The Channel Islands

IN the hurried visit paid by tourists to foreign countries, some of the most interesting, if not the most notorious or nationally characteristic things and places are necessarily overlooked. Hidden away in corners, where the great tide-wave of innovation has but languidly flowed, they are unimportant to the empire, and consequently obscure and unknown to the outside world. But they are the richest of all for the student and observer, for the lover of nature and the curious collector of facts. Now the Channel Islands of Great Britain are places which few Americans ever see, and of which, therefore, but little is known on this vast continent. At a distance of twelve hours from London, and to be got at only by a very troublesome sea passage, where the swirl of the Atlantic wave, thrown back by the coast of the Cotentin, and deflected by the currents which sweep round the various islands, creates a sea that is rarely calm and often dangerous ; with no relics of general historical interest when got at, and but miniature “ emporia ” of loneliness at the best, — we can scarcely wonder that these beautiful little islands are unvisited by the ordinary tourist from abroad, or that even the mass of the English themselves personally know very little about them, and are content to take them on trust from the accounts of the more adventurous few. Besides, they lie out of the highway. To be sure, you can go from Jersey to St. Malo, and from Guernsey and Cherbourg by way of Alderney; but most people prefer to get to France from England by Calais, Boulogne, Havre, or Dieppe ; and so the St. Malo and Cherbourg ships are not on the list of the favored passage boats.

And yet the Channel Islands are worth seeing. The magnificent outlines of every island and islet, bristling with sharp rocks and formidable cliffs, where the sea breaks with a terrible beauty as it comes surging in with the wild ocean sweep ; the exquisite tenderness of the inland scenery ; the strange peaks which wind and water have wrought on granite and sand;—all make the Channel Islands places of exceeding beauty for the loving observer of nature ; while quaint old customs, obsolete traditions, and a quite distinctive character supply the human element to those who remain long enough to enable them to enter into and understand the social life of the people.

Of the four chief islands, Jersey, the most protected and nearest inland of the great bay of which Cherbourg and Brest are the two extreme points, is the largest, the softest, the richest; Guernsey, the foremost of the group, lying as the outpost on the Atlantic, is the grandest; Alderney is the most barren of beauty, if the most important in geographical position, and by no means despicable in produce ; and Sark is the most fantastically picturesque,— the one on which nature and the elements have exercised the most influences and the largest power. There is no doubt that originally all these islands, with their crowns and girdles of related rocks and islets, were united together and formed part of the continent. Geographically, indeed, they are French, and ethnologically Norman ; though they had an early people of their own who were buried with foodurns and stone implements, and who used flint arrow-heads and stone hammers and hatchets and shin-bone skates, as are found in most of the prehistoric barrows throughout Europe ; and though, before the Normans held them, the Romans had come, conquered, and colonized, — colonized, that is, in their high-handed military way, to hold, not to people. The old name of Jersey is Cæsarea ; in fact, the modern name is merely a corruption of the ancient through quick and slovenly pronunciation ; while Guernsey was Sarnia ; Sark, Sargia, and then Sercq; and Alderney, Aurégney. Hermes is good French for a barren waste of land, which, however, the little island of Herm is not. But though all the islands were once part of France, and the people were Norman-French, the incessant work of the sea, beating against the tough granite, and eating out the softer veins which traverse it in all directions, has broken the bonds of union with the mainland ; and the incessant influx of English residents, English ideas, and English influence has worn away much of the earlier Norman and later insular character of the people, till soon there will be no ethnological specialties left to the islanders, and in time no islands in the Channel at all. For the same causes of disintegration by which they became separated from the continent are still going on, and in some notably, as Herm, they are going on visibly and rapidly. Sark, too, is being torn to pieces shred by shred; and old decrees providing for the reparation of roads in Guernsey, where now only the sea moans over barren sand arid dashes against naked rocks, attest the loss of valuable land here, within the memory of man.

Very beautiful, if very dangerous, are the rocks about these islands; and nowhere in England is there such, an iron-bound coast, such treacherous shoals, such rapid currents. Nowhere, either, is there more enchanting loveliness. On a calm day, when the sea, lying like a lake over the sand, is of the color of a beryl, over the hidden rocks like lapis-lazuli, while the lofty cliffs are golden with gorse and purple with heather, and the rocks, towering out of the sea above high-water mark, are gold and green and crimson and orange, where the lichens fleck the old gray stone with broad dashes of color, nothing can exceed the seductive sweetness of the sheltered bays and coves. They might be all parts of the island of Calypso, or the outworks of Armida’s Garden. You may sit there, listening to the tender ripple of the waves, and weave old-world poems, till you lose all memory of historic time ; and you seem to live in the days when the gods dwelt on Mount Olympus, and their sons and their daughters lived among men in such favored spots as these. But in the wild weather, when the fierce Atlantic storms come tearing through sea and sky, and the waves dash up against the jagged cliffs as if they would grind them peak by peak to powder, and pour in turbulent cascades over the intervening rocks, making the earth vibrate as they thunder against her old granite bulwarks, then you see a fulness and majesty of the sterner powers of nature that may satisfy the most craving. Inland, both in Jersey and Guernsey, and in Sark, too, the deep leafy Devonshire-like lanes, with their arching framework of foliage for every point of the view, the luxuriant growth of ferns, the wilderness of wild-flowers, the numerous picturesque little bits of architecture, though nothing more stately than a well-trimmed cottage porch, a mossy wall, an ivy-covered penthouse to protect a spring or well, an ancient gateway, proud though decayed, make the home scenery as beautiful in its own way as the bolder and grander coast; so that literally there is nothing more complete, though much that is larger than the Channel Islands, if studied thoroughly with the eye of an artist and the love of a naturalist.

The most picturesque things are to be found in Sark, “ the gem of the Channel Islands,” as the guide-books not inaptly call it; and of these the three: creux, known as the Creux du Derrible (vulgicè Terrible) and the Little Creux in Greater Sark, and the Pot in Little Sark, Coupée, the Guliot Caves and Les Boutiques, also caves, are the most notable. These creux are funnel-shaped abysses which open at the top far inland, and are connected by a subterranean way with the sea ; so that when the tide comes in, the waters rush up this narrow funnel with a force and violence that make it more like an aqueous volcano than anything else to which I can liken it. If the tide is high and the sea stormy, the scene is beyond measure appalling. The waters surge and swell and roar in their rapid rise with a noise like imprisoned thunder; the earth beneath your feet quivers with the passionate tumult of the waters within; and if you have nerve enough to lean over the unprotected mouth and look into the boiling maelstrom, where a moment’s giddiness or the treachery of the root you grasp for support would be your death, you may see there what Edgar Poe could alone describe, and what you will never forget, and, perhaps, not care to see again.

Then there is the Coupée, — the narrow neck of land connecting the two parts of the island by a slender roadway three hundred and eighty-four feet above the sea, with a sheer precipice on either side and a strong wind always blowing. Before 1811 the roadway was only two feet wide ; it is now broadened to five, in parts to eight. But though the danger of being blown over, once so great and not infrequent, has been lessened by just the number of inches added, enough still remains to make the Coupée a by no means desirable promenade in anything stiffer than a ground zephyr; for even a ground zephyr will be found intensified into sufficient resemblance to a gale up above to make the Coupée as breezy as a pier in a sou’wester, and not quite so safe.

After the Creux and the Coupée come the Guliot Caves, but in point of interest they should have been placed first. The specialty of the Guliot Caves is not the rugged way by which you have to clamber up and down to them, though this too is a feat of which, if you have accomplished it, you may feel reasonably proud ; neither is it the grand views of the Havre Gosselin, or of that, as it seems to us, most melancholy isle of Brechou,¹ which Nature herself frames for you in the fantastic arabesques and arches of the brown cave-lines ; but in the zoöphytes which cover the wall, the rough rock flooring, and the roof of these dark nurseries of life. Limpets and barnacles encrust the lower rocks ; sponges, madrepores, and corallines line the walls and roof; while those strange and lovely things we call generlcally “ sea-anemones ” are set against the walls as thick as berries on an elder-branch. Of all colors are they,—ruby-red and emeraldgreen, pale flesh-color, jasper-brown, Naples-yellow ; but they do not show themselves in their full beauty, for, the water having left them, they are close buttoned up, and are nothing now but wet and shining gem-like knobs. You must take them home to your aquarium to see them to perfection ; but one can imagine what a scene that cavern would present when the walls are alive with the moving tentacles, bright-beaded, fringed, plumed, and of all colors, as they open their flower-like mouths and rake the soft sea for their prey ! What an animated flower-bed! one would almost dare the fate of Hylas for one moment’s glimpse of such strange beauty !

Then there are the Boutiques, grand in rugged outline, and of more purely rocky character and charm, and without the zoöphytes of the neighboring guliots; and there are Les Autelets, the odd altar-like rocks by the Port du Moulin ; and the Moie de Mouton, a mass of inaccessible crags, where a few sheep are landed every now and then, and left to find their way from ledge to ledge as the scanty herbage tempts them. When their time has come, and they are considered to be in sufficiently good condition for food, a boat puts off for the base of the rocks, a man fires at the animal he fancies, or that is most conveniently placed ; and down comes the poor beast, tumbling into the water, whence it is fished up and made into mutton forthwith. This, too, is a primitive trait not to be found on every highway in Europe.

These, though the chief, are by no means the sole attractions of Sark. Months of careful study would not exhaust those attractions ; for is not even Sark, this small, comparatively unknown, and obscure island, but nine miles in circumference, all told, in its way an epitome of nature, a microcosm, where the sciences may be studied and more thoroughly mastered ?

Not quite so fantastically beautiful as Sark, Guernsey has yet some specialties of its own that make it both delicious and tempting. Its bays and points or promontories are many and grand. Moulin Hurt, perhaps the most beautiful of all, where the pretty “ Cradle Rock,” in the middle of the bay, gets its fine-spun dazzling curtains as the tide comes in and pours over the Nord ; Saints’ Bay, where the magnificent “Old Woman” rock is clothed in a garment of green and orange, like nothing woven, by human skill; Fermain Bay, where the island girls bathe without other dressing-room than the friendly rocks, and where the zoöphytes and algæ are specially fine, with the chance of a stray pieuvre or octopod to give a not too pleasant excitement to the silver-footed Thetis of the hour; Tcart Point, where there is an old ruined house having the universal “rat” tradition attached to it, of a man being eaten alive by rats, and where the next parish is America, there being absolutely no intervening point of land between Tcart and the United States ; the narrow gorge of the Gouffre, so like our dear old English Cumberland, where the sharp hillside road leads down to the sea, instead of to a land-locked lake, with the restful harbor of Bon Repos to the side, giving the fishermen safe anchorage for their boats and safe storage for their gear; Petit Bot Bay, the Creux Maliré a grand and glowing cavern, where you must submit to be half suffocated with burning furze if you would see the glory thereof, and which burning furze, with dark-eyed Guernéiois men flinging it up and about on their pitchforks, gives you a lively image of that world to come which is not heaven ; Fleinmont, desolate and time-worn, where stands the lone house of which the island lion, Victor Hugo, made such good account in his “Toilers of the Sea,” and where the Houvis rocks below have “ perished many a bonny boat,” till the Trinity House softened its heart and opened its hand and built the lighthouse which stands on them now, since when there has been but one wreck on them, instead of one or two each winter, as there used to be ; Rocquaine Bay, weird and wild, and Cobo Bay, even more weird and more wild, with the grand rock forming such a magnificent point of resistance for the surging waves to break against; the “ water caves,” peculiar to Guernsey, small, narrow, winding ways, where a little rivulet of sweet, clear water, like a mountain ghyll, runs down to the sea, while hart’s tongue, lastreas, and other ferns, wild-flowers and sweet wholesome herbs, grow on the banks and trailing hedges, and the trees meet overhead, making green cloisters where you may walk in the shade and cool on the hottest summer noon;—these, which are just a rapid roll-call of some of the principal things to be seen, show that Guernsey, if not so strangely rich as Sark, is yet rich enough in beauty for any tourist who will be contented with less than the Cordilleras or Niagara. To be sure, on all these islands there is the danger of walking over the edge in the dark, as the Yankee said of England, but multum in parvo is both good Latin and a natural fact.

With jersey the tale is of gardens; rich leafy lanes ; pretty houses ; softer bays, mild, sandy, rounded, not peaked and torn and jagged ; and some bold coast scenery, of which the finest is the part known as the Corbières rocks. But the coast-lines of Jersey are decidedly inferior to those of Guernsey. The one is the sheltered garden of the group; the other the bit of fell land, half garden, half waste. Nothing very striking is to be seen at Alderney. It is a mere sandy hillock, rising bleak and bare out of the sea, strongly fortified as a check on Cherbourg, with a few fine rocks, specially the Sisters, and fertile as a farm for all its treeless nakedness. But the islands are generally fertile, in spite of the slovenly farming which is all that is bestowed on them. And truly the farming is slovenly ! Seven, nine, eleven horses drag one huge rude plough, which just scratches the ground it is trailed over, doing ill what two light ploughs of one or two horses each would do much better. And the weeding or clearing of the ground, what it gets at all, is as primitive as the ploughing. A man on his knees shoves out the weeds between the furrows with a crooked, clumsy hoe, in the coarsest style of garden culture. Yet the land is kindly, and gives back generously for its niggardly tending. The manure — and wealth — of the islands is sea-weed, freshly laid, or the burnt ashes thereof; and an old saying, “ Point de vraicpoint de hautgarra,”— No sea-weed no corn-yard, — shows its value. It is also the fuel of the poorer folk ; and among the characteristic features of the Channel Islands is the clumsy seaweed-laden cart lumbering along the narrow lanes, — perhaps drawn by a sleepy-looking bullock in the shafts, with a horse for the leader,— and the long stretches of barren land, as at Rocquaine and Cobo Bays, spread out with sea-weed like “scaled hay, purple, red, or gray, drying in the wind and sun for fuel. When sufficiently hoary and dry, it is stacked up in piles, which are to the poor fisherman’s cot what cords of wood and bushels of coals are to richer houses. The sea-weed cutting is allowed only twice a year for the vraic scié ; the vraic venant is unending. Vraic scié is the living weed cut from the rocks, chiefly at Herm for Guernsey, and vraic venant is drift-weed thrown up by the tide, and not so valuable as the scié. Herm is about twenty minutes’ sail from Guernsey, and, besides stores of vraic, has a creux, and a “kitchen midden, ’ and a curious shell shore made by the tail of the drift, and unique in its way ; and a seigneur, who owns the island and has lordly rights ; and, in fact, is a world in miniature, a very doll’s house of an empire, beating Liliput and Monaco hollow.

What would strike Americans more than anything else as utterly strange is the habit, common to all the islands, of tethering the cattle, allowancing their food, and circumscribing their liberty to the range of half a dozen feet or so. All the animals are tethered, — cows, horses, apes, goats ; and the narrow fields are eaten away in semicircular sweeps as clearly marked as if mown by the hand. The farmers say the grass is so rich, that the short commons on which the poor beasts are kept are quite enough for them, want of quantity being made up for by goodness of quality. And, to be sure, the Channel Islands’ milk and butter are proverbial. But, to men accustomed to the boundless lands and prodigality of produce of the New World, this strict apportionment of native, wild daily rations must look chary and pitiful beyond expression. Another cause, also, is the law of succession, by which land is divided and subdivided, as in France, till it is cut up into such small holdings there is no room left for free pasturage or bovine expatiation. In consequence of this habit of tethering the live stock there are few, if any, field gates in the islands. A gap is left in the hedge, and a crooked bough is laid across it, but a gate, as we have them in England, is a rarity almost unknown.

Thereis one peculiar growth here, — the cow-cabbage, — of which walkingsticks are made, and which, specially in Jersey, grows to a quite majestic size. By stripping off all the lower leaves in succession, as covers for baskets for fruit, butter, etc., the succulent stalk hardens into a handsome knotted wood, which takes a fine polish and answers all the purposes of a cane. Jersey is famous for these cabbage walking-sticks, and they are to be found in Guernsey also. The gardens are richly stocked. Magnolias bloom luxuriantly ; while myrtles and fuchsias geraniums and camellias attain the dignity of trees. Hydrangeas, the lemon-plant, and other tender plants, which in England have to be kept under shelter for the winter, remain here in the open ground all the year round ; aloes and semi-tropical growths flower and do well in chosen places ; and at the Vallon, one of the loveliest residences in Guernsey, are magnificent specimens of the Gunnera scabra of South America. All of which speaks well for the mildness of the climate and the (comparative) equableness of the temperature.

There are some old customs and superstitions left in the islands, eloquent of the origin of the race, and to be exactly matched in both Normandy and Brittany among the peasantry. One of these superstitions is, that all water drawn from a well on Christmas-eve turns to blood ; and if any one were to go into a cow-shed exactly at midnight, also on Christmas-eve, he would find all the cattle on their knees. But as something very terrible would happen to him for his profane peeping and prying, no one ever dares go in to verify the belief.² At weddings a slice of cheese is cut into four square portions, never more nor less on the plate; and these, together with a peculiar kind of biscuit (cracker) made of fermented dough and butter, and a glass of mulled wine, are handed to each invited guest, and to every one who calls at the house for a certain period after. Then a huge currant-cake is made four times in the year, at Christmas, Whitsuntide, Midsummer, and Michaelmas, and every servant of the establishment has about two pounds of it given to her. I say her, for as yet men-servants are rare even at the best houses. The dear lady of the Vallon, where the Gunnera grows, and where, by the by, are two willow-trees from slips of the St. Helena and Napoleonic willow, keeps up these good old customs, which help so much in the color of society.

But indeed this color is rapidly fading from the islands, and they are becoming as much like England as if no other than the ordinary British element was to be found in them. In fact, efforts are being made to keep up the old Norman-French among the people, at least in Guernsey; and though by law the church services, for instance, are performed in French alternately with English, yet a Guernsey peasant of anything like education will feel affronted at being spoken to in French, and holds himself entitled to use the language which was once the distinctive characteristic of the upper classes. The servants, too, have followed suit with the rest; and where formerly they were called les basses, the base or low ones, are now as independent as English domestics, and make service more and more a voluntary profession, and not an involuntary servitude as it used to be. For this we may thank that mysterious thing called, for the convenience of our ignorance, the spirit of the age,” whereby individual independence and the dignity of labor have taken their fitting place.

The fish of the islands are as peculiar as anything else belonging to them. These are to be seen best in the Guernsey market, which is one of the sights of the place, and include the long nose or snipe fish, called du horfil by the people, like a long, thin, mackerel-colored ribbon, with grass-green bones ; cray fish, or crabbe a' co ; spidercrabs, or pain dos; velvet crabs, called crabbe or gergeaise (un 'ummghergy means a crabbed, ill-tempered man); and immense crabs proper, magnificent fellows called chancres, which, together with their smaller brethren and bigblack lobsters, are to be seen on all the fish-trays in the market, twiddling their feelers and crawling about their beds of wet moss and sea-weed in a confused and helpless way. Then there are rock or vraic fish, or wrasse ; and ormers (a corruption for oreilles de mer), the creatures which live in those pretty mother-o’-pearl shells with a row of holes along the projection, and which, when well beaten and stewed for a great many hours, taste like tough vealcutlets dashed with sea-weed sauce. And there are conger-eels, great bits of which, raw and bleeding, are sold for a very small sum, and make an excellent addition to the island cabbage Soup. For the island lives on cabbage soup. It is its pot an feu, its butter, milk, and potatoes, its porridge and whiskey, its olla podrida, its roast-beef and plum - pudding, or whatever we choose to select as the national dish ; and its men and women thrive upon it. But not too well ; the islanders are not a very stalwart race, though wiry and with good “ staying ” qualities. And as I am on the question of food, I may as well say that the pigs are mostly fed with parsnips.

It is a misnomer to call the small short-horned dun cow we all know so well “ an Alderney ” ; it may be a Jersey cow or a Guernsey one, perhaps a Sarkois ; for each island has its own particular if allied breed, and each island claims to have the best. They are not allowed to mix the breeds nor to import foreign stock, but every now and then one comes upon a black or red hided beast, which shows that the decree has been evaded somehow, and that the pure blood has got mixed, whether to the advantage or disadvantage of the breed I cannot say. Of the whole family, the Jersey cows are the smallest, and I do not know which are considered the best milkers ; but all are first-rate in that way, and produce magnificent butter.

Amongst other things belonging to the islands may be counted green lizards, the tree locust, the pieuvre, or octopod, immortalized by Victor Hugo ; and in Guernsey, Victor Hugo himself and his house. And if, of these, the one is noble and to be deeply reverenced, the other is decidedly odd and to my mind ugly. It is wonderfully ingenious in its clever adaptation of all sorts of things for all manner of unlikely purposes. Old trap-nailed chests and coffers make stately seats; barbaric ceintures are nailed as ornaments against the crimson velvet chimneypieces. Pieces of fine old tapestry, with historical interest attached, chairs and tables and beds and china, all possessing a special and peculiar value, and with pedigrees and traditions belonging, make the place in its way a museum ; but of household comfort there is none, so at least I should say, in those gloomy, crowded, heavy rooms, and as little artistic beauty. But they are Victor Hugo’s belongings. He has gathered them together, and arranged them, and, so far as they go, they are to be respected as the expression of a great man’s mind and fancies.

The islands send no members to Parliament. Ecclesiastically they are under the sway of the British crozier, being part of the see of Winchester, and strategically they are strongholds of the British Army ; but their internal government is individual; and a Guernésiois, or a Sarkois, or an Aurégnois, is always a man of Guernsey, of Sark, or of Alderney, never a Briton, still less an Englishman. They have governors and seigneurs and states and jurats, and they make their own laws after their own hearts ; each island being imperium in imperio, and scornfully indifferent to the larger empire of which it forms a part, — the coach of which it is the fifth wheel. In religion, though by law Protestant, there are a few Roman Catholics, and more dissenters, among the islands; and the clerical tone is decidedly Low Church, not to say Calvinistic. A good dash of Ritualism would be a blessing among them.

The winnowing process goes on even in these fixed societies. A Certain family called Pipet, of St. Andrew’s, are now the hereditary paupers of the parish ; but long generations ago one of the ancestors, then wealthy and manorial lords, left a field to the Church (Catholic in those days), on condition that a mass was said every year for the repose of the Pipet soul. When the Reformation came and made masses unlawful, the field was still held by the Church, but the condition suppressed. The present clergyman, however, says a loving “ pater-noster ” in his own heart, in remembrance of the donor, whose descendants beg their bread. The Pipet clan are beautiful in a gypsy, dark-eyed fashion, and of late one man has raised himself from the pauperization of his tribe, and has become selfsupporting and independent.

Guernsey is evidently a partially holy isle ; there are no toads there, though plenty in Jersey, while frogs, slowworms, and lizards are the sole representatives of the reptile class of creation ; and there are saints’ wells and holy places in almost all the parishes. In fact, one of the traditions is that it is a holy isle, and that its first civilized inhabitants were saints. If so, their descendants have a little deteriorated from the piety of their forefathers, and, indeed, that piety is a little problematical, at least in the “middle distance,” seeing that a whole large clan in Guernsey are the acknowledged posterity of a Roman Catholic archbishop. One peculiarity of these islands is the universal cousinship of the upper ten. All the great families are so related and interlaced by marriages of all allowable degrees, that it is impossible for a stranger to disentangle the complex threads and understand distinctly who is who, and how A came to be B’s cousin, and why C is obliged to go into mourning when D dies. Even the married stranger finds it difficult to learn all her husband’s relations ; and you may bear an Englishwoman who has entered a numerous clan, after twenty years of marriage, confess she has not learnt her lesson of kinship perfectly, even yet.

It is very strange for one accustomed to a large centre, like London, or for an American, used only to such a free range of life and such incessant change of circumstances as one has in large centres and new countries, to come to one of these quiet “cornered” islands, where life moves at a snail’s pace, and passions, in their broader sense, seem , eliminated altogether. Havens of rest for a time to the weary are they, and beautiful in their peace and stillness ; but only for a time. The man or woman who has been used to action would soon rust out here ; and though the Channel Islands may be lovely as Calypso’s Isle or Armida’s Garden, yet, like those sweet sleeping-places for brave men, they are to be visited only, not lived in permanently, by all who have work yet to do in the world, who have a ourpose to fulfil and a plan to pursue.