roscoff

My cradle, Rosko-Goz, village on the shackle of Aber, port of grounding in the shelter of Roc' H Kroum, often devastated by the Normans. Obstinate, my inhabitants rebuilt each time the destroyed hearths and took again their activities: inshore fishing and maritime trade. About 1400, the blinding of my port, and its destruction by fire due to the English, encouraged Roscovites to settle in the shackle of Quellen,that is more favourable to the rise of my trade.
With my new port, it becomes an important center of transit and slackening. Merchants and traders were made salt warehousemen for the Norman fishermen, exporters of canvases, importers of wines and brandy, and linseed commission agents... and accumulated considerable fortunes in few years, The rebuilding of my city went good. From the west to the east of the port, along the shore, I was only one immense building site. Houses in ashlars, in quarry stones with the roofs of slates, the sculpted gargoyles, and the monu-mental sky lights, in the entry of the street; houses of the port with the walls beaten by the floods; I counted of it more than 450 towards1600, as well as two streets , that are the street of the Pearls (street A.Rousseau today, which, from the manor of Porte-Noire joined the shore, and the street of Rive that starts from the quay to Théven. Suburb of Saint-Pol-de-Léon, I did not have a church. About 1500, fortunate merchants decided to build one of them, on their own sums of money. On the close dune on the place of loading of the island of Batz, they anchored a stone vessel, with the decorated sides of the ships, and the guns pointed towards Albion.
Two hundred years afterwards, I was equipped with a "harbour" ranging between the shore and the quay, and with a "port" constituted by the roadstead where the ships of strong tonnage wet which could not without risk approach the shore. But the wars, the prohibition to negotiate with the belligerents, the insecurity of the sea routes, encouraged my ship-owners to forsake their trade for the "war of race". They transformed their trading vessels into units of engagements and became "corsairs" for the service of the stateBut their "race" did not remain less than a commercial deal where the state, the ship-owner, the captain and his crew, were to find their advantages. Often temptation was strong not to await the division of the loot, to appropriate the hold. My corsars became pirates!
From 1750, my port found its vitality. , Fish-waggons, often armed to defend themselves against the customs and charged of enormous quantities of tea, wine spirit and other drinks, to introduce them in fraud in England, where the import duties were very high. I had become a port of smuggling. In 1789my peasants represented half of my population. A rich ground, a favorable climate; enclosed fields of stone slope, enabled them to produce incredible quantities of vegetables, artichokes, asparaguses, cauliflowers. They supplied the ships and the markets of the bigcities between Morlaix and Brest.
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On January 30, 1790, Roscovites decided to be detached from Saint-Pol-de-Léon and elect their first municipality. With the economic disorders generated by the revolution, my port knew a new decline. During the "Continental Blockade"; it found an important activity of smuggling towards England, then calms down again. My farmers became merchants of vegetables then. Until the arrival of the railroad, they dispatched their harvests to the capital, by the sea, via Morlaix and Havre. In 1828, one of them charter a boat and charged it with onions and with three mates, headed for England. Renewing with hawking, he was followed soon by others. During tens of years, the "Johnnies" went to knock on the doors of the English residences, with the shoulders heavily charged with a stick on which strings of onions tied up in boots were threaded. Schooners, Dundeeses, moored on two or three rows, along the old quay, gave again life to my port.. In 1872, an eminent professor from Sorbonne, Lacaze-Duthiers, founded the "Biological Station" which became along the time a center of scientific research and teaching universally known. First establishment of thalassotherapy, the Marine Institute, created in 1899 by the Doctor Bagot, was at the origin of my medical vocation: Private clinic of Ker Léna, and Center of Hélio Marin followed.