The best-known story is about the boat. Pierre built it in his barn in a single morning, and the Sark people were amazed to see it launched in the Creux harbour. This was "Black Art", Betsy Hamon explained, because the boat was too big to go out through the barn door, and his house was not near the sea anyway. His hedges were repaired overnight by his helpers, and when he had nothing else for them to do they forged coin. Passers-by could hear their hammers.
He courted his first wife in France, sailing there alone in a small open boat, and she married him thinking he was a gentleman. He treated her cruelly. Her parlour was mirrored from floor to ceiling, and he brought his horses into it, where they kicked at their own reflections and smashed the glass and furniture. She died of a broken heart, and he married a Sark girl "little more than a child". His daughter, "la petite Betsy", was seen bringing their cow home at dawn well fed after grazing it in the churchyard at night, so nobody would buy his milk or butter.
Mrs Le Messurier said he was "an excessively bad man", and told the story of the English soldiers who came with bayonets to take him for smuggling ammunition to France, and could not find him because he was down his well. Whatever the truth of that, it suggests a real man with a reputation for smuggling, and Sark legend did the rest. The Creux harbour is the map point.
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