Gunwalloe was the site of a
wreck on 19 January 1526 when the Flemish ship
St Anthony, owned by King John III of
Portugal, laden with bullion, plate, and silver, was
driven ashore in "an outrageous tempest of the
sea." Only forty-five of her crew survived. The
local people spent all day and night salvaging
silver. Two days after the wreck, three local
magistrates, William Godolphin, Thomas St Aubyn and
John Millaton, attacked the surviving crew and made
off with two-thirds of the bullion. The Portuguese
King appealed to King Henry VIII. In answer to these
charges, the three men stated that the chief ruler of
the ship, fearing the country people helping the
salvaging would take it home with them, had begged to
the three to come to his aid. They declared that the
ship's master entreated them to buy some of`the
salvaged goods in order that he could buy some
necessities. This is all, they insisted, they took
for themselves.
Another treasure
ships, this time Spanish, was lost in the same place
in the 1780s. The ship broke in two and spilled the
coins and bullion into a gully. In 1845 a company was
formed to dam the gully and pump out the water to
recover the money. The night before everything was
ready, a gale came up and wiped out two month's work.
In 1847 another attempt was made for miners to cut a
path and steps down the cliff and sink a shaft
twenty-five feet into the rocks, working only in low
tide, then driving forty feet under the gully, the
idea being that the coins would fall into the tunnel.
No coins appeared but the sea did, and the miners
barely escaped. The breach could not be sealed. In
1877 a Mr Boyd and two engineers had the idea of
pumping out ****************
Storms off of
Mount's bay produce vast movements in the sea bottom
and periodically thousands of tons of sand can be
scoured away overnight. Parts of Gunwalloe Cove can
change by as much as twenty feet at a time.
(Larn and
Carter, Cornish Shipwrecks)
