id="ub09874ea-97e0-53ea-977f-91f5d0cad108">
THE MAIN CAGES
PHILIP MARSDEN
For my grandfather
JG Le NK and Zofia Ilińska
CONTENTS
Main Cages – main, from maen, Cornish for ‘rock’; cages, possibly from Cornish kegys – ‘hemlock’ (on the coast east of Pendhu Point is a Hemlock Cove); or perhaps from cagal, Late Cornish for ‘the dung of sheep, goats or rodents’, and also denoting ‘clotted or spattered filth on the coats of beasts’, which, in certain lights, the rocks are said to resemble.
‘The Adelaide? ’91. ’90 was the Prima Donna and the Bonne Julienne and a couple of others I don’t recall.
‘First few days of the year she struck, they dead days right after Christmas, been blowing two days straight, an easterly that come up the channel with a freezing mist before it. Saturday evening it veered south-east and freshened to a full gale. That easterly brought the first snow we had in years but the worst of the easterly’s always the run it brings. Damn swell you can’t do nothing with.
‘She was a big barque, the Adelaide. Steel hull and new built, headed up Liverpool with a hold full of jute. After fifteen weeks she come on land in a snowstorm. Imagine that – fifteen weeks in the heat and you come to land in a bloody snowstorm …
‘They was taking soundings when they heard the bell. They knew what that bell was. Not a man who’s sailed this coast don’t know the Cages bell when he hears it. So the master orders them round but he misses stays and in that wind and they seas he didn’t stand a chance of getting free. Just out from Hemlock Cove, they struck the edge of the reef square on.
‘We was all down at the hall that night, Freeman Rooms, listening to a speaker. Colonel’d been staying up Dormullion but the weather was so bad he couldn’t get back and he was telling us about Africa or someplace. Anyway that’s where we was when