On the trip to England and Scotland that I mentioned in my latest Ad Rem, I made an interesting discovery connecting a very out-of-the-way spot in Cornwall to a well-known part of American Catholic History.
Our big adventure began with a trip from London’s Heathrow Airport to a station where we borded an all-night train from London to Penzance in the Duchy of Cornwall — in England’s extreme southwest. This is a lovely area of the country where, I am told, the climate is officially designated as subtropical (see here for a discussion of this). The vegetation is lush, the climate mild, and the coastal views are quite beautiful. (My English benefactor told me that I was getting to see the Atlantac from the other end now.) One can see palm trees in this part of the country, it is boasted, and I can now attest to the truth of the boast because I saw many of them.
From Penzance, we took a ferry to the Isles of Scilly. Pronounced no differently than the word is without the “c,” the islands are the victims of many a bad joke, such as Charles Coulombe’s quip that this is the only place in the world where he can be himself. On a less silly note, the Isles of Scilly are identical to the legendary lost land of Lyonesse, which is one of the important places mentioned in the Arthurian lore. (Like Atlantas and other lost cities that are said to have fallen into the ocean, while there is a lot of myth and legend surrounding Lyonesse, there is also here a fundamenutm in re for the legends. As Chesterton noted in writing about King Arthur himelf, one of the proofs that he was a real person is that so many legends arose in his wake. People usually don’t make stuff up about a fake person, but a real person — e.g., Padre Pio — might have a number of less than accurate things said about him because he was so important. Something similar is no doubt true about Scilly, which was, in ancient times, referred to as a single land mass.)
The Scilly Isles form a small archipelago off the southwest of Cornwall, beyond Land’s End, the aptly named point of the mainland we passed as we ferried to Scilly. Apparently, the fundamenutm in re of the legend of Lyonesse is an earthquake that happened sometime around the time of the Fall of the Roman Empire in 476, give or take some years. The large landmass that was there previously fell into the ocean, with only the higher elevations protruding above the water in what is now a small archipelago of islands. One of these is Tresco, which boasts the ruins of a Beneidctine priory — a daughter house of Tavistock Abbey — which, like its mother house was yet another victim of lecherous Henry VIII’s malign and theiving Dissolution of the Monstaries.
So what’s the American Catholic connection to the Isles of Scilly? It is this, and I quote from a stone memorial our merry group of pilgrims happened upon unplanned in circumstances I will soon relate:
Father Andrew White, Father John Allen, and the first Maryland colonists sailed from Coves, Nov. 22, 1633 on The Ark (360 tons, 105 ft) and The Dove (40 tons, 51 ft). The Dove was forced to shelter is Scilly duriing a heavy storm.
We found this on one of our perumbalulations of the largest of these islands, St. Mary’s, where the only Catholic church is a tiny little building — owing to the 12th-century original being stolen by the Anglicans, and its much newer 19th-century replacement being built by the C of E. The tiny little Catholic Church, which is not much to write about given its humble size and furnishings, does have an interesting courtyard where we happened upon this:
That photo of mine chops off the stone slab with the text written on it, but it was the best of the three I took. Besides, the text on the stone is difficult to make out clearly in spots, even up close. (I make no claims to be a photographer, by the way, but I did have by Andoid phone with me and snapped over 500 photos with it during the trip.)
So, there it is. Father Andrew White and his companions coming over from Old England to settle in Maryland are, to this day, memorialized in an out-of-the way courtyard on a little island in an archipeligo off the coast of Cornwall because one of their ships sought refuge there duing a heavy storm. It was a very strange feeling I felt as an American Catholic to behold such a thing on this enchanted little isle. Strange but good, a connection to Anglo-America’s Catholic origins.
And, by the way, I love Cornwall and the little Isles of Scilly. To call them lovely does not do them justice.
