The choice may appear extraordinary, but Cornish miners are better calculated to make seamen than any other class of landsmen; not so much because they are always accustomed to difficult climbing, and familiar with the use of ropes, and gunpowder, as that the Cornish system of mining, with an order and discipline scarcely surpassed in a ship of war, compels the lowest workman to act continually upon his own judgment.  Thus it creates that combination of ready obedience, with intelligence, and promptitude at resource, which is the perfection of a sailor’s character.  Familiarity with danger gives the miner a cool and reflective intrepidity; and the old county sport of wrestling, so peculiarly a game of strength and skill, now falling into disuse, but then the daily amusement of every boy, was admirably calculated to promote the activity and self-possession necessary in personal conflicts.

Captain Pellew’s quick discrimination is remarkably shown in thus discovering the capabilities of a class of men, who had never before been similarly tried, and with whom he could have had comparatively but little acquaintance There were no mines in the immediate neighbourhood of anyplace where he had lived; and as his professional habits were not likely to give him an interest in the subject, he had probably never held much intercourse with miners, except when he might have met them as rioters.  For at that period, the attention of the west countrymen was devoted almost exclusively to their mines and fisheries, to the neglect of agriculture; and the county being thus dependent upon importations, famine was not uncommon.  At such times, the poor tinners would come into the towns, or wherever they had reason to believe that corn was stored, with their bags, and their money, asking only barley-bread, and offering the utmost they could give for it, but insisting that food should be found for them at a price they could afford to pay.  If the law must condemn such risings, humanity would pity them for the cause, and justice must admire the forbearance displayed in them.  At one of these seasons of distress, when there was a great quantity of corn in the customhouse cellars at Falmouth, a strong body of miners came in to insist that it should be sold.  Mr. Pellew, the collector, met them in the street, and explained to them the circumstances under which he was entrusted with it, and which left him no power to sell.  They were famishing men, and the corn was in their power; but they had come to buy, and famine itself, with the almost certainty of impunity, could not tempt them to steal.  They received his explanation, and left the town peaceably.