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
that one particular part of the world, and he is usually either a man
of independent position through birth and wealth (who feels himself,
therefore, fairly immune from the law courts), or a hanger-on of such.
And I have noticed that these cranks begin by what is no more than an
affectation; but, like all humbug, this affectation brings its own
punishment in the shape of a sort of ingrowing false sincerity. Such
men _almost_ get to believe in themselves. It never quite comes off.
I have never known one of these men, even in his latest days, to be
really, fully, and homogeneously sincere. For instance, I have never
known one who would hesitate to make money out of the English rule in
some part of the Orient while denouncing that rule with fervour, and
(no doubt) heartfelt indignation.
There is another curious little point about this sort of people: they
are always very proud of being mixed up with the British administration
of the dependency in question. They love to point out in conversation
how their very opposition has brought them into contact with this,
that, and the other important administrator and his class. Usually
their birth has made them familiar with that class; for, until lately,
the controllers of dependencies were drawn in the main from people of
family or from their dependents, and your pro-native crank must be
himself of consequence to survive. Were they poor and weak they would
be broken.
Upon the whole, I think these anti-Englishmen are an advantage to the
State. You may be perfectly certain that they will never go to the
length of doing anything active to the hurt of England, and they lend
variety and criticism to the external action of England. They make the
rivals of England admire a social structure in which such internal
strains (which foreigners always exaggerate) are rendered innocuous. If
they do any harm, it is by inflating, through reaction, that growing
and very dangerous vanity which the public schools and universities
have so much encouraged in our generation, and through which most
men have come to feel that Fate is necessarily upon the side of their
country, that no national disasters need be feared in the future, nor
any precautions taken to forestall national decline. The Englishman
who says that he wants England out of India, inflames, by reaction,
the fatuity of the Englishman who thinks himself in India as one of a
Chosen Race.
These pacifists or internationalists of Britain have strongly in them
the English hatred of cruelty, and they have in high development the
national habit of short cuts in thought; as, for instance, when you
may hear them say that war is wrong, which is as much as to say that a
house on fire is wrong.
This habit of taking short cuts in thought is often called, not only
by foreigners who are unused to the English habit of mind, but by
Englishmen themselves, an incapacity for clear thinking. I do not
quite agree. As it seems to me, the essential characteristic of this
way of speaking and thinking is not its lack of lucidity—for, though
that is evident enough, it is not the essential. The essential is the
taking for granted of a great many things which are not expressed. This
habit of taking short cuts in speech is in some way a habit common to
all this group of islands; for the Scotch have it, too, though not so
strongly marked as the English; and the Irish have it very pronouncedly
indeed: it is far more marked in them than in the English, and is the
root of the ‘bull.’
For instance, when a man says that war is wrong, he is saying
something which, as it stands, is manifestly nonsense. But if we
expand the phrase, it has full and definite meaning. He means ‘for
one organised community to attempt destruction and physical pain upon
the organisation of another such community, with the object of gain
or increase of power, is wrong.’ And so it undoubtedly is. Or, when
he says that war is silly and not worth while, he again means (when
we fully expand his phrase for him) that such action is commonly so
expensive and hurtful, even to those who successfully use it, that it
is a bad speculation. In this, indeed, he is not so certainly right
as in his first proposition, for most victorious wars in history have
handsomely paid the victors; but my point is that this kind of talk,
whether about war or anything else, is not _due_ to muddle-headedness;
though it goes with muddle-headedness. It is due to a clotting of
thought through compression.
One phrase which I very often hear (and which, as it stands, is
apparently a piece of bestial unintelligence) may further my point. It
is the phrase: ‘Some religion ought to be taught in the schools.’
It is obvious that this phrase as it stands is a contradiction in
terms; for the word ‘ought’ can only apply to a moral good; and if
such and such a religious system is of good effect, then an opposite
and contradictory religious system will be of evil effect. If I think
it wrong to murder, if my religion teaches me that murder is a great
moral evil, then I teach children in schools that this is so. But if
my religion is that of an Oriental body I have heard of, called Thugs,
with whom murder is a high religious act, then I teach an opposite set
of morals. Both religions cannot be good. One must be good and the
other evil. But when you hear people say, ‘Some religion should be
taught in the schools,’ what they mean is that ‘the general Protestant
ethics of the English people should, on their broader lines, be taught
in the English schools.’ They take for granted that every one using
the word ‘religion’ means English Protestantism. Having taken that for
granted, they shorten their speech in the fashion I have just quoted.
And really such wandering of the mind over this, that, and the other,
as I have thus indulged before sleep, in the pleasant little cabin
of the Nona (pleasant to me, odious to the pernickety, for it is a
hugger-mugger home), watching between the open skylight and the combing
a little belt of nightly sky with stars, is a poor adjunct to the scent
of the sea, and to the Devon air. To the devil with all reasonings and
counter-reasonings and abstractions and argufying: I am for sleep.
We woke early next morning to the noise of the loud clapping of water
upon the bows, and I put my head out of the skylight to see little
dusty clouds going too quickly across the heavens, and a freshening
breeze blowing up from a little south of west, so that all the harbour
water was dancing and alive. But the glass was high, and there was no
reason why we should not take the sea again, only we must wait for the
ebb (which would come in about three hours’ time, nearer nine than
eight o’clock). For, in that blanketed part of the river down below, we
should never get the Nona out against the flood. Nevertheless, I asked
my companion whether it might not be wise to take another man, for we
were going down the coast, where the rare harbours were shoal, and
not easy to enter, and also small, and lay so that, with such a wind,
one would have to beat up to them. An extra hand, such as we had with
us during the never-to-be-forgotten business of Bardsey, would be an
advantage. Such a hand, therefore, after minute enquiry and searching
questions, did we ship; then, all things having been done in their
order, and sail set with the second jib and two reefs in the mainsail
and one reef forward, we got up the anchor and let her down for the sea.
The hand we had shipped (promising him his journey home by rail
within three days at the most) was very well got up in sailor fashion,
with his jersey and his peaked cap, the latter worn a trifle to one
side, after the fashion of those who are daring, and challenge Æolus.
His trousers, it was true, did not spread out at the bottom, like
elephants’ feet or the mouths of bells, as do the trousers of sailors
upon the stage. On the other hand, he would give them a hitch from time
to time—a gesture symbolic of the Main in Drury Lane. He had nothing
to do as we dropped down river, for all was trim. He sat and smoked,
and watched the water before him with wistful eyes. I think he was by
nature a man sad or saddened; and he was very silent.
On the bar there was no end of a lump, and, as we were blanketed by
that high cliff, the Nona took it uneasily, chucking up and down with
flapping sails and rolling damnably, but in a few moments the strength
of the ebb had swept us far enough out to catch the wind again, and we
set a course full-and-by; right out for the open, for the large. For
we designed to beat in again after a few miles, and so make our way
down-Channel towards the Cornishmen.
There was certainly quite enough wind: ‘All the wind there is,’ as an
old Irish sailor said to me once during an Atlantic gale so abominable
that he and I could not walk against its icy, sleeting December fury,
but had to crawl forward tugging along the rail by main force, all up
the windward side.... That was a passage worthy of remembrance, for we
took three weeks between Europe and the Delaware, the engines and the
old frame quite unfit for their task; and in that cheap passage, also,
I learnt from a stoker two songs: one called ‘The Corn Beef Can,’ and
the other called ‘The Tom Cat.’ They are of the great songs of this
world.
A man should learn all the songs he can. Songs are a possession, and
all men who write good songs are benefactors. No people have so many
songs as the English, yet no people sing less in these last sad days of
ours. One cannot sing in a book. Could a man sing in a book, willingly
would I sing to you here and now in a loud voice ‘The Corn Beef Can’
and ‘The Tom Cat,’ those admirable songs which I learnt in early
manhood upon the Atlantic seas.
There was more wind, indeed, than I liked. We took in the third reef,
and went about to the starboard tack, after we had run out so far that
we thought we could fetch, upon this tack, the next harbour. As we came
near to that town, and saw its roofs far away appear and disappear
again behind the crests of unpleasant seas, the Nona heeled suddenly to
a much too angry gust. I heard a crash coming from below, and with it
the voice of my companion crying, ‘Come down quick and help!’
The Crew (if I may call him so) was sitting forward, hunched up,
clutching the weather shrouds, and not happy. I called him to come and
hold the tiller, while I should go below to help, and I warned him that
she was pulling hard, although she was under three reefs, for we had
nothing forward now but the third jib. He looked over his shoulder in
a very ghastly way, and shook his head from side to side, as though
despairing to be heard in such a wind. I was within a few feet of him,
and I bawled, ‘COME AND TAKE THE TILLER! QUICK!’ but again he miserably
shook his head, and clung to the shroud. Then did I, commending myself
to Saint Elmo (which is a false name, for his real name was Peter,
and even Gonzales, and he was the man who was so shocked to find all
the Galicians lapsed into a pagan darkness and living in open fun),
struggle to make some shift of keeping the tiller up with my right arm
stretched back, while I craned my head down below the cabin door to
see what was going on downstairs.
The stove had got adrift in the lurch. There was oil all over the
place, and a mass of crockery, and everything on the weather side had
leapt to leeward, and some little of it trailed in the oil of the
floor-boards. It was not more serious than that; for, luckily, the
stove was not alight. I shouted to my companion that I could not leave
the tiller. I bobbed up my head again and found that even in that short
moment she had almost swung into irons. I put her round just in time,
and we raced and flew, breasting the seas for that farther little misty