He was in every way a scoundrel and a blackguard, and became such a pest that at last he earned retribution; and after many local attempts to convict him of smuggling or wrecking, the revenue officers came out from Bude to the Bristol Channel to hunt him down. He was seen last on the Gull Rock, off Hartland Point, signalling one evening to a ship which lay in the offing. He was taken off by a boat, but almost immediately a storm came up, the ship was blotted out from the sight of those watching from the cliffs, and when the squall passed she had totally disappeared. No one ever knew whether she had foundered with all hands, or had run out of sight behind Lundy, or whether she had become, by reason of the wicked wretch aboard her, a second _Flying Dutchman_, shaping an endless course through stormy seas.
There is a verse of rough doggerel which the children in these parts still repeat, and which embodies the story of this tyrant:
"Will you hear of cruel Coppinger? He came from a foreign land; He was brought to us by the salt water, He was carried away by the wind."
Probably Coppinger's wild and picturesque rush from the beach, like a Centaur in a scarlet cloak, was an actual measure of prudence; for in those cruel times of wreckers and smugglers the survivors who landed from a wreck were often murdered by the people they were thrown amongst, because "dead men tell no tales," and the unfortunate seamen might otherwise give evidence of false lights which had seemed to promise safety and refuge, and had drawn them on to the rocks. Such was the case of a French ship which was drawn ashore at Hele by wreckers, and the only survivor was taken to Champernownesheyes (the old gabled farmhouse which was formerly the home of the well-known Devonshire family of Champernowne), and there murdered. There is a curious ghost-story told in connection with this: The farm in due time passed into other hands, and all memory of the wreck or the disappearance of the one unfortunate survivor was lost. But one evening, while the farmer who was then living at Champernownesheyes was smoking his pipe in the garden, he fell to idly counting the windows, and, having done this several times, he discovered that there was one window unaccounted for. He called his wife, and then the servants, and, having made sure of this, they located the position of the strange window, and, going upstairs, they broke down the wall which they judged to be opposite, and found, indeed, that the window lighted a small room, furnished in sixteenth-century style, and containing a bed, hung with mouldering tapestry, on which lay a skeleton--the bones of the shipwrecked survivor who had been murdered. As they broke into the room, and went to fling open the long-closed window, they heard a great rushing noise, and cries and groans, and they declared that the garden was filled with evil spirits, rustling and whispering, mopping and mowing, for upwards of an hour afterwards.