Cornish diaspora

[2] Many skilled miners sought the opportunity to find work abroad, as a consequence of the decline of the tin and copper mining industries in Cornwall.

Rugby union was played overseas by the Cornish miners, this helped develop the game in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

[citation needed] Today, in many native Anglophone and some Hispanic countries, some of the descendants of these original migrants celebrate their Cornish ancestry.

This mining area in the northern Yorke Peninsula, including the principal towns of Moonta, Kadina and Wallaroo, was a source of prosperity for colonial South Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In its heyday Moonta was South Australia's second largest town after Adelaide and was predominately settled by Cornish miners and their families.

Many of the original miners' cottages made from wattle and daub still stand and are still lived in by local residents, and many streets and houses have Cornish names.

A number of townships soon developed - the South Australian Mining Association town of Kooringa, plus Redruth (Cornish) Aberdeen (Scottish) Llywchwr (Welsh) and Hampton (English).

Straining to the vivid exhortations of six bullock drivers under the leadership of William Woollacott, they hauled the massive jinker for three months, on a 100-mile journey from Adelaide.

An example of the extent of the Cornish diaspora are the miners who worked at the Geraldine mine in Western Australia and had an influence on the nearby town of Northampton.

[7][8] Of particular note was Cornish miner Thomas Bawden (Scorrier, 1814-Mariana, Brazil, 1886), who had migrated to Brazil as a young man to make his fortune, and who on June 1, 1859 bought, for a very modest price, the gold ore exploring rights of "Mina da Passagem" (in Mariana, the first city and first capital of Minas Gerais Province), then believed to be practically exhausted, from the estate of then recently deceased mineralogy pioneer Baron von Eschwege (Wilhelm Ludwig Freiherr von Eschwege, a German engineer who had been charged by the King, D. João VI, to survey Brazilian mineral resources and establish ways of exploitation.

The company received, in 1867, the official visit of Sir Richard Francis Burton, former Africa and Middle East explorer, then acting as consul to Brazil within the British diplomatic service.

Consul Burton, a renowned linguist and intellectual as well, described (in the book Explorations of the Highlands of Brazil, 1869) how he had found there a large Cornish community, whose church services included hymns sung in the Cornish language, and had witnessed their eccentric rite of "Baptism for the dead", based on the apostle Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians 15:29.

[9] During the mid-19th century, ships carrying timber from Canada (particularly Quebec City) arrived at Padstow and offered cheap travel to passengers wishing to emigrate.

Mineral del Monte's steep streets, stairways and small squares are lined with low buildings and many houses with high sloping roofs and chimleys which indicate a Cornish influence.

It was the Cornish who first introduced football to Pachuca and indeed Mexico, as well as other popular sports such as Rugby union, Tennis, Cricket, and Polo, while Mexican remittances helped to build the Wesleyan Chapel in Redruth the 1820s.

The recruiters were told to focus on Cornish and Scots who were known for their hard work ethic and were therefore deemed particularly ideal for colonial life.

Consequently, due to the island's small and often intermingling population, which has experienced very little change in several hundred years,[20] most of its inhabitants partially descend from him to this day.

In fact, the pioneering of the Rand gold reef was largely down to the hardrock mining expertise that Cornishmen brought with them from their native country, where tin and copper had been obtained from granite for many centuries.

The Kruger government's decision to tax these so-called uitlanders without any kind of legislative representation was one of the many reasons behind the outbreak of the Second Boer War.

Later Cornish migration to South Africa could be viewed as part of a more general trend of emigration from the British Isles and is thus harder to gauge.

[26] In Grass Valley, California, the tradition of singing Cornish carols lives on and one local historian of the area says the songs have become “the identity of the town”.