gorman, p. 180).

A more primitive version of Sir Harry Vyell was the real Stephen Usticke (1700-46) of Botallack, who married Catherine Borlase, sister of the Rev. Dr Walter Borlase and the Rev. Dr William Borlase. John Rowe says: 'Dr Walter Borlase was a Whig and a close friend of the Walpoles and others of the ruling aristocracy. They relied on him to keep an eye on local developments in a dangerous age' (Rowe, p.15).

It was 'dangerous' because some Cornish Tories harboured Jacobite sympathies and controlled a number of boroughs in the Tory interest. In the election of 1734 'the Tories made a vigorous attempt to break through the long reign of Whiggism', but unsuccessfully (Courtney, p. xvi). It was Walter Borlase who opposed both Tories and Wesleyans in west Cornwall, with Stephen Usticke at his call.

Charles Wesley encountered Usticke in the week of July 21, 1746 noting him as 'once a gentleman of fortune, but is now a poor drunken spendthrift' who 'seems raised up by Satan' to be a persecutor of the Methodists. Pearce says how Usticke drove his hounds through one of Charles Wesley's field congregations, with Charles commenting, 'The man who has troubled you today will trouble you no more for ever'. Nor did he, for he died shortly afterwards aged 46 years (Pearce, p. 49).

Pearce includes in The Wesleys in Cornwall a pen and ink sketch of Usticke's house at Botallack, now slightly altered (ibid., p. 55). The family of Sir Humphry Davy was related to the Ustickes.

The journals of John and Charles Wesley also detail the violence of privateering crews and the inability or unwillingness of borough officials to contain them. There is the suggestion that the 'mob' was being incited from a higher level, with little concern for the consequences.

The Wesleys identified St. Ives and Falmouth as privateering ports, but preached anyway. What is remarkable is that the journals give not a single occasion when either preached at Looe or Fowey. When John Wesley preached in the Looe area, it was from a large stone just outside the western borough boundary. Maybe the Couches heard him at the stone, but probably not the Quillers, privateering captains like Richard Rowett, and Zephaniah Job. The Rev. Sir Harry Trelawny corresponded with John Wesley but there is no record of any meeting.

The most probable reason for Wesley not preaching in Looe is that those in political control made it dangerous for the inhabitants to gather to hear him within the boundaries of the town. Pearce notes how the violent opposition the Wesleys had faced since 1743 came to an end, as did the Jacobite scare, in 1747/8. Wesley seems to have believed, presumably on the basis of evidence, that George II - a Lutheran not an Anglican - was in part responsible. Hence Wesley's consistent support for the Hanoverians, such as during the American War of Independence when it cost him the allegiance of the American Methodist Church.

In July 1747, Henry Pelham held a general election in which the Whigs swept to power over the Tories, the Jacobites and the opposition Whigs. This enabled Pelham to hold talks with France which resulted in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in October 1748 in which France renounced support for Charles Edward, the 'Young Pretender'. The Hanoverians could feel secure. Furthermore, the Whigs gained control of Cornwall, to the advantage of the Borlases.

By 1747 the influence of East India Company money was already being felt in Cornish politics. In 1711, Thomas Pitt, the wealthy former Governor of Madras, purchased the Boconnoc estate near Lostwithiel. 'Diamond Pitt', as he was known, was the grandfather of William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham.

In Lady-Good-For-Nothing, Captain Oliver Vyell is the son of Henry Vyell, who had been Governor of the East India Company factory in Bengal. Henry's brother, Roger, had traded at Calcutta. Thomas Vyell, the 3rd Baronet, held a seat in parliament and had East India connections. Their sister, Francis Elizabeth, had married a Pelham, presumably a Whig politician (Quiller-Couch, 1910, p. 32). Captain Oliver Vyell obtained the collectorship at Boston through the patronage of the Duke of Newcastle, Thomas Pelham-Holles. 

The secular Vyells would have had nothing but contempt for John Wesley and the Wesleyans with his denigration of their wealth and status, and disparaging their indifference. Only Harry Trelawny seems to have taken a more conciliatory position and later met Dr Adam Clarke (Wesleyan theologian and sometime President of the Wesleyan Methodist Conference).

In 1741, the Pitts of Boconnoc turned against Robert Walpole in the general election of that year. Walpole resigned in the following year, with John Carteret becoming Secretary of State under Wilmington. In December 1742, William Pitt attacked Carteret in the House of Commons; but in August 1743, Henry Pelham assumed the premiership with the Duke of Newcastle and John Carteret in the Cabinet.

Although John Carteret was heir to the Grenville estates in Cornwall, the Rev. Dr William Borlase refused to support his son Robert Carteret at a by-election for a 'county seat' in Cornwall (Pool, pp. 60-1). In November of 1744, Carteret resigned from the administration of Henry Pelham. William Pitt entered the administration in May 1746.

The general election of 1747 saw Henry Pelham in the ascendant, with William Pitt, Paymaster of the Forces, basking in reflected light. The Bullers replaced the Trelawnys as the main political influence in East and West Looe, although the reason for this is unclear (Lawrence, pp. 234 & 267).

In the Looe-Polperro area of south-east Cornwall the leading political families were the Trelawnys and the Bullers. In the early part of the 18th century the Trelawnys were dominant, but the Rev. Sir Harry Trelawny, Bart., was more interested in religion and was frequently on the continent, with the Bullers and their associates moving into pole position. From 1741, one Looe MP was invariably a Buller, starting with James Buller from 1741 to 1747, then John Buller to 1786, with Francis Gastry as his fellow. They held a range of governmental positions such as those Q ascribes to Thomas Vyell. They trimmed their sails to a Whig or Tory wind, ensuring a virtually permanent position amongst the ruling elite. The 21 or so electors of East Looe continued to patronise the Bullers until 1820, with the family responding by financing capital projects in the borough.

A family wielding considerable influence at the borough level was that of Bond. Thomas Bond Senior, who died in 1773, was a member of the Corporations of East and West Looe, while his father, who died in 1747, had once been mayor.

When Thomas Bond Junior was born John Buller was his godfather and Mrs Giddy, mother of Davies Giddy (mentor to Humphry Davy), his godmother. Davies Giddy or Gilbert became an MP and a President of the Royal Society. John Buller was an MP and a town benefactor.

In 1761, a Buller and a Trelawny were elected for West Looe. Subsequently, West Looe fell under the sway of Indian money, 'a gentleman willing to pay handsomely' (Courtney), such as the Anglo-Indian Major Scott in 1784. From 1803 to 1806 Quintin Dick, 'one of the wealthiest of the East India proprietors' held a seat at West Looe, a connection lasting until the Reform Bill of 1832. The reader is invited to read full accounts in the East Looe and West Looe sections of W. P. Courtney's The Parliamentary Representation of Cornwall to 1832. 

The interconnectedness of Cornish life should be noted. In 1805, James Buller 'obligingly made way at West Looe for Mr Ralph Allen Daniell of Truro, merchant, banker, tin-smelter and mine adventurer, who was elected in 1805, 1806 and 1812 at a cost of £5000 per election' (Ibid., p. 141). He was almost certainly the son of Thomas Daniell who attended the meeting at Redruth on June 14, 1791, with the other lay leaders of Cornish Methodism, following the death of John Wesley (Rowe, pp. 261-3). One branch of the Daniell family became the Lords of Alverton in Penzance in the 17th century, but lost their land in a lawsuit. One descendant seems to have been 'Margaret D.', the witch and astrologer of Zennor, in Bottrell's Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall.

Received opinion has it that we owe our political, religious and legal rights to the great Enlightenment thinkers. The lower levels of society benefited from but contributed little to the struggle. Any study of the lower levels of society will show this opinion to be wrong. What happened in Looe is instructive of what was happening in many small communities prior to the Great Reform Act of 1832.

Browne's Corporation Chronicles. Being Some Account of the Ancient Corporations of East Looe and West Looe in the County of Cornwall provides a remarkable insight into Looe politics before 1832. He quotes from A History of the Boroughs of England and Wales, no author given, of 1792, for East Looe:

Political Character. This is one of those boroughs which exercise their election privileges not at the will of the inhabitants, but at the dictate of personal influence . . . Right of election is in the Mayor, Burgesses and Freemen. Number of voters about 50. The Mayor is the returning officer. Mr. Buller is proprietor of the Borough (Browne, p.13). 

The Mayor and Corporation exercised considerable powers over residents and over customs on the quay. The list of Mayors from 1728 to 1845 frequently records the names of Trelawny until 1751 and from 1746 Buller until 1772. Thomas Bond Senior was Mayor in 1736, and Thomas Bond Junior in 1805. William Graves, later MP, was Mayor in 1786.

The Bullers were patrons but not disinterested ones:

In 1805 the Chapel being in a very decayed state, it was determined by John Buller Esq., MP, and Recorder of the Borough, with the consent of the Corporation, to have it taken down, and to build a new chapel on the same spot. Local tradition asserts that the undertaking was not without a political object (Ibid., p.86).

Prior to the Reform Act, the Bullers subsidized the town in certain expenditures (Ibid., p.100); no doubt thinking this justified their political control.

The quay at West Looe was not a place of amity. From the 1750s there were disputes between the Corporation and the traders using the port, presumably including the Quillers, which came to a head in 1788, when legal advice was sought. The disputes gradually took on a political aspect, which is described by both Courtney and Browne. The inhabitants began to challenge the ruling elite, something which took considerable courage.

In Corporation Chronicles Browne reproduces an eye-witness account of the Parliamentary Election for the Borough of East Looe in May 1796 (Ch.16). Pitt the Younger was leading a Tory administration (1783 to 1801), George III was on the throne and Britain was at war with France. Privateering craft belonging to the Quillers would have been moored to the quays at Looe and smuggling would have been rife along the coast. Q's novel The Mayor of Troy is set only seven years later, with Aeneas Pond the Thomas Bond figure.

Courtney relates that prior to the Parliamentary Election of 1796, during the administration of Lord North (1770 to 1782): 'Thanks to the family of Buller the Tory government of Lord North treated the electors of East Looe as their slaves' (ibid., p.124). However, the next decade saw a challenge beginning to develop.

In Corporation Chronicles Browne relates that the election of 1796 took place on May 31 at the town hall in the presence of the Mayor, Aldermen and Freemen, along with the candidates John Buller and William Graves, supported by figures as distinguished as Reginald Pole-Carew and Sir William Lemon. Unexpectedly, an opposition candidate, William Waddington, put himself forward, but the few votes for him were declared disqualified. John Buller and William Graves were elected. William Waddington demanded the recognition of a petition which could be forwarded to the House of Commons, but this was refused. This petition was preserved; it contains 14 names, including Francis Couch, individuals who were opposing very powerful men.

Opposition was stifled but it did not go away. Following the close of the Napoleonic Wars it seems to have coalesced into pro and anti-Buller factions, with the 1820s as a time of particular conflict, one not resolved until the Reform Bill of 1832. What we see in Looe was, no doubt, general throughout the country, but has been ignored by academic and political historians, who concentrate on London.

Corporation Chronicles has as its next chapter 'The East Looe Mayoral Election in 1823'. The electorate divided into pro and anti-Buller factions. A jury was elected to decide on matters of legality. With great fortitude it questioned the right of Sir Edward Buller to be Recorder and the legality of Thomas Bond in being both Alderman and Town Clerk. It was Bond who had to read the judgment out! The business was sufficiently serious for it to end up in the House of Commons. The establishment won, but the days of representation by Buller and Bond for East and West Looe were numbered because of the 1832 Reform Act.

The jury was opposing the two most powerful men in the area. Again we see how change was effected by pressure from the bottom, not grand ideas from the top.

According to A. L. Browne, Thomas Bond Junior was 'the most influential man in both boroughs' (Browne, p.182), no doubt building on his father's reputation. He received the position of Town Clerk of East Looe in 1790 through the offices of the Recorder, W. Buller, after having been appointed to the same position at West Looe the year before. He would have been privy to the political manoeuvring of the influx of Indian money and scenes such as those described by Browne in 'The East Looe Mayoral Election of 1823' (ibid., pp. 176-8), with its Buller and anti-Buller candidates. Apparently, 'The rivalry between the contending parties came to a climax at a contested Parliamentary Election in the year 1827' (ibid., p. 178), five years before East Looe ceased to have MPs. Bond's powers were greatly diminished with the Reform Bill of 1832. The Bullers found seats elsewhere, Charles Buller at Liskeard.

Thomas Bond's connections gave him influence extending way beyond borough boundaries. It included four members of parliament, the extended Buller family, and figures as politically and scientifically distinguished as his cousin Davies Giddy/Gilbert.

Smuggling and privateering operations such as those of the Quillers and the Carters, and bankers and attorneys such as Zephaniah Job and Christopher Wallis required figures of influence in London. Job was associated with a banker Christopher Smith, a London Alderman and Sheriff and in 1817 Lord Mayor. Smith endeavoured in vain to win a parliamentary seat at East Looe in 1806 against the Bullers. Was he backed by Job, the Quillers and the Trelawnys?

Job and the Quillers required influence in the Admiralty, the Customs and the Courts. Christopher Wallis, or Tobias Roberts whose apprentice he was, seems to have pulled sufficient strings at the Admiralty to secure a prisoner exchange for John and Harry Carter, 'by the order of the Lords of the Admiralty', imprisoned in Brittany in November 1779 (Carter, p.9).

Job's records reveal Quiller money being lent to Sir Harry Trelawny, JP, who also obtained his spirits from the family. When Harry Carter had a price on his head following near capture at Cawsand his hiding place was Acton Castle, a property of wealthy landowner John Stackhouse who had it erected in 1775. When Davies Gilbert entertained the family of Josiah Wedgwood Junior at Penzance in the winter of 1797-8, one of the excursions was to the 'King of Prussia's Cove' or John Carter (Todd, p. 115).

The struggle for greater democratic participation in Looe was taking place against a backdrop of the 'County Meeting', possibly a unique phenomena signifying the sense of Cornish unity. The 'County Meeting' had to be called by the County Sheriff, taking place either in Truro or Bodmin. It is not known whether Jonathan Couch and Thomas Bond ever attended.

As Elvins explains, on one side of the political spectrum there existed the old Tory families such as Lord Lieutenant of the County, Earl Mount Edgcumbe (who had signed the commission making Jonathan Couch second lieutenant of the East and West Looe Voluntary Artillery under Thomas Bond), and the peers De Dunstanville and Elliot, and often the County Sheriff; and on the other side the Rashleighs, the Molesworths, Charles Buller and Edward Stackhouse – at whose father's property, Acton Castle, Harry Carter, with a price on his head, had hidden in 1788.

In the 'County Meeting' of 1813 battle was joined regarding qualification of attendance, which continued until 1830. The Tories wanted noblemen, gentlemen, clergy and freeholders; the Reformers wanted householders added, later expanded to copyholders, leaseholders, merchants, mechanics and miners.

The controversy rose to an initial pitch in 1814, when the Napoleonic Wars seemed at an end. This was the year of the Cornish 'Great Revival' when the county ceased to be nominally Anglican and became Methodist, and inevitably more politically radical. In 1814, Jonathan Couch led the Polperro Methodists out of Talland and Lansallos parish churches into a purpose-built chapel.

After declining for a time there was a second peak in 1822, when the Reformers linked two issues, the distress of the yeoman farmer and a call for parliamentary reform.

The third and final peak came in 1830, the principle of extended attendance having finally been won, when the Reformers, now a majority, called for radical parliamentary reform. The 'County Meeting' now attracted an attendance of 4000 to 5000 from across the social spectrum. In Cornwall there were no riots, no violence and no repression.

Jonathan Couch was a supporter of parliamentary reform, democracy and the lay control of religious organizations. A few years after the passing of the Reform Bill he helped lead a revolt in Methodism at what he saw as the clericalisation of the church, establishing an independent Methodist body.

Thomas Quiller Couch, Q's father, was born at Polperro in 1826, eleven years after the battle of Waterloo and six before the Great Reform Act. His father, Jonathan Couch, had been born in the year of the French Revolution and his mother, Jane Quiller, a year later in 1790. For forty years Jonathan and Jane knew East and West Looe as 'rotten boroughs', awash with East India and other monies, and, in spite of growing opposition, controlled by the Bullers and Thomas Bond.

There is no evidence of Quiller money being used to influence political outcomes. If it had, it would have been used in the Trelawny interest. Maybe the bonfire of documents that followed the death of Zephaniah Job in 1822 and the loss of Thomas Bond's diary prevents us from ever knowing the truth. The relationship between Bond and Job is a mystery.

The heroes of Looe are the inhabitants, vulnerable but incorruptible, who stood up to power and ultimately triumphed, as did the Wesleys and the drivers of the Industrial Revolution. They stand head and shoulders above the Enlightenment elite. Today, freedom and free speech are again at a premium. It is from the bottom not the top of society that these virtues will have to find defenders.

Chronology of political and related events, 1782 to 1837

1782: Major Scott elected MP for West Looe with the assistance of East India money.

1788: A serious dispute over quay dues between the Corporation of West Looe and traders, possibly involving the Quillers.

1789:   The French Revolution.
Jonathan Couch born at Polperro. 
Thomas Bond becomes the Town Clerk of West Looe.

1790: Jane Quiller, granddaughter of John Quiller, born at Polperro.
Thomas Bond becomes Town Clerk of East Looe.

1791: The death of John Wesley in London.   
A meeting at Redruth of leading Cornish lay Methodists.

1796: A contested Parliamentary Election at East Looe with John Buller and William Graves elected.

1801: The death of William Graves.

1802: Edward Buller elected MP for East Looe, serving continuously until 1820.

1803: Quintin Dick, East India proprietor, elected MP for West Looe.

1804: John Quiller drowned at sea returning with contraband from Roscoff.
Ralph Allen Daniell of Truro, industrialist and banker, elected MP for West Looe; subsequently in 1806 and 1812 at the cost of £5000 per election.  
James Buller re-elected for West Looe.

1812: Charles Buller Senior and Antony Buller elected MPs for West Looe.

1813: First County Meeting.

1815: End of the Napoleonic Wars.

1822: Death of Zephaniah Job of Polperro and the destruction of his records. 
County Meeting.

1823: The disputed Mayoral Election at East Looe. Sir Edward Buller, Recorder, and Thomas Bond, Alderman and Town Clerk, found to be in defiance of the Town Charter. Open political conflict between the Buller and anti-Buller factions in Looe.   
Death by drowning of William and Thomas Quiller, bringing an effective end to the Quiller trading company.

1826: Birth of Thomas Quiller Couch in Polperro.

1827: Contested Parliamentary Election in East Looe. The House of Commons petitioned unsuccessfully by the inhabitants against the Corporation.

1830: Charles Buller Senior forced by the family into yielding his seat because of his support for the Reform Bill.

1832: Charles Buller elected MP for Liskeard following the passing of the Reform Bill.

1834: Death of Sir Harry Trelawny in Italy.

1837: Death of Thomas Bond in Looe. Legatee Davies Gilbert.

(x) London as a medical centre and the training of Jonathan Couch

In the 18th century, the medical schools of Edinburgh and Glasgow, dominated by the thought of David Hume (1711-76) who believed reason should be based on direct observation, led medical thinking in Britain. Dissection, observation, recording and effectiveness were elevated above theory, authority and tradition. This approach, mirroring in certain respects that of the Industrial Revolution, was brought south to London by William Hunter (1718-83) and his younger brother John (1728-93). The pupils of John Hunter, for instance Sir Astley Cooper (1768-1841), were the teachers of Jonathan Couch.

For more information see: The Knife Man: Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, father of Modern Surgery, by Wendy Moore (2005) and Digging Up The Dead. Uncovering the Life and Times of an Extraordinary Surgeon, by Druin Burch (2007).

From 1808 to 1810 Jonathan Couch attended the United Medical School of Guy's and St Thomas' in London, as slightly later did the poet John Keats who, according to his sister Fanny, was half-Cornish, his father coming from the Land's End Peninsula or West Penwith, where from about 1650 to 1850 an extensive family of that name resided.

Another of Jonathan's lecturers was Henry Cline (1750-1827) who, like Cooper in his early days, was a political radical, and supported the French Revolution, retaining contact with revolutionaries. Notes on the lectures of Cline and Cooper can be found in: Notebook of Medical Lectures, 1808-1847, Special Collections, Rubenstein Library, Duke University, USA.

Whether Jonathan Couch attended any of the public lectures given by Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution is unknown, but Davy mixed in medical circles, including surgeons from Guy's and St Thomas'. No doubt while he was training with John Rice of East Looe and after his return from medical school, Jonathan Couch was regularly called to the harbours of Looe and Polperro to attend the wounded and dying on returning privateers and even smugglers who caught a bullet during a venture.

(xi) Medical provision for smugglers and privateers

On January 30, 1788, the smuggler Harry Carter suffered a severe sword wound to the head while landing contraband at Cawsand on the Rame peninsula, an area both isolated yet convenient for the Plymouth market. In The Life of Samuel Drew another such landing is described, between Portwrinkle and Downderry, during which Drew, the Methodist theologian, was nearly drowned. A fictional landing of contraband is described in Q's novel Harry Revel, but on the eastern side of the peninsula, and one interrupted by the arrival of the military and the customs. 

A doctor was called to attend to Carter and continued in attendance until arrival in Lostwithiel. Carter is finally hidden, with a price on his head, in Acton Castle, a residence of the wealthy John Stackhouse, where he received the attentions of a doctor from Marazion – who was blindfolded on the last part of his journey to his patient. There can be little question that the Quillers regularly landed on the Rame peninsula, which was a convenient distance from Polperro and gave access to the Tamar region.

When it came to medical provision for the smuggling and privateering crews and the landsmen, and for any compensation covering death or injury, the records of Zephaniah Job remain silent. The Carters and Quillers were sufficiently wealthy to pay for medical attention, but they were the exception. One of the main attractions of the trades with poor and sometimes destitute men was the expectation of financial gain in advance of anything available elsewhere, whatever the risks involved.

The most dangerous hour in a smuggling run was that of disembarkation, when, often in heavy seas, kegs had to be manhandled ashore, maybe overlooked by soldiers. A realistic description of such a scene can be found in Q's short story 'The Singular Adventure of a Small Free-Trader'.

For the privateer it was the broadside and the boarding, or the chase by a foreign frigate and the possibility of violent death or imprisonment. Crews captured by Cornish privateers invariably ended up in Dartmoor. A few would have been exchanged, as with John and Harry Carter after the 'Terror', through the agency of the Admiralty.

At a time when antiseptics and antibiotics were unavailable, wounding frequently resulted in death, even if someone like Dr Jonathan Couch was called to the harbourside. The advance of medical science is one area where a positive contribution has been made to human happiness, but it resulted not from the spinning of theories. Observation, tabulation and practical outcomes ruled the methodology. This methodology underlay all Jonathan's scientific work and that of his children, Drs Richard, Thomas and John Q. Couch, and was finally passed down to Q. Q's lectures need to be understood in the light of this methodological position of empiricism.

(xii) The folk tradition

The Borlases might have been dismissive of Jacobites, Toryism and Methodism but they were fascinated by natural science and antiquarianism, with an empirical approach admired by John Wesley. They were Anglicans who believed in an ordered and rational world based on linear time; not in a determinist or a chance world. They were aware of non-rational practices such as astrology and witchcraft in the local area but seem to have disregarded them. 

The approach of Jonathan Couch, except for the dismissal of Methodism, was much the same: investigation through observation, measurement and testing, the keeping of careful notes and records, and a caution about definite conclusions. Jonathan was also aware of the non-rational practices locally, and while he acknowledged the non-rational he believed nothing constructive could result from it.

Humphry Davy inherited the Borlase tradition through being apprenticed to Dr John Bingham Borlase until 1798, when he moved to Clifton. Humphry, an indifferent scholar, had left school at fifteen, in 1793. In a letter of 1802, about the time he moved from Clifton to the Royal Institution in London, he wrote:

I consider it fortunate that I was left much to myself when a child and put to no particular plan of study . . . I perhaps owe to these circumstances the little talents that I have, and their peculiar application. What I am I have made myself (Davy, p.4).

Jonathan Couch's bleak experience of formal education at Bodmin Grammar School ensured that all his children were taught at home.

Humphry Davy's young mind was stimulated from three sources:

1. Wide and varied reading;
2. Observing the mines, foundries and smelting houses around the Penwith moors and conversing with those involved;
3. His close relationship with his grandmother.

Grandmother Davy was born about the time that the antiquary and linguist Edward Lhuyd was visiting the Borlases in an attempt to study the last phase of spoken Cornish. John Davy says that she was:

a woman of fervid and poetical mind, of a retentive memory, and who had at command at rich store of traditions and marvels (Ibid., p.5).

Humphry, whose poetry was admired by Coleridge, inherited all the above from his grandmother. He was closer to the old Celtic world than was Jonathan Couch, but The History of Polperro shows how steeped Jonathan was in traditional culture. Neither of them adopted the superior and dismissive attitude of all too many contemporary academics. Thomas Q. Couch and Q stood in this tradition. Q's novels, short stories and lectures were informed by it.

The Quillers were even more centrally placed than the Couches. John Quiller was illiterate, living almost completely within an oral tradition stretching back into antiquity. Although not an academic, he was highly intelligent as a seaman and a businessman who amassed considerable wealth. He possessed faculties of intelligence, as did many of the drivers of the Industrial Revolution, looking beyond the intellect and a narrow academic training. The genius of Davy and Couch was stimulated by a remarkable cultural inheritance, breeding independence of thought and imagination.

In Q's last and unfinished novel Castle Dor, Dr Carfax, the Couch figure, talks to M. Ledru of a 'sixth sense in nature' (Quiller-Couch, 1962, p.44). The Quillers possessed this faculty, which people from what is termed the 'Celtic fringe' have traditionally possessed, and to a remarkable degree. The Quillers were seafarers whose world extended to Iberia and the western Mediterranean. Their faculties were appropriate to their work. The narrow confines of academia and the over-development of the intellect were not for them, anymore than they were for Q. It is instructive that Q's creativity blossomed after he left London for Fowey, a port used by the Quillers, in 1892-3.

The folk stories that Grandmother Davy passed to Humphry Davy were similar to or the same as those found in William Bottrell's Hearthside Stories of West Penwith. The locations, the families involved and even some of the individuals would have been known to him. Another person whose youth coincided with Humphry Davy was Elizabeth Branwell, the 'Aunt Elizabeth' of the Brontës' history (Hardie, p. ). No doubt, she would have enlivened the long winter evenings in Haworth parsonage with Penwith tales.

Humphry Davy and Elizabeth Branwell would have known John and Harry Carter of Prussia Cove whose smuggling and privateering exploits equalled those of the Quillers (Hardie, p.71). The Quiller privateers possibly anchored in Mounts Bay when the weather was inclement.

West Penwith was a community in which Anglicans and Wesleyans, witches and astrologers, venturers, miners and inventors, smugglers, privateers and justices of the peace, all lived cheek-by-jowl. Yet there was a hierarchy, at the top of which reigned the Rev. Dr. Walter Borlase, JP, Vice-Warden of the Stannaries, and a friend of Prime Minister Robert Walpole. In the 1740s, Wesleyans and tinners occupied the lowest rung. Reputable smugglers were held in some regard, especially by the wealthy they supplied.

The relationship between authority, secular or religious, and the practitioners of astrology, alchemy, natural healing and divination was complex. William Bottrell includes stories of a 'Margaret D.', the 'White Witch of Zennor', who was descended from a distinguished landed family which had 'produced many learned astrologers' and had once been the 'Lords of Alverton', but had lost their estate at Alverton in a lawsuit (Bottrell, 1870, pp. 72-114). The owners of Alverton who lost their land were called Daniell. An account of the lawsuit can be found in Pool's History of Penzance, pages 35-7 & 66-9. Presumably 'Margaret D.' is Margaret Daniell. Margaret was an educated woman who could read Latin. She ended her days at Escalls, Sennen, associating with learned astrologers such as 'Usticke of Botallack and Dr Maddern'.  When Bottrell published his Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall in 1870, there were possibly a few old people who could remember her. She lived beyond the Napoleonic era. The Usticke mentioned was possibly a descendant of Stephen Usticke encountered by John Wesley. 

General histories endeavour to relegate astrology, alchemy and witchcraft to footnotes. Witch trials present a picture of cruel persecution of helpless women. The truth is more complex. There is no evidence of a witch trial in Cornwall, where such people, along with astrologers and alchemists, were a part of the social fabric. The most famous witch, Tamsin Blight of Helston, famously had her portrait painted by one of the Opie brothers. It is reproduced in Hamilton Jenkin's Cornwall and the Cornish.

II. Rediscovering the Quillers of Polperro

(i) The Forebears of John Quiller

The Quillers were of French, probably Breton extraction, with one branch of the family settling in the parish of Lansallos, between Polperro and Fowey, for five generations. Whether John Quiller represents the fifth generation is unclear.

The Quillers had probably arrived during the Huguenot revolts of the 1620s or during an 'inflow of Huguenot refugees' around 1689 (O'Gorman, p. 52). They were or quickly became seafarers, capable of adapting to changing conditions.

A complete 'QUILLER family Pedigree' can be found in Johns, 1997, Appendix 2 (p. 166).

(ii) The three generations from 1741 to 1865, based on the 'Quiller Family Pedigree' 

The' Pedigree' consists of the two generations stemming from John Quiller. It commences with the baptism of John Quiller in 1741 and concludes with the death of the last known surviving grandchild, Elizabeth Barrett nee Quiller, in 1865.

John Quiller married Jane Libby in 1763. They had five children, three male and one female, with a fifth unnamed. Of the males Richard and William, but not John, are recorded with issue. 

1n 1779, John Quiller married for a second time, to Mary Perry, resulted in five children, three being named, one marrying John Clements in 1791. However, in the text Johns suggests all ten children to have been from the first marriage, with no second marriage mentioned.

The oldest son of John and Jane was Richard Quiller, who was born in 1763. He married Mary Toms in Talland parish church on May 5, 1784. They had seven children, three boys and four girls. Of these Jane Quiller married Jonathan Couch in 1815.

The second son was William Quiller, who was born in 1765 and married Philippa Toms in 1785. William and Philippa had eight children, four boys and four girls. The last surviving male and female descendants of John Quiller recorded on the pedigree are John Quiller who died in 1863 and Elizabeth Barrett in 1865.

Johns records seven male Quillers as having been 'lost at sea'.

Q was the grandson of Jonathan and Jane Couch.

In summary, the family line is: John Quiller (b. 1741) > Richard Quiller Senior > Jonathan and Jane Couch > Thomas Quiller Couch > Arthur Quiller-Couch (d. 1944).

Only the last name is hyphenated.

The little evidence there is suggests that Quiller wives died comparatively young. Jane Libby seems to have died in her thirties. Mary Toms died not long after her sons, John and Richard Toms, who perished in 1812. Jane Couch was said never to have been in good health, as she was most probably affected by the loss of so many family members when she was young. Child-bearing and continual anxiety probably wore them out.

(iii) The three generations of Quillers at Polperro: smugglers and privateers

For three generations the Quillers were at the centre of Polperro's business life, while also contributing to the prosperity of Looe and Fowey.

John Quiller was the first to emerge from obscurity. He was illiterate, relying on Zephaniah Job for accounts, legal transactions and general organization. Success depended on the Quiller-Job relationship.

John's eldest son Richard was destined eventually to lead the operation but was lost at sea in 1796. John Quiller followed his son in 1804, leaving William in effective charge. William was lost in 1815. As Richard's sons John and Richard Toms Quiller  (d. 1812) were already dead, William's sons William and Thomas must have assumed control. 

The death of Zephaniah Job in 1822 can only have been a severe blow to the business because Zephaniah, the nephew of the same name, had left his uncle's employment some years before. The other nephews Ananiah and Thomas Job seem to have wound up Zephaniah's estate. When William and Thomas Quiller were lost at sea in 1823 the Quiller trading empire must have come to an end.

About the remaining males, John and Richard Quiller, nothing is known. 

Bertha Couch gives some insight into the female side of the family, who had to cope with the tragedies and anxieties.

Smuggling held a modicum of danger for the smuggler, but operations were essentially about outwitting authority. Soldiers resented involvement in customs matters. Privateering was legal, dangerous and bloody, little respected by belligerent navies, and only permitted because government took a percentage of the profits. Privateers were courageous and ruthless men. The practice came to an end in the 1850s with the Declaration of Paris in 1856.

The Quillers reflect Basil Williams' portrait of John Carteret and with Alexander Dumas' novels and observations: they chose seafaring, with its dangers and profits, even after they had amassed sufficient wealth to retire. Their life was one of action rather than reflection and they lived lives of pragmatism rather than ones based on theory and hypothesis.

(iv) Sources of information

Following the death of Zephaniah Job in 1822 his papers were substantially destroyed by interested parties, probably including the Quillers, although with a half-hundredweight remaining in the loft of Crumplehorn Mill. A century later the chest containing this material was discovered by local historian Frank Perrycoste, who recognised their historical importance. His findings were published in Gleanings from the Records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro in 1930.

J. R. Johns has made a further study of Perrycoste's work, supplementing it with an investigation of Customs records, Guernsey smuggling company records, back copies of the Sherborne Mercury and the like. His published writings are essential reading for anyone interested in the Quillers, Polperro at the time of the Quillers and Q's Polperro/Talland based stories.

Bertha Couch's Life of Jonathan Couch provides more intimate information about the Quiller family, including a description of the Quiller house in which she was brought up.

v. The role of women in smuggling and privateering from 1750 to 1823

For those imbued with the notion of 'the traditional role of women in society' the question appears unnecessary. As a result, academics have seen little point in investigating the position of women in such activities. Working people are viewed as having contributed nothing but their labour to society, with women the most irrelevant. A detailed examination of the evidence, historical and literary, shows this to be a gross oversimplification.

Smuggling and privateering were complex enterprises requiring an organisational base, a hinterland-market, and international connections. For the Quillers their organisational base was Polperro, their hinterland-market Cornwall/Plymouth, and their international connections were Guernsey, Roscoff, probably Portugal, and London.

Each smuggling run and privateering trip had to be highly organised and efficiently carried out. The Quillers were successful over many decades, becoming very wealthy. If we look in available records for female involvement we see virtually nothing. Yet other records exist from which we can read sideways to the Quillers.

The first factual record of female involvement in smuggling comes in The Life of Samuel Drew, but is the least helpful. When Samuel Drew was a cobbler on the Rame peninsula he involved himself in the landing of contraband. One occasion is described when a whole village turned out to land what must have been a considerable cargo. Whether the villagers were paid, other than by a broached keg, is unlikely.

Q had a detailed and accurate knowledge of smuggling which came from his father. The novel Harry Revel is a virtual textbook, with Chapters 12-14 of particular value: the Rame peninsula is the location and about 1811 the date. In the story Lydia Belcher is left 'a thousand a year' by a local Earl and helps finance a syndicate of venturers, including Jack Rogers, Justice of the Peace. The organisational base is her house, identifiable as being in the village of Antony. In Chapter 12 the syndicate gathers at her house to await news of the night's run.

There can be little doubt that Q knew of such women or similar women who by dint of wealth, social status or sheer personality involved themselves in smuggling operations.

At both ends of the social scale, in the same area although at slightly different times, women played appropriate roles, either as labourers or as venturers.

This leaves a substantial middle-ground. Fortunately, a modicum of evidence is available, from the records of Christopher Wallis of Helston, to indicate how this space can be addressed. It is more than likely that the lost records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro contained similar information.

The Carters of Breage were a family of father, a miner, mother, who probably worked on the surface, and ten children, two daughters and eight sons. The oldest, probably John Carter, and the youngest, had education. When Francis Carter was about twelve or thirteen, he was converted, so would have been taught to read the bible by the local Wesleyan society. The investigation of the Wallis papers of 1781 by Dr James Whetter reveals the names of: John, Charles, Francis, Thomas and Robert. Charles seems to have been the most involved in clerical and organisational matters. When Harry Carter was landing contraband at Cawsand in 1788, Charles was awaiting him and subsequently accompanied him back to Prussia Cove, ensuring medical attention for a head wound.

On May 9, 1782, Christopher Wallis, attorney, met Francis Carter of Breage and subsequently 'Thomas Carter's wife' on smuggling matters. On January 15, 1794, he met 'the wife of Charles Carter and advising on the letter received by him rejecting a composition offered the Commissioners of the Excise' . Then Wallis met Mr Gerard, an excise official, to arrange a compromise. On the following day, January 16, he again saw the wife of Charles Carter about 'his compounding the rent, advising on further steps to be taken in consequence of reporting what the officers had said re the business' (Whetter, ABK, 91, 1998). Wallis saw her again on the 18th and 19th. Interestingly, later in the year Wallis was also in touch with Zephaniah Job.

The Carters appear only occasionally Wallis's record. A detailed analysis would be required to appreciate the full involvement of the female Carters in the running of the Carter business. The above is simply what is contained in Whetter's selection. However, the importance of the female Carters is clear.

The Quillers had fewer males than the Carters, with Johns recording seven lost at sea, yet they were dedicated seafarers even when wealthy enough to remain in port. Neither Perrycoste nor Johns identifies the equivalent of a Charles or Francis Carter in the Quiller family. 

Banking, bookkeeping and legal work was conducted by Zephaniah Job. However, Job was a businessman with a wide remit, of which the Quillers were only a part. When Job became steward of the Trelawny estates in 1786, the Quillers must have declined in relative importance, although they continued to look to him until his death in 1822, another 36 years.

Between the seafaring male Quillers and Zephaniah Job there is a large blank area. Who did the daily accounts, chased up unpaid bills, settled outstanding debts, collected rents and remunerations, employed craftsmen for immediate repairs, ensured there were sufficient landsmen, ponies, replacements for losses on privateers, and paid a surgeon for amputations and bandaging?

It is most probably the female Quillers who did this work.

Johns does not provide a date of death for any of the female Quillers. Captain Harry Carter married Elizabeth Flindell in 1787, but she died about two years later when Harry was in New York.  

Bertha Couch describes Jane Couch, the daughter of Richard Quiller: 'For many years she had been a great sufferer, and died at the age of sixty-six' (Couch, B., p. 81). The imputation is that the deaths of her father in 1796, and her brothers John and Richard Toms in 1812, had undermined her constitution. Jane's mother 'did not long survive her husband and sons' (ibid., p. 33). No doubt she was worn out with work and worry.

Marrying into the Quillers and Carters was no sinecure. Only the tough survived. 

When we come to Bottrell's droll 'The White Witch, or Charmer of Zennor', with its possibly historical characters, it must have been the wife of Matthew Thomas who did the accounts, leaving him free to stream tin and purchase contraband in Roscoff.

The situation of 'Billy V.' and 'Margaret D.'  is similar but closer to that of the Quillers and Carters. Before their wedding, Billy took a house for Margaret in his home port of Falmouth. This, presumably, was to be the organisational base.

As 'much money and other valuables were placed in safe hands for Margaret's use' (Bottrell, p.103), a Zephaniah Job or a Christopher Wallis figure must also have been involved. Billy V. established his business arrangements before leaving Falmouth in August, with Margaret fully aware of his activities. She could not have been the innocent the 'droll' makes her out to be.

The facts show that women played an important role in the smuggling and privateering industries. Some women, such as Margaret D., were educated, while others were simply able and astute. Experience and direct observation dictated their actions, with 'book learning' held in suspicion.

III. Beyond the bibliography

(1) Periods of War from 1739 to 1815 when privateering was operational

1739, November 22 : War with Spain
1744, March 4 : War with France
1748, October : Peace with France and Spain
1756, May 17 : The Seven Years War against France
1763, February 10 : End of the Seven Years War
1775, April 19 : War of American Independence begins
1776, July 4 : Declaration of American Independence
1778, February 6 : War with France
          June 16 : War with Spain
          November 2 : War with Holland
1783, September 3 : End of the War with America, France and Spain
1793, February 1 : War with France
1795, August 25 : Holland becomes a dependency of France
          October 5 : War with Spain
1802, March 27 : Peace of Amiens commences
1803, May 18 : Peace of Amiens ends
1806, November 21 : 'Berlin Decree', Continental System inaugurated against British Trade with Europe
1812, June 18 : War with USA
1814, May 30 : 1st Treaty of Paris ends War with France
          December 24 : Peace with USA
1815, March-July : Napoleon's return and defeat
          November 20 : 2nd Treaty of Paris
1853 : The official end of privateering
 

(2) A general introduction

(i) Cornwall and Its People by A.K. Hamilton Jenkin

Possibly the best short introduction to the smuggling trade in Cornwall comes in 'The Smugglers' from Cornish Seafarers, the first work of a trilogy published by A. K. Hamilton Jenkin between 1932 and 1934 and incorporated into Cornwall and Its People of 1945. Q wrote the original 'Introduction' in 1932 and this is retained in the 1945 edition.

In the 'Introduction', Q mentions his grandfather's History of Polperro, with its section on 'Privateers and Smugglers', saying that the late Captain H. N. Shore (afterwards Lord Teignmouth) 'derived much of the material he reproduced in more popular language' from the work, although this is possibly a slight overstatement.

Hamilton Jenkin describes Polperro as a centre of the smuggling trade, with information taken from Couch's history although neither the Quillers or Zephaniah Job are mentioned. The Cornwall Gazette of 1802 is one of Hamilton Jenkin's most interesting sources (Hamilton Jenkin, pp. 24-25).

On 13 February, 1802, the Gazette reported 'A squadron of frigates being ordered to cruise on the Cornish coast against the smugglers' with Polperro suffering most, including the loss of the Unity (See Johns, 1997, pp. 87 & 132). The Unity smuggling lugger makes its appearance in Q's short story 'The Haunted Dragoon', set in 1798-9.

Presumably the negotiations for the Treaty of Amiens, signed on 17 March, 1802, released naval craft from military to preventive duties. Deprived of profits from privateering and with smuggling more difficult, the Quillers must have found life problematic. However, the resumption of hostilities on 18 May, 1803 beckoned better times, although cut short for John Quiller the following year with his death by drowning while on a smuggling venture. 

With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the whole preventive service was reviewed, especially in 1816-17 (Hamilton Jenkin, p. 28), necessitating a greater degree of sophistication on the part of the smugglers, which appears to have been effected. 

In his 'Introduction', Q praises the work of folklorist Robert Hunt, F. R. S., who he knew through his father, Dr Thomas Q. Couch, and William Bottrell, who he almost certainly knew through his Penzance relations. Hunt's Romances and Drolls includes 'The Smugglers' Token' and 'Prussia Cove and Smugglers' Holes', the first relating information from the Lizard peninsula, where Q based his first novel, Dead Man's Rock, the second relating to the Carters of Prussia Cove, about whom Q wrote in the short story 'King O' Prussia'.

Bottrell's 'droll', 'The White Witch, or Charmer of Zennor', includes an opening section about smuggling. The narrator is Jack Tregear who worked a s a tin-streamer for Matthew Thomas on the Penwith moors. Sam Tregear is the 'droll' teller in Q's short story 'The Haunted Dragoon', while certain scenes of the novella Ia are set on the Penwith moors with 'Aunt Alse' as the 'white witch'. 

In the late 18th century Matthew Thomas streamed tin in Trewe Bottom and lived at Treen, locations found in the parish of Zennor, where D. H. Lawrence was to write Women in Love over a hundred years later. Matthew Thomas was a venturer in a smuggling business run from Ludgvan, the home parish of Sir Humphry Davy, who knew these moors well and possibly Thomas. Three or four times a year the smugglers would land a cargo from Roscoff at Long Rock, between Penzance and Marazion, with horses conveying the contraband to the stream-works. Sometimes the excise would make an appearance, to be seen off with a few kegs. Eventually, Matthew Thomas built a moor-house with a secret room, where contraband could be hidden for sale to a local inn-keeper and the fox-hunting gentry. 

These 'drolls' and Q's stories give an insight into the experience of smuggling around 1800. It is history from the inside not the outside.

(3) The Journals of Charles and John Wesley 1743-1789

(i) The Wesleys in Cornwall. Extracts from the Journals of John and Charles Wesley and John Nelson. Edited and with an Introduction by John Pearce, 1964

Preface

The editor's great-great-grandmother was Ann Rodda (1773-1860) from Sancreed. When she was 16 years old she experienced John Wesley's last visit to St Just. Wesley's Journal records this as Thursday, August 20th 1789. He had preached at Helston on the 19th, where he may well have been heard by some of the Carter family.

As he did not arrive in St Just until the evening of the 20th, Wesley probably spoke at the villages on the road between Helston and St Just, namely Breage, Germoe and Marazion, all places mentioned in Harry Carter's 'memorandum'. The congregation seems to have included some of his earliest converts. On the 21st, he preached at Penzance, where Humphry Davy possibly heard him, as he certainly did on another recorded occasion.

In August 1789, Captain Harry Carter was in America. He arrived at New York on April 19, later meeting Thomas Coke, who had been ordained Superintendent of the American Methodist Society by John Wesley in 1784, and Francis Asbury, who had been sent by John Wesley in 1771. During the time John Wesley was preaching in Cornwall, from August 17th to 28th, Harry Carter received news of his wife's death.

Ann Rodda married Thomas Johns who 'divided his time between his liquor establishments at Roscoff in Brittany and Sennen and St Buryan in Cornwall'. He was 'a smuggler and an agent' and reputed to be a 'pious man' (Pearce, p.7); he was murdered when travelling between Sennen and St Buryan.

Both the families of Johns and Carter owned property in Brittany. 1789 saw the opening of the French Revolution and 1793 the confiscation of British property. 

Pearce's grandmother, Elizabeth Humphrys (1850-1943), who married Ann and John's grandson, could remember R. M. Ballantyne in her grandfather's farm kitchen when he was collecting material for the novel Deep Down,  set at Levant Mine.

Smuggling and Privateering in the Wesley Period, 1743 to 1789

In The Whig Supremacy, 1714-1760, Williams says how the Spanish War of 1739 opened a 24-year struggle, with an interlude in 1748, between Britain and the Bourbon powers, Spain and France, concluding in the Treaty of Paris of 1763.

From 1742 to 1745, the Minister of State in charge of foreign policy was John Carteret (1690-1763), about whom Williams comments:

Like a true Cornishman, indifferent, as it is said, to what the rest of England was doing or thinking, he scorned the necessary condescensions of statesmen to secure the co-operation of fellow ministers, parliament, or people, [the same being true of] 'foreign rulers, except the king of France . . . ' (Williams, p. 239).

The same observation might be made of John Carter, John Quiller, Zephaniah Job and possibly Vice Admiral Thomas Matthews (1676-1751). Matthews won a victory over the French and Spanish fleets outside of Toulon on February 11, 1744, not thinking it necessary to await the declaration of war with France, which did not happen until March 4. 

Hamilton Jenkin believed the smuggling trade to have 'reached the zenith of its prosperity' (Hamilton Jenkin, p. 9) in the 18th century, presumably finding the disruptions of the war years to regulated trade a great advantage to unregulated trade. The establishment of privateering at this time is evidenced from the journals of the brothers Charles and John Wesley as examined by Pearce.

On July 28, 1744, Charles Wesley noticed the fitting out of crew for privateers at St Ives for war with France and Spain  (Pearce, p.47) . On April 5, 1744, John Wesley attributed the wrecking of the Methodist meeting house in St Ives to jubilation at Admiral Matthew's victory, a greater if 'Admiral Lestock had fought too . . .' (ibid., p.76). Lestock was Matthews' second-in-command, who had failed to engage with the enemy. On July 4, 1745, John Wesley recorded the arrival of privateers in Falmouth Harbour (ibid., p.91).

In a footnote Pearce comments:

'the worst scenes of physical violence in opposition were found in the ports where crews were being recruited for the Navy and fitted out for privateers' (ibid., p.31). 

In 1744, the French were introducing a convoy system in their West Indies trade and freelance privateering was proving less profitable, so privateers transferred to escorting British convoys.

The remarkable absence of preaching within the ports of Looe and Fowey might best be explained by their being privateering centres. The place Wesley preached at in the Looe area was at Waylands, where a commemoratory stone now stands, a mile out of town.

Wesley is first recorded at Polperro on September 1, 1762, and again on September 16, 1768, where Jonathan Couch's forebears heard him and helped found a Methodist society. Harry Trelawny (b.1756), Couch's mentor, corresponded with Wesley, but whether they met is unknown.

Zephaniah Job arrived in Polperro around 1770, so could have heard Wesley at Waylands, if he so chose. Privateering, according to Johns, commenced at Polperro in 1778, with the Quillers at the forefront (Johns, p. 8). If Zephaniah Job did ever hear Wesley it was far more likely to have been at St Agnes. John Wesley's first recorded visit there was on July 5, 1747, before Job was born, when there was a 'large multitude of quiet hearers, many of whom seemed deeply affected' (Pearce, p.102). He subsequently went on towards Penzance, a centre of opposition, but preached, as at Looe, a mile out of town at Newlyn.

John Wesley preached at St Agnes and Breage in 1750, the year of Zephaniah Job's birth, and subsequently at both locations, including 1770 when Zephaniah probably departed for Polperro. At St Agnes he invariably drew a large congregation. 

Wesley's twelfth missionary journey of 1757 is of remarkable interest, when Job would have been about 7 years old. Wesley was in St Agnes on September 2-3, where the curate, the Rev. James Vowler, who drew large crowds (ibid., p.126), including the wealthy Donnithorne family, were sympathetic to his cause. On September 15, he was in Helston, where Francis Carter was possibly converted (Carter, p. 2).

When he preached at Redruth on September 18, 'many French prisoners were mixed with the usual congregation'. Wesley then describes how a few days before a 'cartel ship', one used for the exchange of prisoners of war, had discharged 'some hundred English, who had been prisoners in France' at Penzance. On passing through Redruth 'None showed more compassion to them than the French' (ibid., p.129). John and Harry Carter were later to be involved in such an admiralty exchange.

At about this time Wesley read Antiquities of Cornwall by William Borlase, rector of Ludgvan, the home parish of the Davy family. Humphry Davy was reputedly blessed by John Wesley. William was not as antagonistic as his brother, Dr Walter Borlase, magistrate, vicar of Madron and Morvah, etc. (ibid.,p. 46).

A much later entry in the Journal, dated September 5, 1787, concerns when John Wesley, the Rev. Dr Thomas Coke (who would expand Methodism in America) and Dr Adam Clarke (sometime President of the Wesleyan Conference) had just completed a mission to the smuggling centre of Guernsey. Harry Carter would encounter Coke in America after 1789. Coke had gone there in September 1784, returning home in June 1787, shortly before the Guernsey mission, after which America called again. Samuel Drew of St Austell, who initially worked as a cobbler and a smugglers' landman, wrote Coke's Life –  published by the Wesleyan Book Committee in 1817.

Samuel Drew was 'converted' under the ministry of Dr Adam Clarke in 1784-5, when Clarke was in the St Austell circuit, which included Polperro. In 1891, Bertha Couch related in her Life of Jonathan Couch how Clarke had preached in candle-light in the net loft next to the Quiller residence, later Jonathan Couch's house, to the small society: a folk memory of about 106 years.

Wesley records the sailing from Guernsey as a normal event, which to him it possibly was, but not to Coke and Clarke (Pearce quoting Etheridge's Life of Adam Clarke, Jones's Life, p.166-7). The boat was harbour bound by a contrary wind. Wesley, who was reading a book, knelt, rebuked the wind, and returned to his reading. The breeze immediately changed and the passage to Penzance was quickly effected. 

No doubt the smugglers and privateers longed to have such authority.

(4) Polperro Texts

(i) Gleanings from the Records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro by Frank Hill Perrycoste (1930)

Introduction 

1. A short biographical sketch of Frank H. Perrycoste (1866-1930) following his move to Polperro in 1898.

2. Perrycoste's discovery at Crumplehorn Mill, at the entrance to Polperro, of 'papers, ledgers and letterbooks' which had belonged to Zephaniah Job and had survived the destruction of his records by his former clients when he died in 1822. A 'half a hundred-weight' of material, in various stages of decomposition, confronted Perrycoste at the mill a hundred years later.

3. Perrycoste's findings were initially published in the Cornish Times of 1929, before being reprinted in book form shortly before his death in October 1930.

Perrycoste, Quiller and Couch

It seems likely that as the Quillers feature regularly in Job's surviving papers, they were significantly involved in the ransacking of the Job house in 1822 and the burning of incriminating material.

The seafaring Quillers were mostly lost at sea before the death of Job on 31 January, 1822. William and Thomas, the sons of William Quiller and the grandsons of John Quiller, were drowned at sea in 1823. Their brothers, John and Richard, survived them as did a number of the daughters of Richard Quiller, including Jane the wife of Jonathan Couch (see 'Quiller Family Pedigree' in Johns: The Smuggler's Banker).

For context, Perrycoste was born three years after Q and four years before the death of Jonathan Couch. When Thomas Q. Couch edited his father's History of Polperro in 1871, Thomas seems to have been oblivious to the material mouldering in a chest in the mill loft.

I can also find no reference in Q's non-fictional writings to Frank Perrycoste, although Q survived him by 14 years, including the publications of 1929 and 1930. Nor can I find any reference in works as well researched as A. K. Hamilton Jenkin's Cornwall and Its People (1945). It is to the credit of the Polperro Heritage Press that Perrycoste's invaluable material has been brought to public attention.

An overview of Gleanings

Perrycoste opens Gleanings with an assessment of the importance of Zephaniah Job to the Trelawne estate, to the smuggling and privateering companies of Polperro, and to the commercial life of an area stretching from the Looe to the Fowey rivers. He laments that the records preserved at the Mill are but a modest percentage of what originally existed. 

Perrycoste was fully cognizant of the historical importance of Job's material, providing as it does a detailed and accurate picture of life around the English Channel during forty or fifty momentous years

The catalogue of Job's records

When confronted with 'half-a-hundredweight' of material, Perrycoste recognised the necessity of creating a catalogue, both for himself and for future researchers. He identified 43 items. Items 1, 2 and 3 came into Job's possession when he assumed the role of business-manager at Trelawne. Those asterisked, 16 in number, are not quoted from in Gleanings. Some 'subsidiary daybooks' were overseen by a clerk, probably a William Minard. Perrycoste acknowledges the 'sample' nature of Gleanings, while hoping for further study of Job's records by others. Sadly, it would be another 60 years before Perrycoste found a worthy successor in Jeremy Rowett Johns.

A resume of Perrycoste's catalogue suggests it to have been a collection made at the house after its ransack in February 1822 by individuals fearful of exposure, rather than a collection and store by Job himself. Some volumes have pages torn out while covers are frequently missing. Much of the remaining material is innocuous. 

Item 25 is what survived of a ledger with accounts attempted after Job's death. These accounts were probably made up by Minard or by Zephaniah's nephews, Ananiah and Thomas Job. 

The value of the estate was made up in 1822 by Ananiah and Thomas, indicating that much information remained after the 'huge bonfire' of documents following the death. This leads to the surmise that it was Ananiah and Thomas Job who destroyed much of the incriminating material and secreted the remains in the chest discovered by Perrycoste a hundred years later.

After constructing the catalogue there remained a packet of varied material which Perrycoste only examined after virtually completing Gleanings. It is included under 'The Packet of Deeds' on pages 222 to 230.

The relevance of Gleanings to Q's fiction

Gleanings provides essential background information, showing Q's smuggling and privateering stories to be grounded in fact, although fact interpreted from a Couch perspective. Any critical understanding of Q's Talland-Polperro stories needs to be properly informed, with Gleanings as essential reading.

Q must have obtained his information from his father, Thomas, and from other oral sources. Thomas never knew Job personally, but his father William did, and so did others in the village when Thomas was growing up. Thomas would also have known families such as the Rowetts, the Johns and the Minards, all featuring in Q's stories under their own name or a pseudonym. The Quillers are not mentioned directly, nor are the Trelawnys; Jonathan Couch is mentioned twice.

Central to Q's Talland-Polperro tales, usually referenced under his own name, is Zephaniah Job. The Quillers relied upon Job, particularly as John Quiller was illiterate and signed his name with a cross, for all land-based work, such as correspondence with Guernsey merchants, London banks, customs and courts, marine insurance agencies and ship builders.

What Gleanings reveals about the novels and short stories of Q

Firstly, it reveals the accuracy of Q's information, both in context and detail. Q understood how smuggling as privateering worked as share-based companies involving all levels of society, making both huge profits and crippling losses.

Secondly, he knew the details of who at Polperro was involved in the trade, their personalities, where they lived and who their wives were.

Thirdly, Q's fictional writings reflect the wide economic and cultural parameters of south-western ports such as Polperro. This gave him a broader perspective than many inland novelists.

Sections of 'Gleanings' of particular interest to Quiller and Couch scholars

1. Job as Banker (pp. 43-56)
2. An Olla Podrida of Local History (pp. 56-69)
3. The Tenants of Various Farms: the Quillers (pp. 70-71)
4. a. Manor of Raphiel Conventionary Rents, Lady-Day 1800 (pp. 75-95)
    b. Manor of Raphiel Freeholds at Rack Rents, 1800 (p. 96)
    c. Commentary on the above (pp. 97-106
    d. Heriots due (1800) (pp.107-8)
    This material possibly provides a complete list of households in Polperro, with name, age, address, etc.
5. Marine Insurance (pp. 186-187)
6. The Polperro Smugglers (pp. 188-204)
7. Privateering from Polperro, (pp. 204-209)
8. The Profits from Smuggling and Privateering (pp. 219-222)

Through the loss in 1822 of so much material, the above provides an incomplete yet fascinating picture of the activities of the Quillers and other important families in the Polperro area.

The trading arc

Gleanings reveals Polperro's arc of trading, even if the loss of material reduces the number of identifiable ports:
1. Some men and women were employed in seasonal work in Newfoundland, presumably in fish processing.
2. There was the export of pilchards to Leghorn, Venice and Naples in Italy.
3. There was the import of port from Oporto in Portugal.
4. Guernsey was centrally important.
5. Roscoff and Morlaix in Brittany became important smuggling centres.
6. London was more a banking than a trading centre.
7. There are occasional references to Alderney, south Wales and Ireland.

(ii) Polperro's Smuggling Story by Jeremy Rowett Johns, 1994

Polperro's Smuggling Story was first published by the Toby Press in 1994, with subsequent editions by the Polperro Heritage Press. This analysis uses the third edition n.d., which was a 'Gift of the Publisher' to the Morrab Library in Penzance. Relevant sections are:

Acknowledgements

James Derriman, The Royal Institution of Cornwall, the National Maritime Museum, the Public Records Office, Mrs Sheila de Burlet and the Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch Fund

Situation of Polperro: a map of the area as found in Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro (p.6)

Preface

In the preface, Rowett Johns reveals the smuggling background of the Rowett and Johns families of Polperro, along with others such as the Quillers and the Langmaids (p.vii).

Although he acknowledges a debt to secondary sources, he explains how, as far as possible, primary sources were relied upon:

• Zephaniah Job Records; The Royal Institution of Cornwall;
• Carteret Priaulx Papers; the Priaulx Library, Guernsey;
• Admiralty records; the Public Record Office;
• Newspaper Reports; British Newspaper Library
• (Also see his bibliography, pp. 84-5).

Introduction

He introduces the subject of smuggling and privateering at Polperro, particularly from 1775, a year before the Declaration of American Independence, to 1815, the close of the Napoleonic Wars. At the centre of such activities was Zephaniah Job, who came to Polperro from St Agnes in 1770. A generous tribute is paid to Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro. Facing page 1 is Polperro (from an engraving by Henry Shore 1892) - Commander Henry N. Shore's Smuggling Days and Smuggling Ways and Old Foye Days are included in 'Secondary Sources'.

Chapter One: Free-Traders and Fortune

This comprises an introduction to Polperro, its seafaring traditions and its environment, including:

• that East Polperro and West Looe traditionally existed within the parish of Talland, with the family of Couch buried in the graveyard.
• Talland Bay as a location for contraband.
• information on Zephaniah Job
• the importance of Guernsey, its merchants and merchant companies to the smuggling trade at Polperro.
• privateering: how it was organised and run.
• Polperro boats: an investigation of six Polperro smuggling and privateering craft, their owners, including the Quillers, their captains or skippers, their cargoes and their profits.

Chapter Two: The Smuggler's Banker

This chapter is about Zephaniah Job, looking at:

• his early life at St Agnes from 1750 to about 1770 (p.13).
• his time as a school-teacher in Polperro, c.1775 (pp.13-16).
• his role as Rev. Sir Harry Trelawny's steward and agent from 1786 (pp.16-17).
• how he provided the Quillers with financial and legal services with an introduction to the Quiller family (pp.18-20).
• the names of the Guernsey merchants or smuggling companies, their relationship to Polperro, their connection to London merchant banks and their financial rewards, for the period 1778 to 1804 (pp.23-28). 

Chapter Three: The Swallow's Tale

This chapter investigates the activities of one of Polperro's smuggling and privateering craft, the Swallow. It was owned by Thomas Effard, Zephaniah Job, John Quiller and William Johns, and was based at Looe.

The map 'Polperro in the County of Cornwall in the year 1805' covers an area extending from the Looe to the Fowey river. 

Chapter Four: Polperro and the Revenue Men

This chapter covers:

• a period of prosperity from 1783 to 1793 (pp. 39 & 40). 
• an account of a raid on Polperro by Revenue officers and militiamen on 5 March, 1794, and a subsequent affray (pp. 40 to 42). (Jonathan Couch was five years old at the time.)
• the trial of John Langmaid at the Old Bailey in London for his part in the affray and the intervention of Job (pp. 42-45).
• Lieutenant Gabriel Bray, commander of the Revenue's most feared cutter The Hind, and the problems of catching and convicting smugglers, 1793 to 179 (pp. 45 to 49). 

Chapter Five: The Lottery's Last Chance

This is an account of the 'Lottery Incident' covering:

• the shooting of Humphrey Glinn (pp.49-51).
• the capture of the Lottery by Gabriel Bray of the Hind in May 1799 (pp.51-54).
• Roger Toms turns 'King's Evidence' (pp.54-58).
• Tom Potter is tried and hanged for the murder of Humphrey Glinn on 18 December 1800.
   

Chapter Six: Preventive Measures

This addresses the various preventive measures taken in the wake of the 'Lottery Incident':

• the continuing hunt for the remaining crew members of the Lottery in 1799.
• the shooting of Robert Mark in January 1802, (pp. 63-66).
• the stationing of the first preventive boat at Polperro in 1801 (pp.67-69). 
• counter-measures by the smugglers.
• Government measures and Acts, 1802, 1805, 1807, to counter smuggling (pp. 70-72).
• end of the Trade, (pp. 72-77).
• the death of Zephaniah Job on 31 January, 1822.

With peace in 1815, privateering ended and smuggling from Guernsey became very difficult, resulting in Roscoff in Brittany taking its place. By 1835 smuggling had ceased to be profitable.

Appendix: Polperro's Smuggling Chronology, 1778 to 1822

This has biographical notes on:

• Trelawny, Job and the Quillers.
• the Smugglers, including the Quillers.
• the Revenue Men, including Gabriel Bray.
• the crew names of Polperro Preventive Boat 1801.
• the Guernsey Merchants: the four main merchant companies.
  the London Agents.
• Polperro Boats: type / armaments / owners / if seized by customs etc.

(iii) The Smugglers' Banker. The Story of Zephaniah Job of Polperro by Jeremy Rowett Johns. Polperro Heritage Press, 1997

Why This Book is Important

For those interested in Q's Quiller inheritance,this is a central book of reference. It builds upon the foundations of Jonathan Couch's History of Polperro of 1871, Frank Perrycoste's Gleanings from the Records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro of 1930, and J. R. Johns' Polperro's Smuggling Story of 1994.  

Most importantly, as Johns acknowledges in the Foreword, is the Zephaniah Job collection of the R. I. C. in the Courtney Library at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro, Cornwall. This was the material originally discovered by Frank Perrycoste in Crumplehorn Mill at Polperro in the early 1920s. 

The Smugglers' Banker has one chapter specifically devoted to the Quillers. The Index shows how frequently the Quillers are referred to in the text, specifically: Elizabeth, Jane (wife of Jonathan Couch and Q's grandmother), John, Mary, Richard and William. In additon, a Quiller family tree is printed on page 166. As far as is known, John Quiller (1741-1804) was the founder of the smuggling and privateering dynasty at Polperro, one lasting for three generations.

At its centre in Polperro was Zephaniah Job, who acted as accountant, banker, organiser and solicitor to the Quillers and others, as well as acting as steward to the Trelawnys of Trelawne and the Eastcotts of Lansallos and Lostwithiel. 

It is unsurprising, as the Introduction maintains, that after Job's death in 1822, an attempt was made to destroy incriminating material, but enough survived to enable Perrycoste and Johns to create a picture of the man and his activities.

Q's smuggling and privateering stories, whether embedded in novels or contained in short stories, were based on facts, many of which can be found in the works of Perrycoste and Johns. This enables the reader to see how Q adapted fact for the purposes of fiction, a technique he employed in his imaginative works. No interpretation of Q's fictional writings can be seen as satisfactory without this understanding. He did go further, but it is a furtherance based on solid foundations.

Structure

Between the Foreword and the Introduction is a Chronology, starting with Job's baptism at St Agnes, in west Cornwall, in 1750, and concluding with his death at Polperro, in south-east Cornwall, in 1822. There are parallel columns, the right giving the main events in Job's personal life, and the left the most relevant historical events.

Chapter One: Fugitive from St Agnes

Chapter One investigates the little that is known of Job's early life at St Agnes, a mining parish on the north-west coast of Cornwall. His forebears came from further west again, the parish of Gwithian, and would have been Cornish speakers. 

Chapter Two: Polperro Schoolmaster

There is a description of Polperro in the 1770s (pp. 21 to 24), followed by an account of fishing syndicates and smuggling companies in the 1770s (pp. 24 to 30).

Chapter Three: Freetraders and Privateers

This covers:

• Job as agent in Polperro for the Guernsey merchants (pp.31-33).
• an account of privateering from 1778, the year when France joined the American War of Independence on the American side (pp. 33-35).
• the activities of the Swallow and Good Intent privateers (pp. 35-36).
• the troubled relationship between the privateers, including the Quillers, and the Customs Board (pp. 36-38).

Chapter Four: The Swallow's Tale

A study of the armed lugger Swallow, part owned by the Quillers and Job, from 1778 to 1783 (pp. 39-46).

Chapter Five: Trelawny Steward

A study of the business relationship between Job and the Rev. Sir Harry Trelawny, Bart., JP, etc., from 1786 to 1822 (pp. 47-60). 

Reference: Mr Rice of East Looe, who initially trained Jonathan Couch in medicine (p.7). 

Reference: Jonathan Couch physician to Job and the Trelawnys, 1814, (p. 59).

Chapter Six: The Tragic Quillers

A study of the smuggling and privateering family of Quiller, from the birth of John Quiller at Lansallos in 1741, to the drowning of his grandsons, John and Richard Toms Quiller, brothers to Jane Couch, off Tenerife in 1812. Jane Quiller was the grandmother of Q (pp. 61-68).

Chapter Seven: Captain Gabriel Bray

This chapter looks at:

• Customs and Revenue directed raids on Polperro, March and April, 1794, and September 1797 & April 1798, (pp.70-71, 77-80).
• Lieutenant Gabriel Bray, commander of the Hind revenue cutter, (from p.74).
• Job's influence with the magistracy (p.72).
• The trial at the Old Bailey, London, of John Landmaid, (pp. 72-73). 

Chapter Eight: Revolutionary War

This chapter covers:

• 1793, the fitting out of privateers by the Quillers and others, backed by the Guernsey merchants and the London banks (pp. 81-82).
• the English Channel as an area of intense and confused conflict (pp. 82-88). 

Chapter Nine: Man of Business

Job's business and commercial activities, (pp. 89-97)..

Chapter Ten: Smugglers' Banker

• Job's dealings with the Trelawnys, the Quillers and others, the Guernsey merchants and the London bankers, (pp. 99-107).
• Job's Polperro bank, (pp.105-107).

Chapter Eleven: Guernsey Merchants

A study of the Guernsey merchant houses1778-1805 (pp.109-118).

Chapter Twelve: The Lottery Incident

A study of the tragic 'Lottery Incident', 1798-1807, (pp. 119-130).

Chapter Thirteen: The Revenue Men

This chapter covers:

• the increasing effectiveness of preventive measures (pp.131-133, 136, 140).
• the shooting of Robert Mark in 1802, (pp. 134-35).
• the story of Robert Jeffery 1807-1810, (pp. 137-39.

Chapter Fourteen: Spiritual and Temporal

• Job's character (pp. 141-143).
• Job's business dealings with the clergy (pp.142-146).
• the notorious 'Reverend' Whitmore (p. 146).
• the Rev. Richard Doige of Talland (p.147). 

Chapter Fifteen: Death and Destruction

• Polperro harbour (pp. 149-152).
• Job and Jonathan Couch (p.153). 
• Job's death, his estate and his legacy (pp.53-159). 

Additional Information about Zephaniah Job

It is now possible to extend slightly the known information on Zephaniah Job found in The Smugglers' Banker. 

Johns informs us of how Zephaniah Job was baptised by the Rev. James Walker in the parish church of St Agnes – which in Q's stories is always referred to as St Ann's – on 22 January, 1750. Zephaniah's grandfather had moved a few miles east from the parish of Gwithian, in the Hundred of Penwith, to St Agnes, in the Hundred of Pydar.

Cornish was spoken in Penwith until the 1770s, so Zephaniah's grandparents would almost certainly have had the language, with the grandson quite possibly having a smattering.

Where in the History of Polperro Jonathan Couch attempts to translate Cornish placenames into English, it is difficult to see who could have been his consultant other than Zephaniah Job.  

Johns' 'Chronology' in The Smugglers' Banker records John Wesley's visit to Polperro in 1768, a couple of years before Job's arrival. 

The Wesleys in Cornwall edited by John Pearce from Charles and John Wesley's Journals,  informs us of how John Wesley preached at St Agnes on Tuesday, 30 August, 1768, again on the Sunday before arriving at Polperro on Friday 16 September 1768, where in a 'Perfume' of 'pilchards and conger eels', he preached in 'heavy rain', 'yet none went away' (Pearce, p.150). Those listening would have included the forebears of Jonathan Couch, later leader of Polperro Methodism.  

Wesley preferred to speak at Waylands Farm, between Looe and Polperro, where a stone now commemorates the spot. A photograph of the 'Preaching Stone' can be seen in The Religious Heritage of North and East Cornwall, by Canon David Annear, along with a body of information about the Rev. Sir Harry Trelawny, the sixth Baronet (1756-1834). After her marriage, Mary Trelawny, daughter to Sir Harry, lived in Brittany, while Sir Harry, who in early years had been a correspondent of John Wesley, died in Catholic orders in Italy. Sir Harry was Jonathan Couch's mentor, with M. Arzell, a renograde priest, as his Latin tutor. After qualifying, Jonathan Couch became medical advisor to the Trelawnys at Trelawne.

The Rev. James Walker of St Agnes, who had baptised Zephaniah Job, was the brother of the Rev. Samuel Walker of Truro – and Talland, 1747-1752 – one of the country's most distinguished Calvinist divines. The Walkers and the Wesleys differed theologically.  

There were occasions before 1768 when John Wesley field-preached to the mining community of St Agnes – 2 September 1757, 8 September 1765, 14 September 1766 – invariably attracting a 'large crowd' (Pearce, pp. 125, 143,146).

If Perrycoste's Gleanings are to be believed, Anglicanism in the Polperro region was not as well served as at St Agnes (Perrycoste, pp. 122-138).  Perhaps this goes some way to explaining Jonathan's eventual aversion to Anglicanism. Wesley's Journals evidence the particular hostility of privateering crew. In a footnote to Charles Wesley's entry of 18 July, 1743, Pearce comments:

It will be noted that the worst scenes of physical violence in opposition were found in the ports where crews were being recruited for the Navy and fitted out for privateers.

Maybe this explains why there is no record of Charles or John Wesley ever preaching in Looe or Fowey. Could it possibly have been worse than St Ives!.

Smugglers preferred to work covertly. It was not until 24 July, 1753, that John Wesley 'found an accursed thing among them: wellnigh one and all bought uncustomed goods'.

It is difficult to see into Job's soul, but apart from not working on a Sunday and occasionally attending Sunday worship, as Johns intimates, Job possessed little religious feeling. Zephaniah Job was a man of the 18th century. Whether he was any different from the Quillers is unknown. 

(iv) The History of Polperro by Dr Jonathan Couch

Chapter V. Smuggling, Privateering, etc.

Commander Shore, Frank Perrycoste, Hamilton Jenkin, J. R. Johns and Q looked back to this chapter as authoritative and foundational, because Jonathan Couch was writing with direct knowledge of the subject. He knew those he wrote about, he experienced many of the events described and he heard accounts from the smugglers and privateers themselves.

Jonathan Couch was born in 1789. He did not witness the 'first American war', when between the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the declaration of war with France in 1778, the first Polperro privateers saw active service, but he did witness the Napoleonic Wars when privateering and smuggling were at their most profitable and under the overall control of Zephaniah Job, the 'smugglers' banker'. 

Jonathan Couch knew Job and the younger Quillers, possibly as their doctor. He was a doctor to the Trelawnys. In 1815, he married Jane Quiller, the granddaughter of John Quiller, and moved into the former Quiller residence by the bridge in Polperro. The house had been specifically adapted for the concealment of contraband and smugglers on the run.

The chapter is divided into sections, although without headings, in which smuggling and privateering are treated separately.

Smuggling: 

1. Introductory paragraph, (pp. 82-83).
2. Smuggling vessels, including the Unity (p.83).
3. A smuggling incident taken from 'oral testimony' (pp. 83-84).
4. The story of the Vigilant smuggling smack from December 1802 (pp 84 & 85).
5. The shooting of Robert Mark in 1810 (p. 85).
6. The 'Lottery Incident' (pp. 85-88). 

Privateering:

7. Introductory paragraph (p. 88).
8. A story from the first American War and the intervention of Zephaniah Job (p.89).
9. How Zephaniah Job came to Polperro from St Agnes (pp. 89-90).
10. The growing importance of Zephaniah Job to the smuggling and privateering companies in Polperro (pp. 90 & 91).
11. The story of the Providence or Grecian related by H. L. Rowett (p. 91).
12. How William Quiller (1790-1823) entered government service (pp. 91-92.
13. The story of Richard Rowett (b. 1770) of the Unity off Ushant (pp. 92-93.
14. The story of Robert Jeffrey and the island of Sombrero (pp. 93 to 98). 

Smuggling:

15. The end of the smuggling trade (pp. 98-99).
16. A concluding paragraph (p. 99).

The Importance of History of Polperro

Much of what is included in Chapter Five found its way into other books on smuggling and privateering or was expanded upon by later writers.

Q used his grandfather's writings, sometimes following them closely, at other times adapting them for his own literary purposes. For all Q scholars the History of Polperro is obligatory reading.

(v) The Life of Jonathan Couch, F. L. S., by Bertha Couch, 1891

There are two chapters of particular relevance:

Chapter II 

The drowning of John Quiller sailing from Roscoff aboard the Three Brothers in 1804. 
The appearance of John Quiller, brother of Jane Couch, in the bedroom of his mother in Polperro when being captured aboard the Black Joke, off Algiers, in 1810. John Quiller was the son of Richard and Mary Quiller. 

Chapter VII

A letter, dated January 26, 1809, from John Quiller to Mary, his mother, while commanding the government lugger Black Joke. 

vi. The Private Memoirs of Jonathan Couch (1789-1870) of Polperro

In Section 18 there are three paragraphs on three generations of Quiller:
i.   Captain John Quiller, snr.
ii.  Captain Richard Quiller, son of John and father of Jane Couch.
iii. Captains Richard and John Quiller, sons of Richard and brothers of Jane Couch.

Plus information on Zephaniah Job. 

5. Fowey-Roscoff

(i) Old Foye Days. Part II. An Authentic Account of the Exploits of the Smugglers in and around the Port of Fowey compiled from various sources by Commander Hon. Henry N. Shore, R.N.

Availability

This work was published in 1907. The Morrab Library in Penzance possesses one copy and copies may be found elsewhere. The book was re-issued as a Classic Reprint by Forgotten Books, 25 April 2018. 

Introduction 

Commander Shore, an accepted authority on Cornish sea-going affairs, does not mention the Quillers and rarely Polperro. Yet the work provides important textual information on the smuggling industry and cross-channel links with the Channel Islands and Roscoff in Brittany.

Shore uses the 'droll' technique in much of the work, relating material through an informed narrator, as does Q in some of his short stories.

Polperro lies between the more significant ports of Fowey and Looe. The Quillers had business dealings in both. They auctioned their 'prizes', foreign craft captured during times of war, on the quay by the King O' Prussia Inn in Fowey.

As information about Roscoff, from which John Quiller set off on his last journey in 1804, is hard to come by, Shore's section, 'Roscoff. A Famous Smuggling Entrepot', is especially valuable. 

The Text

'Introductory'

Customs at Fowey (p.3)

This area was overseen by:

• a Customs Board and Commissioners in London, who posted official notices in the Sherborne and Yeovil Mercury;
• a Collector of Customs at Plymouth, supported by local dragoons and preventive craft;
• a Custom House at Fowey, with preventive craft on call and Riding Officers patrolling the coast.

From 1801 there was a Customs presence at Polperro. A Directory of 1791, accessed by Shore, gives the complement at Fowey as a Surveyor, a Controller and a Collector of Customs, 3 Custom-house officers, 1 hand-waiter, 3 Salt-officers, 1 Searcher of salt, and 1 Excise-officer – a staff of 12. 

Salt being cheaper in France was smuggled into Cornwall (p. 84).

The relevance to Q's Novels and Short Stories

Customs officials and officers feature in a number of Q's novels and short stories. 

Mr Pennefather, Collector of Customs at Troy (Fowey), is introduced in Chapter Five of The Mayor of Troy as a secondary character and is also Riding Officer in Chapter Six.

In Chapter Eleven of Harry Revel, the Glad Tidings of Looe has to avoid the 'Water guard' in the Lower Tamar and in Chapter Twelve a group of smugglers encounter the 'red-coats' and a 'Riding Officer' from Plymouth when unloading a cargo on Rame Head.

The short story 'The Haunted Dragoon' from I Saw Three Ships has a company of dragoons travelling from Plymouth to Polperro, while The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem, from the same, has dragoons and a riding officer arriving at Talland Bay. In The Mayor of Troy, a Riding Officer leads a company of Dragoons to intercept a landing of contraband at Talland in 'The Battle of Talland Cove', (Chapter Seven).

'The Lottery Incident' at Polperro (p.4)

Shore recounts the incident and a footnote explains that Shore first published an account in the Western Morning News, under the title 'A POLPERRO TRAGEDY; or, THE TRUE STORY OF THE LOTTERY' (April 5th and 8th, 1905).

'The Lottery Incident' is also recounted in: 

• The History of Polperro, J. Couch, 1871, pp. 85-88.
• Polperro's Smuggling Story, Jeremy Rowett Johns, 1994, pp. 10, 51-68.
• The Smugglers' Banker, Jeremy Rowett Johns, 1997, ch. 12, 'The Lottery Incident'. 

The Lottery Incident in Q's fiction

It acts as the basis of the short story 'The Haunted Dragoon' from I Saw Three Ships of 1893.

'The Fight at Lantic Bay' (pp.19-31)

The Editor's Note gives October 1835 as the date of  last 'affray' between coastguards and smugglers. It took place at Lantic Bay between Polperro and Polruan. 

Affrays or fire-fights take place in Q's writings in:

• 'The Singular Adventure of a Small Free-Trader' from Old Fires etc., of 1900. It reputedly took place at Ropehaven on the Dodman in the spring of 1803.
• 'The Mystery of Joseph Laquedem' from Old Fires etc., taking place fictionally at Talland Cove on August 15, 1810. 
• Harry Revel, Chapter 12, at Rame Head in 1811.

Although the information provided by Johns establishes Jersey and Guernsey as the places where the Quillers chiefly did their business, Roscoff was not without its importance (Couch, B., p. 31). Shore observes that Roscoff in Brittany is the French port nearest to Cornwall and Devon. It is accessible even to open boats – the 'Mevagissey system' of fast row-boats which could cross in the hours of darkness.

The information in the chapter came to Shore from an informed Roscoff source, one who had observed the last phase of the smuggling or 'free-trading' industry. The source had access to records from 1763 – the year of John Quiller's marriage at the age of 22 years – with Roscoff exporting brandy and importing tobacco. The high-point of trade was between 1815 and 1840. As Zephaniah Job died in 1822 and John Quiller's grandsons, William and Thomas Quiller, drowned at sea in 1823, the Quillers little benefited from this halcyon time.

Roscoff's rise as a smuggling port was partly the result of the British Government's establishment of customs houses on the Channel Islands from 1767, with the French Government responding by making Roscoff a free-port or port d'entrepôt.

Even following Napoleon's 'Berlin Decree' of November 1806, in an attempt to strangle British trade, Roscoff was permitted to export brandy. Imports had to be surreptitious, often being obtained in the Channel Islands, where there were no duties, in a triangle of trade: Cornwall-Channel Islands-Roscoff. As smuggling companies often had offices and banking connections in London, there was an important fourth element, especially with concerns as profitable as the Quillers. (This is discussed in The Smugglers' Banker by Johns).

Shore's informant describes how developments in Roscoff necessitated the need for accommodation. Bertha Couch reveals how the Quillers lodged with a Mrs Magna in 1804, who seems to have accommodated others from Polperro (Couch, B., p. 31). There was, according to the informant, who must have run contraband to Cornwall, a 'great hotel, like the one up at Fowey,' run by a 'Madam S-'. 

Some houses in Roscoff had 'subterranean passages and very deep cellars', while 'sheds and underground warehouses to which the goods were conveyed had doors that opened onto the sea, so that at high tide boats passed loaded into the sheds'. Remarkably, there was no right of search. Firms such as Malabee and de'Lisle (see The Smugglers' Banker p. 162) oversaw major operations.

After 1840, smuggling grew increasingly risky and less profitable, ceasing largely by the time Q was born in 1863. Yet Q's father knew the trade, passing the details on to Q, whose knowledge is always accurate, even in small details. He might well have spoken to those who had once been practitioners. 

6. Recorded Memories

i. A Memoir of William Pengelly of Torquay, F. R. S., Geologist, with a Selection from his Correspondence, edited by his daughter, Hester Pengelly, 1897.

William Pengelly was born at East Looe in Cornwall on January 12, 1812, when privateering craft could be seen moored in the river and smuggling was rife along the coast. 1812 was a tragic year for the Quillers with the drownings of John Quiller and Richard Toms Quiller, sons of Richard and Mary Quiller, and brothers to Jane who would become the second wife of Jonathan Couch. Job's bank was in full operation. Affairs in Looe were very much under the authority of Thomas Bond, town clerk of East and West Looe and later the writer of A History of Looe.

The word 'pen-gelly' in English means the 'end of a grove' and is a common place name and personal name in Cornwall. A local Looe tradition has them deriving from the Rame peninsula.

William Pengelly's mother was a Prout from Millbrook in the Rame peninsula, where Samuel Drew had spent 1784 making shoes by day and smuggling by night.

The Pengellys had long been seafarers, his father, Richard, captaining a coastal trader, and his uncle a trading and smuggling craft. William was brought up to the sea but was destined for another station in life.

Chapter 1: Early Years at School and at Sea. January, 1812-1830

Chapter One provides an account of his character and his early life at sea from 1824, when he was twelve, to 1828. What is of particular relevance are the accounts he made of his seafaring experiences and the seafarers he worked with (pp.3-10). They are a window into the world of seafaring men following the close of the Napoleonic Wars. However, a number of the seafarers must have gone to sea in the pre-Napoleonic period, retaining the beliefs and attitudes of the late 18th century.

There are six distinct accounts:

Account I
Life aboard a coastal trader (pp. 3-4).

Account II
How Richard Pengelly, following supernatural guidance, left his father's farm for the sea, even though his father had lost his life in the waves (p.4).

Account III
The sea-life of John Pengelly, former smuggler and privateer (pp. 5-7).

Account IV
The sea-life of shipmate George, who had sailed the world as a Royal Naval sailor (pp. 7-10).

Account V
William Pengelly's experience of shipwreck (p. 10).

Account VI
The benefits to William Pengelly of his seafaring experience (p. 11).

It is disappointing that little information relates to the period 1828 to 1830, when William Pengelly formed a friendship with Dr Jonathan Couch. 

For information, these references from H. Pengelly's 'Life of William Pengelly' are useful:

• 'Jonathan Couch', pp. 55 & 187.
• 'Q', p.274.
   
• See also: Q's Memories and Opinions pp. 2 & 52.

William Pengelly appears under 'Subscriber's Names' at the conclusion of the History of Polperro by Jonathan Couch, edited by Thomas Q. Couch, published 1871.

ii. Life of Samuel Drew by J. H. Drew, 1834

The Life of Samuel Drew, A. M. (1765-1833) of St Austell opens a window into the most humble and least investigated aspects of smuggling, the landmen who landed, hid and distributed contraband goods.

Neither the Quillers nor the Carters are mentioned in the text, yet between 1782 and 1784 Drew might have worked for both, either or neither. The St Austell Bay was an important landing place for mid-Cornwall, while the Rame peninsula served the lucrative market of Plymouth. Harry and Charles Carter are recorded as landing contraband on the peninsula in January 1788.

At the age of eight, as with Zephaniah Job and Harry Carter, Samuel Drew had gone to work at a mine dressing ore. At ten he was apprenticed to a St Blazey cobbler, where he was gradually drawn into smuggling activities. 

About this time his father was collecting editions of the Sherborne Mercury from Plymouth for distribution in Cornwall and suffered an attempted robbery at Batten Cliff, between Crafthole and Downderry on the Rame peninsula. In 1782, Samuel Drew obtained a cobbling job at Millbrook, near Downderry, subsequently moving to Cawsand, near Rame Head, and then back to Crafthole, with its adjoining smuggling cove of Portwrinkel. Smuggling was clearly more of interest than cobbling.

Drew would have been involved in signalling smuggling-craft into a bay, rowing out to unload, reloading on ponies on the beach and leading them along smuggling trails to a place of safety. The ponies would have been clipped and greased, with barrels slung either side.

Apparently, when a cargo was sighted at Portwrinkle the whole village turned out to help. It was a dangerous business when a sea was running and in Decmber 1784 Samuel Drew almost lost his life rowing an open boat (Chapter VI).

Following his joust with death Drew returned to St Austell, where he came under the influence of Dr Adam Clarke. In 1819, through Clarke's influence, Samuel Drew became editor of the Imperial Magazine, first in Liverpool and then in London. He published some of Jonathan Couch's early papers. In 1830, members of the council of London University requested his name to be forwarded for the vacant chair of Moral Philosophy, but indifferent health prevented it and in 1833 he died at St Austell.

7. Christopher Wallis, attorney, of Helston, Records edited by Dr James Whetter, The Cornish Banner or An Baner Kernewek, no 91 to 125, 1998 to 2006

Introduction

Zephaniah Job of Polperro (1750-1822), commonly called the 'Smugglers' Banker', and Helston attorney Christopher Wallis (1744-1826) provided different although overlapping services to the smuggling and privateering families and companies, specifically the Quillers of Polperro and the Carters of Breage-Germoe, in their respective localities, towards the end of the 1700s and the early 1800s. 

Wallis received a good education before entering the office of attorney Tobias Roberts of Helston in 1764; Job was trained to be a mine captain, requiring mathematical and technical expertise. When at Polperro Job probably relied for legal advice on Thomas Bond of Looe, someone Wallis knew (see 1 Nov. 1792).

Wallis's legal expertise proved invaluable to the Carters, a family engaged in licit and illicit trade. Financially, the Carters fended for themselves. The Quillers looked legally and financially to Job.

While Job only left Polperro for exceptional reasons, Wallis travelled frequently, even staying for long periods in London, where he developed useful contacts.

Knowledge of the Quillers comes mainly but not totally from Job's surviving records, which have been studied by Frank Perrycoste and Jeremy Rowett Johns. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the surviving journals of Christopher Wallis. One of the few attempts to remedy this can be found in seven editions of An Baner Kernewek/The Cornish Banner, edited by the economic historian, the late Dr James Whetter. The following is a list of relevant articles:

No.  91, Feb. 1998, Christopher Wallis: Helston Attorney, 1781-3
No.  96, May 1999, Christopher Wallis: 10 Years On, 1790-2
No. 107, Feb. 2002, Christopher Wallis in 1793
No. 109, Aug. 2002, Christopher Wallis: 1794
No. 115, Feb. 2004, Christopher Wallis, Helston attorney, in
No. 118, Nov. 2004, Christopher Wallis in 1797
No. 125, Aug. 2006, Christopher Wallis in 1799.

The Carters were well-known figures in Helston and Penzance around 1800. In the winter of 1797-8, Davies Gilbert of St Erth, MP for Helston (1804-6) and Bodmin (1806-32), and President of the Royal Society (1827-30), took Josiah Wedgwood Junior and family on "excursions to the King of Prussia's Cove (John Carter) and Land's End' (Todd, p.115). Davies was mentor to Humphry Davy of Penzance. He was a relative of Thomas Bond, visiting Looe in 1804 when Bond was made Chief Magistrate, no doubt to the gratification of the Quillers (Todd, p.141). 

Thomas Branwell of Penzance, almost certainly the same as was grandfather to the Brontë novelists, had involvement with Wallis in September 1797. Humphry Davy (b. 1778), Maria Branwell (b. 1783) and Elizabeth Branwell (b. 1776) would have regularly seen the Carters in Penzance. In 1796, Wallis acted for Richard Trevithick and the venturers of Ding Dong Mine, to the north of Penzance, in a celebrated dispute with Boulton and Watt. 

From the literary point of view, then, it is virtually certain - which Mrs Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Brontë  fails to acknowledge - that the Brontë rectory of Haworth in Yorkshire would have been redolent with tales about Humphry Davy, Wallis, Gilbert, Richard Trevithick, the Carters and even the Quillers, who landed contraband in the Penwith area. 

Maria Brontë, nee Branwell, and Aunt Elizabeth Branwell were reared in a culturally richer area than that of Haworth in Yorkshire, stimulating the imagination of Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë with remembrances of what must have appeared a fantastical world. 

Cornwall's maritime position, so different from landlocked Haworth, opened it to trade and influences from North America, Iberia and the western Mediterranean. If Charlotte and Emily Brontë had travelled to Leghorn, where Harry Carter resided in 1788, or to the Rome beloved of Sir Humphry Davy, or to Laveno on the Italian lakes, where the local Roman Bishop in the early 1830s was Sir Harry Trelawny, instead of Brussels, in Belgium, what a cultural liberation would have followed. 

International events such as the American War of Independence, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars directly affected the Quillers and the Carters, presenting opportunities and problems, some requiring the interventions of Job and Wallis, along with those who could 'pull strings' in high places, such as Davies Gilbert, Sir Harry Trelawny and even Sir Humphry Davy. The prisoner exchange of John and Harry Carter for two Frenchmen in November 1779, must have resulted from someone's influence at the Admiralty in London.

What we have in the records of Job and Wallis is actual history, specific facts, not the generalizations of historians. This is life as it was lived, often confusing, sometimes contradictory, but always fascinating.

Captain Harry Carter and Christopher Wallis: A Chronology from 1749 to 1799

Harry Carter's parents: Francis Carter (1712-1774), miner and smallholder, and  Agnes (1714-1784). Both would have had some knowledge of the Cornish language.

1749:  Harry born in Pengersick, Breage, Cornwall. Pengersick is actually in the parish of Germoe on the road down to Praa Sands.

Francis and Agnes had 8 sons and 2 daughters. Those known: John, the oldest; Thomas (1737-1818); Henry or Harry (1749-1829); Charles (1757-1803) (p. xviii).

1758-9 to 1766
Worked in the Breage mining district, first 'shoding' ore, second underground.

1766
John Francis and Harry start a smuggling and fishing enterprise from Porthleah or King's Cove.

1774 onwards
Worked sloop of 16 to 18 Cornish tons – 2 men
Owned sloop of 32 Cornish tons
Owned cutter of 50 Cornish tons – 10 men

(1776, July 4: Declaration of American Independence)

1777
Owned cutter of 197 Cornish tons, a privateer with 36 men and 16 carriage guns 

1777 December
Guernsey to St Malo in Brittany where, having no maritime pass, Harry is arrested as a pirate. 

1778
(February 6: Treaty between France and the American colonists.
March: Embargo on all British ships in French ports.)
May 1: Harry Carter imprisoned in St Malo and Dinan.
June: John Carter arrested at St Malo while bringing 'certificates' for Harry.
August: John and Harry paroled in Josselin.

1779 November
John and Harry exchanged for 2 Frenchmen, arranged by the Admiralty. Arrive Breage on December 24.
John offered credit by the Guernsey merchants to rebuild his business.

1780
Dunkirk privateers, including the Black Prince, 16 guns and 60 men, active in the English Channel. Harry Carter is arrested as a pirate but freed through 'Lords of Admiralty'.
Harry purchases privateering cutters of 19 and of 20 guns.
December: sails from Guernsey to Mounts Bay.
December 24: Collector of Customs at Penzance requests Harry Carter to intercept the Black Prince, which is eventually sunk off Padstow.

1781
July 4: First recorded meeting of Christopher Wallis and Charles Carter.

1782
May 9: meeting of Christopher Wallis with smugglers Coppinger, John, Francis and Thomas Carter.
August: Christopher Wallis sees Charles Carter and brother (?) and William Gluyas of Marazion over prize or wreck. 

1783
End of war with France, Spain and the Americans.
Guernsey merchants arrive in Cornwall to settle accounts. Christopher Wallis meets with Mr Clansie, Francis, John, Robert and Thomas Carter, and others.

1785
Christopher Wallis sells Bochym to Sir Harry Trelawny. 

1786
Zephaniah Job takes stewardship of Trelawne in 1786, subsequently having to service the debt. Wallis appears to have maintained contact with Trelawny and Job.
Harry Carter marries Elizabeth Flindall of Helford, as recorded in the Manaccan Marriage Register: 

1787
November: Owns cutter of 140 Cornish Tons, 16 carriage guns. 

1788
January 30: Severely wounded when landing contraband by crew of man-of-war off Cawsand, where Charles Carter awaits him. £300 reward offered for his capture. Hides in Acton Castle and at Marazion, possibly with Gluyas.
October 24: Escapes by boat to Leghorn in Italy, arriving late December.

1789
January: sails from Leghorn.
April 19: arrives at New York. Meets Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury.

1790
August: sails from New York to Breage via Dunkirk, arriving October 10.

1791
April 1: warned of possible arrest – by (Wallis ?)
April 19: sails from Mounts Bay to Roscoff.

1792
May: visited by his brother's children.
October 31: Christopher Wallis meets Sir Harry Trelawny at Trelawne and spends the night in Looe.
November 1: Christopher Wallis meets Zephaniah Job and Thomas Bond in Looe. Looe expenses 7s 6d.
November: Harry Carter returns from Roscoff to Cornwall.
December 24: with war imminent Harry Carter sails again for Roscoff.

1793
January 21: Louis XVI executed.
January 25: Christopher Wallis dines at Bochym with the Trelawnys and four émigré French priests.
February 1: War declared between Britain and France.
               2: Embargo placed on British vessels.
March: Harry Carter, McCulloch and Clansie to Morlaix as prisoners.
April 6: Committee of Public Safety formed.
June: The Reign of Terror.
July 24: Christopher Wallis meets a Mr Clansie.
October 5: Christianity abolished in France.
November 27: Christopher Wallis writes to Zephaniah Job about the wrecking of the Three Brothers, bound for Naples, off the Lizard. 

1794
July 28: Convention decrees the right of prisoners to know their charge – many freed. 

1795
January 23: Harry Carter liberated.
August 22: Harry Carter arrives in Falmouth.
October 5: Spain declares war on Britain.

1797
June 3: Thomas Carter, son of Robert Carter, committed to Exeter gaol but Christopher Wallis effects his release.

1799
Attorney General files information regarding Richard, Robert Senior, Robert Junior, Thomas, Francis and William Carter for trial on May 7.
September 7: Christopher Wallis meets with Francis Carter, Henry (Harry) Carter and Charles Carter regarding family accounts.

This entry marks the end of available information.
 

Christopher Wallis of Helston, attorney to the Carters and the Quillers

The records of Zephaniah Job of Polperro are paralleled in the far west of Cornwall by those of Helston attorney Christopher Wallis. As Perrycoste and Johns have thrown light on the Quillers and their associates with their work on the account books and correspondence of Job, so Dr James Whetter has thrown light on the Carters of Breage-Germoe and others in the area of Kerrier-Penwith with his study of the Wallis journals.

Whetter's work is of interest to researchers into the Quillers and the Couches because the Quillers and the Carters ran similar ventures, and because Wallis had dealings with Sir Harry Trelawny, Zephaniah job and Thomas Bond. Furthermore, St Agnes, the St Annes of Q's stories, the home parish of the Job, lies less than eight miles north of Helston.

Whetter's study of the Wallis journals was published in various editions of An Baner Kernewek or The Cornish Banner, the magazine he edited and which ceased with his death. Wallis and Job records can be located today at the Courtney Library of the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro.

Christopher Wallis was born in Penzance and baptised at Madron, probably by the Rev. Dr Walter Borlase, in the momentous year of 1744.

Henry Pelham had only recently formed his Whig administration, with the local support of the Borlases, but with Cornwall's 44 MPs divided into Whigs and Tories, some shading into Jacobites. Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, was waiting to cross the channel, with his claim supported by France and Spain. 

The Wesleys and their infant societies were facing persecution from the Established Church. This was led by the Rev. Dr Walter Borlase, supported by squires such as Stephen Usticke of Botallack, and made dangerous by crews of St Ives privateers.

The opening of mines and associated industries, with sudden wealth for a few and relative destitution for many, posed a further challenge to the established order.

The political crisis arrived and passed with the failed second Jacobite rising in 1745-6, after which the Industrial Revolution developed and trade, licit and illicit, dramatically expanded, with Cornwall partaking of both. 

In 1764, Wallis was apprenticed to Tobias Roberts, attorney of Helston, taking over his office on Roberts' death in 1783. His journals commenced in 1781, with matters relating to smuggling and privateering quickly appearing. It is distinctly likely that Roberts and Wallis were involved in the prisoner exchange of John and Harry Carter for two Frenchmen in 1778-9, so that involvement with the Carters was well established when Wallis took over.

The involvement of Christopher Wallis with the expanding smuggling and privateering business of the Carters came at about the time Zephaniah Job was becoming involved with John Quiller. Channel life must have been increasingly complex, with Cornwall, Guernsey, Brittany and London all involved.

Legal advice was of central importance, and in this Job was deficient, having been trained as a mine captain. One who had been trained as an attorney, but who never openly practised, was Thomas Bond of Looe. Browne claims Bond to have had a private fortune but fails to say where it came from. It is possible that Job consulted Bond on confidential matters, as Bond himself was probably involved in a range of licit and illicit activities. In The Mayor of Troy, Q calls him 'the deepest man in Looe'. Q knew more than we do.

In November 1781, Wallis went to London 'dealing with shipping and smuggling matters' (Whetter, no. 9, p. 21). On April 25, 1799, he 'attended 12 Exchequer causes v. Attorney General' with 'Carter and nine others' on one side. (Whetter, no.125, p. 21).

The Quillers, through Job, must have required similar representation in London, but via whom is unknown. The Guernsey merchants would have had available quality legal advice, through which Job could have worked.

Wallis had dealings with Zephaniah Job over the wreck of the Three Brothers of Looe: 'writing Mr. Job of Looe thereon', dated to November 27, 1794. (Whetter, no.109, pp. 14-5): possibly this was to Zephaniah Job of Polperro via Thomas Bond of Looe – unless Job had a Looe office. 

The Looe connection seems initially to have been through Sir Harry Trelawny, who purchased the house of Bochym from Wallis in 1785. On October 31, 1792, Wallis slept in Looe when on the following day he 'Attended Mr Job . . . (and) . . . Undersheriff Mr Bond' about a Trelawny matter. The following year Wallis was dining with the Trelawnys at Bochym (Whetter, no.107, p. 27). 

8. Penzance, the Branwell-Brontë Connection

i. Brontë Territories: Cornwall and the Unexplored Maternal Legacy, 1760-1860, by Dr Melissa Hardie

It is hardly likely that anyone coming to investigate the Quiller family expects to end up at the parsonage of Patrick Brontë in Haworth, Yorkshire.

In 2019, American academic Dr Melissa Hardie published a ground-breaking study, Brontë Territories: Cornwall and the Unexplored Maternal Legacy, 1760-1860. Unexpected, because from the time of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the Branwells of Penzance have been viewed as peripheral figures. This position can no longer be sustained.

When Dr Hardie died, her research papers were deposited in the Morrab Library in Penzance, where the Q Project is based. Apparently, Hardie was intending to publish additional studies as Brontë Territories far from exhausts the accumulated information.

Hardie has opened up a whole new area for research, which it is hoped others will develop. The present study is a minor contribution. It suggests the possibility that a Penwith oral tradition, as found in the writings of William Bottrell, was conveyed to the young Brontës by Elizabeth Branwell or 'Aunt Elizabeth' and can be identified in the juvenile writings and even in the novels of Charlotte, Emily and Anne.

This present writer is a Q not a Brontë specialist. The following and later the detailed analysis of one Bottrell 'droll', with possible Branwell-Brontë links, goes as far as time allows. 

As one who knew Hardie well, it can be confirmed that the use of her papers in the cause of further research was her wish and expectation.  

In relation to this study on the Quillers, William Bottrell, the Carter family of Prussia Cove and smuggling, along with probable connections to the Branwells, are all mentioned in Dr Hardie's work: an unexpected but interesting development requiring more work. 

A summary of material covered by Hardie in her book relevant to this study.

Contents
Author's note etc.

Part I:  Penwith and environs: The Land's End
          1. Living at the edge
          2. Creators of Penzance
          3. Language, legend and literature – stories and storytellers

1. Family connections
2. The oral tradition and droll tellers
3. The antiquarians and historians
4. The Methodies
5. The Scientists
6. Romanticism – the age of revolution and its literature.
      4.  And then came Wesley
      5. In the everyday
      6. Time-line in Branwell-Carne lives.

Part II: Origins of family lore 
7. Legacies of kinship
8. The people called Branwell
9. The people called Carne
          10. Travellers Tales
          11. Biographical brief A-Z
          12. The Document Register 

Part III: Appendices and indexes
 The Index – Subjects relevant to this study:
    Bottrell, William (kin) folklorist: 6 references
    Carter family of Prussia Cove: 4 references
    Smuggling: 6 references
Privateering is not indexed but is mentioned in the text.

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