One little cove tucked away in a lip of land not far from Mount’s Bay and Penzance owes its name to a family of famous smugglers. Prussia Cove is a small, secluded and rocky cove with not much of a beach, a few miles west of Praa Sands.
The pebble beach and cave is overlooked by a fine manor house and a series of former coastguard houses and fishermen’s shacks all of which belong to the Behrens family and are now used to host wedding parties and holidaymakers throughout the year.
The area is designated as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a Geological Conservation Review site and is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and consists of four small coves and several cottages and houses. The names of the coves from west to east are Piskies, Bessy’s, King’s and Coule’s.
But the curiously named Prussia Cove owes its name to Cornwall’s dark past of smugglers and wreckers, Methodism and making do when fishing wasn’t lucrative enough to put food on the table. Once known as Portleah, Prussia Cove became the home and operating base for the Carter family who turned smuggling into an art form towards the end of the 18th century.
John Carter, born 1770 at Breage near Helston, became one of the biggest smugglers on the coast - so much so that he styled himself as ‘King of Prussia’. The eldest of the Carter brothers even named the cove Prussia Cove, because of his deep admiration for Frederick the Great, who was - the actual King of Prussia at the time.
According to biographies and histories, John Carter was a mixture of hard working fisherman, honest merchant and out and out rogue. He operated out of Bessies Cove, a rocky inlet near Perranuthnoe in Mount’s Bay. It was an area notorious for lawless gangs of wreckers and smugglers.
But it was a time when few local people thought smuggling to be a crime. John and his brother Harry were well known along the French coast, but during the French Wars they were arrested and imprisoned in St Malo for a year on one occasion.
The wars Britain was fighting were costing the country a fortune which meant taxation had to be raised to pay for it. A good way to raise revenues was to tax imported goods. In turn that led to a rise in the practice of smuggling whereby small, fast boats would do all they could to evade the excise men and bring in contraband from France and the continent, from cloth to brandy, wine and tobacco and everything else they could get their hands on and sell at a profit.
The Carters’ landing cove, Prussia Cove, was the perfect spot for this kind of business. The cove had slipways for landing goods, and the Carters had a house with cellars and lofts where they could store the contraband that they had landed. To this day you can see the cart tracks left in the rocks that lead from the water’s edge up the slip way and up the hill.
Aside from smuggling, the Carters were confirmed Methodists. John's brother Harry is said to have held Sunday services on the quayside for smugglers when he was exiled in Roscoff. The Carters even forbade swearing on their vessels.
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According to historians, the Carters owned two large vessels, and were good seamen with a vast knowledge of the Cornish and French coasts. These boats were a 19-gun cutter of 160 tons, and a 20-gun lugger, each with a crew of around 30 men. Each vessel would be equipped with at least one smaller boat for inshore work.
The risks involved in smuggling were high. The best you could hope for was transportation to the colonies in Australia, but more often than not, penalties for smuggling involved a one-way trip to the gallows for a swift hanging. In 1803, the Carters’ house in Prussia Cove was put up for sale by auction.
A copper mine had been opened on the cliffs overlooking the cove, and coal was landed to drive the mine’s steam engine. Perhaps mining brought in more money than smuggling. By 1807 John just disappeared from the cove and Harry retired to a farm nearby, and went on to full time preaching. Other members of the Carter family are said to have continued smuggling into the 1820s.
However the Revenue men were getting better at their job, and smuggling became less profitable. In 1825 the building of a Coastguard Station at Prussia Cove finally put an end to smuggling in Prussia Cove and only the name remained.