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
of Falmouth, you have Fowey, you have the miles of inland water at
Plymouth, you have the Yealm and Salcombe, and the Dart and Teignmouth.
Yet the legends, and even the history of Dumnonia are more concerned
with such shallow, small, and difficult places as Saint Ives, Padstow,
and Bideford River. The wealth seems to have been more on the
north than upon the south, for you will note that the pirate raids
principally struck there, and the shrines also, the ancient shrines,
are rather on the north than on the south; and on the north also is
Tintagel, of which it was said by Tristram: ‘Blessed be Tintagel and
all that dwell therein.’ The relics of the saints were established
in the northern harbours. The seats of government were on the north:
there, in the north, is the story of Arthur; and when Cornwall
communicates with Brittany in the early Dark Ages, men seem to sail
round the end of the land—though the southern harbours are there,
pointing right at the further shore.
Did that peninsula swing as on a pivot axis? Did it deepen to the south
during the long, hardly-recorded ages?
I knew nothing of these harbours of North Devon and Cornwall, not even
by hearsay. I read up diligently in my ‘West Coast Pilot’ that river
which seemed the best for entry along these coasts, and hoped to make
it before evening. But the wind died down altogether, and we drifted
aimlessly enough back upon the flood, then down again on the ebb,
through the night, and all through the morning and the noon, and on
into the afternoon again of the second day.
It was full evening, and the sun within an hour of its setting, the air
much warmer now and the light mellow with a powdery gold, when a strong
breeze came up out of the very sun, as it were; out of the glory. The
Nona heeled to it, and was now to be handled at will, making a good run
a little north of west, with the opportunity for beating as we chose.
We beat up towards the river-mouth, sure, as we thought, that the wind
would hold, and that we could easily run up the stream and so to the
town beyond before darkness. What we had not reckoned with was a sheer
cliff lying along the river-mouth to the west, overhanging it and
cutting off the wind. On the eastern shore was an immense stretch of
half-covered sand, bearing a name of disaster, and famous for wreckage.
Having lost the wind, we could no longer manœuvre, and, what was worse
in that narrow passage, we found that the tide did not run true to the
sea-tide outside.
We had counted upon the flood making; but, whether because there was
more water than usual in the river, or from some odd effect of the
wind, or because locally it is always so (though the ‘West Coast Pilot’
told us nothing about it, nor the chart either), the river was still
running out violently, and there seemed no sign of an upward-going
stream before darkness.
I had almost determined to let her drift out again, catch the sea
wind when I got beyond the wall of the cliff, find anchoring-ground
well offshore, and wait there for the day, when there appeared,
coming down the river at great speed, a white motor-boat, large and
exquisitely apparelled, splendid with burning bronze, regally accoutred
in unspotted gleaming mantle of the foam-colour, of the cloud-colour,
of the snow-colour, and a line of gold all around. It was indeed a
boat apparelled, not only as to itself, but as to its two humans; and
shameful did the Nona appear, homely, draggle-tail, sordid, even after
so very calm a passage, when contrasted with that dandy of the inland
waters. Alas! That dead wealth should dig such gulfs between mortals
and that poverty should lessen virtue!
But, to be just, it is not only wealth that breeds these fine sights,
it is also a certain temper in the owner. And I knew very well that
though I had three million pounds and some odd pence over I should
never have a tidy boat. I could not sleep in such a thing.
Anyhow, there she came, thundering down the tide. I had thought she
would pass me in her rush of speed, and I held up until she should have
done so, for it would have been dangerous to have tried to go about
with such a weight of movement coming on us, and our own course half
out of control, dependent only upon occasional slight splashes of wind
from over the cliff. But the motor-boat slowed down, and its owner
asked us if we wanted a tow up to the town. We met him with gratitude:
he was of that very considerable class known as the Good Rich, with
whom are the Penitent Thieves, the Reformed Drunkards, the Sane
Professors, the Womanly Furies, and all other candidates for heaven.
We threw a line aboard him and made fast, and so went up just as the
darkness came, and dropped anchor in the pool under a neat little city,
which lived by the traffic of that difficult waterway with its strange
tide. But, then, all tides are strange.
My companion and I sat in the hatch that evening under quiet stars,
smoking pipes, watching that most pleasant of sights, the home lights
of a little harbour town, and their trembling reflections in the
water, the slight swaying of the masts of fishing-boats moored by the
quay. We wondered together at the way the tide had behaved when it
tried to baulk us of our entry, and we decided before we slept that
it was better never to reason upon tides, nor even to accept print
upon them, but to take them blindly as they came, for ‘No man living
can understand the tides,’ said my companion, and, as he said it, he
sighed; and he was right.
No man living can understand the tides. And the mystery of the tides is
as good a corrective as one could find to our deadening pride in exact
measurements, and to the folly of attempting to base real knowledge
upon mere calculation: our pretence to a universal science, and to a
modern omniscience upon the Nature of Things.
The bungling of landsmen in the matter of tides begins with Galileo.
That worthy had a talent for getting off the rails and he bungled on
the tides as he did on comets. Then came Newton. Why does the tide flow
every twelve hours on the average, instead of every twenty-four? If it
be true, as I suppose it roughly is, that the moon is the main puller
of the tides (helped and hindered a little by the sun, and certainly by
other forces of which we know nothing), then there ought to be a tide
every twenty-four hours. Put a lot of fluid round a solid sphere, and
set a pull, working from some point well outside the fluid. It looks as
though the fluid would heap up towards the pull. It being discovered
that the fluid heaped up not only towards the pull, but also on the
other side of the solid sphere, away from the pull, the mind of man
could not rest without proclaiming an explanatory dogma, and we were
told (by Newton among others) that the pull not only heaped up the
fluid towards itself, but also dragged away the earth from the water on
the far side. Indeed, Newton worked it out and proved that it was so.
If the phenomenon had been the other way about, if the fluid had
behaved as one would expect it to behave, and had heaped up only on
the side towards the pull—oh! believe me! a formula would have been
discovered to explain _that_ with just as much ease as the formula
which has been drawn up to explain the real state of affairs.
But this original false dogma is not of very much interest compared
with the immense complexity of the tides, and the inability to follow
them with any sort of completeness by reason of that complexity.
For the tides behave in the most inexplicable fashion. They follow, of
course, certain habits, which we know (from the observation of liquids
everywhere) to be in the nature of a liquid in movement. They pile
up higher as they rush up funnels. They are checked by ridges, they
form eddies—and all the rest of it. But they are continually playing
anomalous tricks; and any one who tries to work up a theory of the
tides makes a fool of himself: still more does any poor sailing-man do
so who uses science to discover what the tide may be doing in a place
he has not yet tried. He makes not only a fool of himself, but also,
very probably, shipwreck.
Why should a tide run three hours late inshore along the Bight of
Sussex? We are told it is an eddy. Of course it is. But why an eddy
of such extraordinary retardation? The main Channel tide runs from
headland to headland. It is ‘true,’ as the phrase goes, at Saint
Catharine’s, and again at Beachy and so on to Dungeness; and if you are
going up-Channel outside, you carry it with you ‘true’ all the way.
That it should be a little retarded in the Bight of Sussex one might
understand, but that Bight is very shallow (it is only fifteen miles
from the deepest point by Shoreham to the outer line), and yet you have
this three hours’ difference! The tide still runs hard to the west
alongshore, three—anyhow, two and three quarters—hours after it has
turned eastward outside.
Who can explain why there is nine hours’ ebb on the easterly shore of
Portland and only three hours’ flow? It is a monkey trick, designed to
prevent the poor sailorman from sneaking in just under the Bill: it
gives him only three hours out of the twelve in which to do it, with
Scylla on his left, and that most abominable howling Charybdis called
Portland Race on his right. And if he comes up to the Bill at the end
of his three hours’ limit, he has his heart in his mouth for fear that
he should find the ebb stream catching his bows the moment he is round
the Bill, and driving him headlong into the heart of the Race.
And what about the double tide of the Wight and Poole, the _gulder_, as
they call it—the mystery of the Dorset and the Hampshire seas? In the
days of my innocence I used to believe what I was told: that the double
tide in Southampton Water was due to the water coming in first through
the Needles channel and then around by Spithead later. It sounded
reasonable for Southampton Water. But when I first made Poole, and
found that they had a double tide there as well—and even out beyond
Saint Alban’s Head—my philosophy was shaken, and my scheme of things
fell heavily to the ground. Why on earth should there be a double tide
on that coast? Who could explain it?
The enormous tide at the end of the funnel of the Bristol Channel is
reasonable enough, though it is a little odd that it should be so very
much bigger at Chepstow than at Gloucester. But how will you account
for the prodigious heave at Saint Malo? Why does the flood come up Arun
River like a racehorse recently invigorated with a bucket of beer, and
at Newhaven hardly move at all up the Ouse?
I have stood outside the old piers at Newhaven in a little boat, with a
northerly wind, expecting the first of the flood to help me to beat up,
and waited for the quarter flood, and the half flood, and, later than
that, and still have seen the sluggish surface water running out to
sea against all the tidal laws that were ever written down: running out
to sea, though the level of it steadily rose.
But there is no end to the mystery of the tides. Why is there a tide
at Venice? It is not much of a thing, but it is there. And, for that
matter, there is _a_ tide in the Lake of Geneva. Here, again, the
learned come barging in and tell us all about it. Closed basins (they
say) like the Adriatic, even quite small ones, like the Lake of Geneva,
have their little tides after the fashion of water swung in a basin.
The explanation is given in some simile like this: ‘If you shake a
basin slightly, the water will begin to swing with a regular movement
back and forth.’ So it will. But who shakes the Lake of Geneva? Or who
catches the Adriatic at either end, and gives it a regular balance up
and down, exactly so often, every so many hours?