The Levelling Sea
In Falmouth, just outside the modern maritime museum, stands a 40ft granite obelisk, first erected in the 1730s. It’s a memorial to the Killigrew family, and, with what remains of their ancestral property Arwenack Manor, just across the road, adds up to the only visible relics of this piratical dynasty – apart, of course, from the port and town of Falmouth itself, which the Killigrews, virtually single-handedly, founded.
Falmouth is relatively new as Cornish towns go – its charter is only 450 years old (this year, as it happens) and the first settlement itself, initially called Smithwick, is not many decades older.
Peter Marsden’s book, accurately subtitled The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail, is a history of the foundation and growth of…
