On St. Agnes is the Well of St. Warna, a saint who protected her protégés from being wrecked and drowned. She has fallen into disrepute, however, owing to the whole population of her island having been wrecked and drowned on their way home from the neighbouring island, whither they had been to church! What a shock to believers in St. Warna. If only it had been a case of bad boys bird's-nesting on the Sabbath or of merry maidens dancing to the music of the blind fiddler, or east coast men fishing on Sunday, but--respectable citizens on their way home from church!
Ocean currents run strong here. It has long been mistakenly supposed that the Gulf Stream affects the climate of Western Cornwall. Needless to say, the true Gulf Stream does not come within many miles of the duchy; instead, a surface current of warm water is carried north-eastward from hot latitudes, and the ameliorating effects on flowers and plants and vegetables are the same. This warm current does not, however, ameliorate the storms, and in spite of four lighthouses the wrecks are numerous. In 1707 four ships of the Navy were lost here and 2000 men. The islands once had a reputation not only for smuggling, but for wrecking, and for the kind of wrecking that gives no help "to those in peril on the sea," but rather the other way about. Not that the people were altogether to blame. The law of wrecks was largely responsible for the brutalities undoubtedly indulged in towards shipwrecked crews, for it stated definitely that wrecks should be the property of the governor of the isles only "if none of the crew remained alive."
In our gentle days it is hardly believable that the whole populace should have seen to it that a wreck had no survivors. Themselves at the mercy of the waters, one might have thought such constant peril would have bred a fellow-feeling, but the contrary seems to have been the case. In the Tresco Gardens is a terrace devoted entirely to the figure-heads of vessels that have been cast on these shores. Each sorry relic represents its quota of human lives, and, remembering this, it is as if you were in some sort of concentrated graveyard where the bones of the poor dead are not even decently covered and concealed from sight.