The cruise of the Nona The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners
trimmed for your miserable barque, neither too strong nor too light nor
too far forward so that you have to beat, nor so far aft that you fear
a gybe, or pooping from a running sea? Will you never repose in the
will of your Maker and take things as they come? Why, then, drift round
Skomer like a fool!
Which, indeed, was what the Nona did, for as it fell dead calm, the
set of the sea took her in the most amusing unaccountable way on a
jolly little voyage of exploration. The sea took charge. The tiller
was not worth holding, the helm swung idle, and the canvas hung like
the flabby muscles on the face of an Opposition leader towards the end
of the third hour of a speech from the Front Bench to which he has had
to listen, sorely against his will. It hung loose and inept, like the
hands of a poor man waiting orders in the presence of a rich man, or
like the mind of a sceptic when he considers the ultimate nature of
good and evil—let alone beauty. The sea took charge and trolled the
little boat along, keeping her just so far from the shore, as who
should say, ‘See, my child, how remarkable is the Island of Skomer!
Come with me, I will show you every cranny of its outer shore.’ So were
we taken off round Skomer by the tide in that calm, further and further
from Jack Sound.
When they had played this farce with us long enough, the Powers halted
the sea, as is their fashion every six hours, and we found ourselves
close aboard a large ketch which lay at anchor off that Skomer shore.
There was one man upon the deck, smoking a pipe and keeping his mind
empty, as is the duty of all mortals in such few intervals of leisure
as heaven affords us. He bade us not knock into him, and we called out
to him (but not very loud, for we were at a familiar cast of but few
yards) that if we came too close aboard we would shove off and do him
no harm. We asked him who he was and where he was going. He did not
tell us who he was, but he told us where he was going, which was to
Cork, and what he had on board, which was a cargo of coal.
The lazy sun, halfway down the sky, looked indifferently upon us; the
quite smooth sea turned again in its perpetual come and go, and took us
slowly back in so many hours, till we found ourselves again by evening
where we had started, at the mouth of Jack Sound. What this current
or tide movement was which had thus taken us nearly round Skomer and
back again, I know not, but it was a journey that cost nothing, and,
tedious as it was, we had at least learned another few miles of shore.
It seemed, however, all of a set purpose, for the wind now blew again
lightly but steadily from the northeast. The ebb was well on its way,
and we could point through Jack Sound, and hope to be in Milford Haven,
round Saint Anne’s Head, before the late darkness of this day in early
June.
So did we enter that passage.
Jack Sound in that evening light was a repetition of Ramsey, only
more violent, for we were more in the full roar of the ebb. There
was the same rush as of a millrace, the same cataracts of falling
water over the landward rocks. We came out of it with the setting sun
glorious upon our starboard quarter, and ran quickly for the end of
Skokholm—another Scandinavian name—sure (in that steady breeze) of
rounding Saint Anne’s Head easily before darkness, and dropping anchor
in some cove of Milford Haven.
But nothing is ever certain at sea. We were, perhaps, a mile from the
Head when there rolled up with astonishing rapidity from out the main
ocean a solid bank of cloud, sweeping the level of the sea. I say cloud
rather than fog, because it was so solid and so dark. It caught us like
a cloak thrown over a man’s head; and, before we knew where we were,
we found ourselves steering hopelessly by the card, not daring to keep
too much out, lest we should lose the mouth of the haven; not daring to
keep too much in, lest we should strike: and nothing to prevent that
but listening anxiously to the great fog-blast, which was now hooting
regularly in its panic from the height of the headland.
What followed for nearly two hours was such an adventure as only
wretched amateurs would indulge in, and amateurs in a craft which did
not draw more than six feet of water. The wind, such as it was, had
dropped, of course, with the fog. It gave us only enough way to creep
eastward before it; and what we proposed to do was so to feel our way
in the fading light through that dense mist until we should hear the
slight surge of water upon the rocks of the haven mouth to port, that
is, on the north side of the haven entry. I had a large plan aboard,
and I knew that there was water close up to the shore, and that it was
plain enough going, with nothing hidden beneath the surface. So we
gingerly put her head slightly round, when we made out the mournful
menace of the fog-horn to have come just aft of the beam; my companion
took the helm, and I went forward with the lead, and also to call out
to him to put the helm up whenever that might be made necessary by our
getting too close. We faintly heard already the slight wash of the
gently heaving water, and I saw, some few yards off the bow, little
gleams of white through the mist, which were the foam sliding from the
rock surfaces, as we slipped by. The Nona’s movement was so very slight
that even if she had struck a glancing blow, nothing that was not
jagged would have harmed her greatly; but we were preserved and did not
touch.
We had this further good fortune, that, just as it grew quite dark,
the sound of the slight surge to leeward receded and disappeared so
that we knew we had turned the headland and opened the first bay of
that long inland arm of the sea. Our chart showed us good depth and
good holding-ground, and a good berth for the night, granted that there
should be no other craft about. We heard none such through the fog; no
voices, no swinging spars, no movement at all. So when we had got well
into the bight, we dropped anchor; trusting to luck that, as she swung
to her chain, she would not strike shoal ground nor anything near. Had
we still had the dinghy, I would have gone out and explored and made
certain, and risked my chance of getting back aboard through the mist,
but, having no dinghy, we had to take things as they were, and these
seemed secure enough, for we were well out of the fairway. The first of
the night was interrupted by that perpetual call of the great horn upon
the headland, but before midnight the fog lifted, the sound ceased, and
a profound silence fell upon the sea and the land. We had also the
comfort of seeing that we had plenty of room to swing, with the shore
perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
That night as I fell asleep I designed the second and third verses of
the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’
The next morning we found, following the flood up the Haven, a very
slight breeze from the west and north, not enough to allow us to beat
up against the current; so we passed the time till the beginning of the
ebb, or rather till the flood should slacken, sailing slowly up that
long fiord, Milford Haven, of which one reads so much in history, but
which to-day, having no industrial hinterland, has half dropped out of
men’s memories. Two evils of the past are rooted in its landscape, for
it was here that the first Tudor claimant, ‘the foul usurper, Henry
Tydder,’ landed with his French mercenaries to try for the crown, which
he grasped in two weeks on Bosworth Field. And it was hence that the
transports sailed for the Puritan orgy of lust, loot, and massacre in
Ireland under Cromwell’s leadership. I wondered as I cruised about,
watching the shores and the little town near by, what further fate
Milford Haven might hold for England. Things go by threes—especially
evils—what will the third curse arising from this inlet be?
The wind freshened just as the flood was slackening, so we turned to
beat out. It was well into the afternoon when we took the open sea,
with the wind a trifle north of west, so that our last board out of
harbour was a free run. We took her well outside so as to be able to
set a straight course for Lundy and beyond, intending a passage to
Bideford River, and the ending of this voyage.
The wind dropping somewhat, it was evening before we had well passed
Saint Goven’s lightship, and all that night we went quietly over the
seas with a gentle following wind until, before morning, we raised
Lundy Light full and clear. But the wind failed us at dawn, falling
first to irregular puffs, and at last, when we were about a mile and a
half northeast of the island and pointing right for Appledore Bar, it
fell off altogether. Little patches of slightly ruffled water, here and
there, fewer and more distant one from the other, at last faded out to
nothingness; and we lay helpless, hardly moving, until the set of some
slight current drew us half a mile further on into that strange piece
of water called the Great White Horse Race.
What this may be in heavy weather or even in a strong breeze I cannot
tell, for I have never been through it before or since. As things were,
in that dead calm, it was a perpetual succession of fairly even, long,
smooth, watery hills, with troughs astonishingly deep and rounded
crests astonishingly high for a morning without wind. There was no way
at all on the Nona; she lay buoyant enough, but like a log; broadside
on and rolling damnably for hour after hour; shaking her spars with
every lie-over, as though to so many hammer-blows; throwing the boom
with a bang, although I had made it as fast as I could, and giving a
violent jerk at the mainsheet each time she ended a swing. It was a
miserable ten hours or so that we endured, gazing at Lundy from the top
of each passing heave, and drifting there paralysed under the useless
sky.
Lundy is one of those neat things which you get now and then in Nature,
and which look as though they had been specially designed on a rather
careful plan with one simple object. One would think Lundy could do no
harm—yet I always remember the Montague.
It is so placed that it gives shelter in any weather. It is a sort
of little breakwater set up in the midst of the Bristol Channel,
offering security to all craft, coming up or down; for there is good
holding-ground everywhere about, and you can lie under the lee of
the land whichever way it may be blowing. The only drawback of the
neighbourhood for small craft is this same White Horse Race, in which
we had been caught by the calm. Even in that oily weather, its great
swells passed us half way to the height of our jaws, and our topmast,
excessive for the little craft, made her roll all the worse, while the
motion was so jerky that at times I feared for the fastenings of the
shrouds at the sides. But a larger craft would think nothing of this
patch of sea and, save for it, all the water round Lundy is exactly
made for security.
I have never landed on the island. I have heard many legends about it,
none of which I repeat for fear that they are false. But what I should
most like to know (only I have never met any one who could tell me) is
whether the pleasure of isolation which these places afford increases
with the years, or at last becomes intolerable? I knew a man once who,
during all the latter part of his life, was torn between the desire
of possessing an island, and his fear lest, once he had bought it, he
should find that he had purchased misfortune. All his friends told him
that islands were like those legendary objects of bad luck which one
man has to pass on to another and which each new holder soon finds
unendurable. To be king of one’s own land, to be quite cut off from
the complexity and futilities of the world, to have a little country
all of one’s own, neatly bounded, inaccessible if one chooses to make