The Cornish Overseas

Philip Payton

Description

In this fully revised and up-dated edition of The Cornish Overseas, Philip Payton draws upon almost two decades of additional research undertaken by historians the world over since the first paperback version of this book was published in 2005. Now published by University of Exeter Press, this edition of Philip Payton’s classic history of Cornwall’s ‘great emigration’ takes account of numerous new sources to present a comprehensive, definitive picture of the Cornish diaspora.  

The Cornish Overseas begins by identifying some of the classic themes of Cornish emigration history, including Cornwall’s ‘emigration culture’ and ‘emigration trade’, and goes on to sketch early Cornish settlement in North America and Australia. The book then examines in detail the upsurge in Cornish emigration after 1815, showing how Cornwall became swiftly one of the great emigration regions of Europe.

Discoveries of silver, copper and gold drew Cornish miners to Latin America, while Cornish agriculturalists were attracted to the United States and Canada. The discoveries of copper in South Australia and in Michigan during the 1840s offered new destinations for the emigrant Cornish, as did the Californian gold rush in 1849 and the Victorian gold rush in Australia in 1851. The crash of copper-mining in Cornwall in 1866 sped further waves of emigrants to countries as disparate as New Zealand and South Africa. In each of these places the Cornish remained distinctive as ‘Cousin Jacks’ and ‘Cousin Jennys’, establishing their own communities and making important contributions to the social, political and economic development of the new worlds.

By 1914, however, Cornwall was no longer the international centre of mining expertise, the mantle having passed to America, Australia and South Africa, and Cornish emigration had dwindled as a result. Nonetheless, the Cornish at home and abroad remained aware of their global transnational identity, an identity that has been revitalised in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.47788/KILX2994

A Culture of Mobility

The Rage for Emigration

Bonanzas and Bugbears - Latin America

From Famine to Frontier - The Hungry Forties and the First American Mining Boom

South Australia's Copper Kingdom

Gold! The Californian Rush

Gold! The Victorian Rush

Crashed Copper, Tumbled Tin & 'The Largest Cornish Communities Beyond Land's End'

New Frontiers - Australia

New Frontiers - North America

'But a Suburb of Cornwall' - South Africa

'All Hail! Old Cornwall! May Thy Glory Last' - The End of an Era

An Enduring Identity? The Cornish in a Globalised World

Sujets

• Modern
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Sudoeste de Inglaterra
• Local history
• University of Exeter Press
• Modern history
• General officer
• Ireland
• South West England
• History of Europe
• Stephen Ireland
• Great Britain
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: University of Exeter Press
• Date de parution: 17 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781905816132
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Cornish Overseas
A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’
Revised and updated edition -->
also by Philip Payton and published by
University of Exeter Press

Cornish Studies (ed.) (a series of twenty-one annual volumes, 1993–2013)
New Directions in Celtic Studies (ed. with Amy Hale) (2000)
A.L. Rowse and Cornwall: A Paradoxical Patriot (2005)
Making Moonta: The Invention of ‘ Australia’s Little Cornwall’ (2007)
John Betjeman and Cornwall: ‘The Celebrated Cornish Nationalist’ (2010)
Regional Australia and the Great War: ‘The Boys from Old Kio’ (2012)
The Maritime History of Cornwall (ed. with Alston Kennerley and Helen Doe) (2014)
Cornwall: A History (revised edition) (2017)
Philip Payton

The Cornish Overseas
A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’


-->
First published in 2020 by
University of Exeter Press
Reed Hall, Streatham Drive
Exeter EX4 4QR
UK
www.exeterpress.co.uk

© Philip Payton 2020

The right of Philip Payton to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-905816-10-1 (Hardback)
ISBN 978-1-905816-11-8 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-905816-13-2 (ePub) ISBN 978-1-905816-12-5 (PDF)

Cover illustration: Cornish miners at Redruth railway station, en route to South Africa, c.1905. Courtesy Kresen Kernow.

Typeset in Goudy by BBR Design, Sheffield
CONTENTS
Maps
Preface

Chapter 1 The Great Emigration: Reflections and Comparisons
Chapter 2 A Culture of Mobility
Chapter 3 The Rage for Emigration
Chapter 4 Bonanzas and Bugbears: Latin America
Chapter 5 From Famine to Frontier: The Hungry Forties and the First American Mining Boom
Chapter 6 South Australia’s Copper Kingdom
Chapter 7 Gold! The Californian Rush
Chapter 8 Gold! The Victorian Rush
Chapter 9 Crashed Copper, Tumbled Tin and ‘the largest Cornish communities beyond Land’s End’
Chapter 10 New Frontiers: Australasia
Chapter 11 New Frontiers: North America
Chapter 12 ‘But a suburb of Cornwall’: South Africa
Chapter 13 ‘All hail! Old Cornwall! May thy glory last’: The End of an Era?
Chapter 14 An Enduring Identity? The Cornish in a Globalised World

Notes and References
Select Bibliography
Index
MAPS
Central and South America
Southern Canada and the north-eastern states of the USA
Principal mining locations in South Australia
Mining locations and principal cities in California
Principal mining locations in Victoria and New South Wales
Principal mining locations and cities in South Africa
PREFACE
I am deeply grateful to University of Exeter Press for undertaking this new and extensively revised edition of The Cornish Overseas: A History of Cornwall’s ‘Great Emigration’ .
Recent years have witnessed a continuing fascination with the story of Cornwall’s diaspora and the creation of a Cornish transnational identity during the nineteenth century, including the disproportionate role of the emigrant Cornish in forging an ever-expanding, international hard-rock mining frontier. From archaeologists to musicologists and family historians, scholars and popular enthusiasts alike have been tireless in tracking down the Cornish in far-flung corners of the globe, adding almost daily to the grand narrative as well as continually offering new insights and perspectives. Much of this new work has been published, not least in the second series of Cornish Studies , also by University of Exeter Press, and some of the more extended academic research has been conducted by postgraduate students at the Institute of Cornish Studies, long a home of Cornish migrant investigations. Overseas institutions, not least Flinders University here in South Australia, have likewise made their own important contributions.
The achievement of UNESCO World Heritage Site (WHS) status for the Cornish mining landscapes of Cornwall and West Devon in 2006 signalled recognition of the international significance of those distinctive landscapes. Moreover, the acquisition of WHS status was a timely reminder of the existence overseas of remarkably similar landscapes, important sites of technological as well as cultural transfer from Cornwall during the nineteenth century. Prominent among these were the Cornish copper-mining landscapes of South Australia, which in 2017 led to the award of National Heritage listing for Burra and Moonta Mines by the Australian Government, prelude to a proposed bid to UNESCO for World Heritage Status which would in turn link these sites to those of Cornwall and West Devon, and perhaps in time to other sites in Mexico, Spain and South Africa, emphasising once more the transnational dimension of the Cornish diaspora.
Occasionally, in preparing this new edition, I have stumbled across evidence from my own family history, which I have contrived to include. None is more poignant than the story of Mary Ann Williams and Lucy Williams, my great-great-aunts, who both emigrated from Cornwall to Queensland, Australia, in 1887, as related in these pages. More successful were the emigrations of my Constantine granite-quarrying forebears, members of the Williams, Jenkin and Pascoe families, who found themselves working as stone-cutters in America and South Africa.
Many friends and colleagues, too numerous to mention, have assisted my work on Cornish emigration, over more decades than I care to remember, and I pay tribute to them all. But I should say a particular ‘thank you’ to my wife Dee, who has accompanied me on numerous visits to Cornish sites in America, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, and who with great accomplishment has provided an index for this book.

Philip Payton
Flinders University, Adelaide
2018
CHAPTER ONE
The Great Emigration: Reflections and Comparisons
C ornwall is one of the great emigration regions of Europe. 1 First and foremost a maritime land, with links to a greater world beyond these islands stretching back even into prehistoric times, Cornwall has experienced at least two great waves of emigration in its long history. The first is shrouded in mystery, that still unexplained exodus from south-western Britain which—somewhere between the fourth and sixth centuries ad —took hundreds, possibly thousands of settlers to the Armorican peninsula, present-day Brittany. Although its origins are obscure, the results of this emigration are everywhere apparent—not only in the common place names and saints’ dedications that are evidence of the long historical entwinement of Cornwall and Brittany but in the expressions of present-day pan-Celtic sentiment, including the formal twinning of Cornish and Breton towns and villages.
The second wave of mass Cornish emigration, that wholesale scattering of so-called Cousin Jacks and Jennys known to modern scholars as the ‘Great Emigration’, is a far more recent phenomenon—running for little more than a century from 1815 until the First World War and after—but it has been truly global in its impact and may have consequences which even now are not fully played out, let alone fully understood. Cornish historians have long recognised the international significance of the Great Emigration. A.L. Rowse considered that ‘the story of the Cornish emigration is the biggest and most significant of Cornish themes’, 2 a claim that he put to the test in The Cornish in America , published in 1969. A.C. Todd and John Rowe—those two other founding fathers of Cornish emigration history—also helped to pioneer the study of the Cornish abroad, pointing the way for later writers who would take the story beyond the United States and Mexico to encompass Australia, South Africa, South America and elsewhere. Yet it is only very recently that we have been able to construct an overview of the Great Emigration in its entirety, to pull together the numerous strands of an extra ordinarily complex and intriguing phenomenon. The result is this present volume, The Cornish Overseas , revised and updated to take account of the latest research. 3
Cornwall’s Great Emigration is best explained against the background—and as part—of a wider European emigration which ran from 1815 until the Depression years of the 1930s. This emigration created the ethnic and cultural complexity of the ‘New World’ in its widest geographical and political sense, and facilitated the construction of the increasingly industrial international economy and the international labour market which supported it. But Cornwall’s Great Emigration was also distinctive. As well as its sheer volume, absolute as well as relative, it had particular characteristics which often set the Cornish experience apart from otherwise comparable European emigration regions and which ensured that emigration would exercise a profound influence over the making of modern Cornwall. Even today, Cornwall lives under the shadow of its Great Emigration, while the growing visibility of overseas Cornish communities is vivid testament to an enduring (if redefining) Cornish identity located amid the multicultural societies of America, Australia and elsewhere.
In 1815 Europe had emerged from the long struggle of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars into a ‘new world order’ which promised peace, security and stability. The Congress of Vienna, set up by the victorious powers—Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia—reviewed and settled the political boundaries and structures of Europe, ushering in a period of conservative dominance which resisted further change and revolutionary impulses. Between 1815 and 1848, Europe enjoyed an unprecedented period of peace, with no armed conflict between its principal powers and relatively few major internal upheavals—notwithstanding the achievement of Belgian independence in 1830 and the mild ‘revolution’ in Paris that year. On the wider canvas, British sea power underwr