494 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
Side by side with these marvels we have statements of a more 
matter-of-fact every-day character, but founded upon nothing more 
substantial than this same shadowy popular faith. 
Yonge in his Memoirs* is the first writer who without limitation 
advances the Drake claims. In this work, written in the closing 
years of the seventeenth and opening years of the eighteenth 
century, he says that Drake “ put up the Compas on the Hawe,” 
and built ‘‘divers conduits,” and that he carried out the Water 
Act to his ‘‘ great Honor and the Inexpressible benefit of the town 
and Haven.”t We have seen that Drake did not put up the 
Compass, and did not build the Conduits ; and with all the facts 
before us it is easy to judge whether the bringing in of the water 
redounds more to his “ great Honor” or to his business abilities. 
Prince in his Worthies, published in 1701, in the main follows 
Westcote,t and practically adds nothing to the narrative. In fact 
he rather tones it down; for he sees the absurdity of the in- 
habitants sending their clothes a mile away to dry, and so 
substitutes wash. He says of Plymouth :— 
This famous place before Drake’s time was a very dry town, 
and the inhabitants were enforced to fetch their water and wash 
their clothes a mile from thence; but, by his skill and industry, 
he brought a stream many miles into the place. The head of the 
spring that thus waters the town is to be found no less than seven 
miles distant, in a direct line, but by circlings and indentings he 
brought it thirty, and that through valleys, wastes, and bogs; but 
what was most troublesome of all, through a mighty rock thought 
to be impenetrable. However, by his undaunted spirit, he, like 
another Hannibal marching through the Alps, who said Aut viam 
faciam aut inveniam, made the way he could not find, and over- 
coming the difficulty he finished the enterprise, to the continual 
commodity of the place and his own perpetual honour. And fine 
would have been the diversion, when the water was brought some- 
what near the town, to have seen how the Mayor and his brethren 
in their formalities went out to meet it, and bid it welcome hither, 
and that, being thus met, they all returned together. The 
gentlemen of the Corporation, accompanied with Sir Francis 
Drake, walked before, and the stream followed after into the town, 
where it has continued so to do ever since. 
* Vide Plym. Inst. Trans., vol. v., p. iii. 
+ Plym. Inst. Trans., vol. v., pp. 525, 527, 565. 
t Topographical writers copy and repeat each other to an extent which 
makes them the most unoriginal class of authors known ; but the repetition 
of a statement is no additional proof of its correctness, if the repeater has 
no added personal knowledge. Prince certainly had none. 
