craft through the maze of shipping, and
pick up her moorings. For small boat sailing the waters of the Fal are
ideal, but here also, as on the salt waters beyond the river mouth,
great care is required by reason of the wind cutting down the creeks and
gullies with practically no warning. What a halo of tragedy lies over
the dreaded Manacles! and what wonderful escapes some fortunate vessels
have had. The author once saw a schooner of five hundred tons thread the
narrow channels of the needle-pointed rocks in safety, but the feat was
regarded by his companion, an old sailor of Falmouth, as little short of
a miracle. As a matter of fact captains who get their ships among the
Manacles are so anxious to keep the news from reaching the owners that
they hang a sail over the names of their ships.

By a glance at the map it is obvious to anyone that no vessel going up
or down the Channel need be within a dozen or more miles of the
Manacles. Yet many still get there; and few are fortunate enough to get
away without becoming total wrecks. Not only on account of nearness of
time do the _Mohegan_ and the _Paris_ disasters take undoubted
precedence in the Manacles' victims, but on one occasion the loss of
life was appalling. The _Mohegan_ was a steamship of 7000 tons in charge
of Captain Griffiths, the commodore of the Atlantic Transport Company.
At half-past two on her second day out she signalled "All well" at
Prawle Point. Four and a half hours later, when the light was good and
the wind not high, she dashed into the Vase Rock, one of the outer
Manacles, and within twenty minutes all except the upper portions of her
masts and funnels were beneath the water. How the _City of Paris_ got on
the rocks is equally a mystery, for she is computed to have been twenty
miles out of her proper course when she struck, and the weather was fine
and the night clear.

[Illustration: VIEW OF FALMOUTH HARBOUR]

As Mr. Albert Bluett says: "We have the uncontradicted statements of
seamen of all classes, that the bell-buoy, fixed to one of the outer
Manacles, is utterly inadequate to warn vessels of their nearness to
danger. And when the sounds of that bell came in the landward breeze to
where I stood looking across the reef, they seemed, not a message of
warning to those who cross the deep, but as the death-knell of the
hundreds of men, women, and children who have breathed their last in the
sea around the Manacles."

There is no doubt that gene