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
harbour town.
The Nona is like those women who are peevish and intolerable under
all conditions of reasonable happiness, but come out magnificently in
distress. I lie; for the Nona is never peevish and intolerable. What
I mean is that in easy weather she is a little sluggish on the helm,
and has one or two other small faults, excusable after the fortieth,
the fiftieth, year: for she was launched before Plevna, though, it
is true, a year or two after Sedan. She has her mortalities; but in
a seaway she is magnificent. With her few inches of freeboard, her
old-fashioned straight stem, her solid grip upon the water, she takes
the sea as though she belonged to it, and so she went that day, riding
in highbred fashion, worthy of all praise, and praise she received from
me as she leant over and took the combers one after the other. I gave
her perpetual encouragement: for no boat will do her best unless she is
sufficiently flattered.
Thanks to that increasing wind, the passage was short enough, and what
we had said would at most take three days was accomplished between a
morning and an evening, for it was still broad daylight when we passed
outside the group of rocks of which the chart warned us, and stood
within a mile or two of the now distinct houses of that little harbour
town, all full of Cornish men.
But the wind still rose, and for the wind to rise when day is falling
is a very bad sign. I had no desire to ride it out in the open, and I
proposed to get in under the lee of the land (for there was a sort of
point there), and not to drop anchor till I could be sure of plenty of
water in the harbour later on, when I should make for it on the flood.
My companion came up on deck, from settling things below, and we cast
about anxiously for a place where the anchor might be let go.
It was not an easy calculation. She was driving pretty fast. One had to
get well under the shelter of the low point, and yet to leave plenty of
water beneath one in which to swing. I asked him to go forward and get
all ready, and the Crew would help him. But the Crew did not do so.
The sea being now calmer (though the wind was still rising) because
we had come under the lee of the point, the Crew did, indeed, stagger
forward; but he still held on manfully by the forestay, and looked
curiously on my companion’s activity with the anchor as at a novel and
a pleasant sight. Beyond that he did nothing; but I think he was proud
of keeping his legs so long as he could grasp that forestay. It is no
use to argue nor much use to command in the face of imbecility.
I shouted to my companion to let go the chain when I thought the right
moment come, and at the same instant brought her up sharp.
The anchor took the ground. We were in, perhaps, five fathom of flood
water; for it was full evening, though still light. When we had so lain
for a quarter of an hour or so, taking stock of everything around, I
asked my companion whether we could not, with the last of the light
and the last of the flood, make harbour. The wind was still rising, but
we should be running before it towards the not distant pier. Rounding
that stonework, we should shoot right into the wind’s eye, when it
probably would be broken by the hillside of houses beyond, and, even
though we did not know how far the harbour might still be dried out, we
should be in safety, with plenty of water beneath our keel for an hour
or two more, while we enquired where we should berth. So we decided to
risk it, though perhaps wiser men would have ridden out the night where
we lay.
She certainly took a great deal of water aboard during that short mile
or two, with more and more breakers as we got farther and farther from
the protection of the point. Once, when she buried badly, I was afraid
the sprit might snap, for I had not housed it. But she carried through
all right (though the sprit bent like a willow wand), and we rounded in
the gloaming, shot past the pier-end, and dropped anchor immediately
inside.
A man hailed us from the shore; we threw him a rope, and he showed us
where to berth in water that would just or nearly float us, even at the
lowest of the tide.
The Crew was no longer indolent, now that he had left behind him the
pitiless waste of the seas and felt once more beneath his feet the
solid strength of England. He did what he was told in fastening warps
and putting out fenders. Then came the moment for payment: wage and
the railway fare home. Before he went over the side I asked him gently
whether he had ever been to sea before. He said: ‘Oh, yes, in a manner
of speaking.’ I asked him whether he had ever handled a tiller. ‘Not by
rights,’ he said. ‘Not in such a boat as this.’ I asked him whether he
had any fault to find with the boat. He said no, she was a very good
boat so far as he could see, but he did not pretend to understand
these things. He went over the side into the darkness. He was and he
remains a mystery.
Was he a Charon man who pulled a ferry from shore to shore? Or was
he a man who lounged about on the quay, dressed as his companions
were dressed, but timid of tumbling water? Or was he a vision? Or a
detective? Or an actor? Or one of those writing men who pretend to go
to sea in boats, but never do? I cannot tell. I never saw him again.
This episode of the man in sailor clothes with the hitch, who knew
nothing of the sea, started my mind upon two ways, which, as they
diverged, I could not both follow.
For first it made me think of how we judge by immediate
indications—and the taking-in of people through this method is at the
basis of most commercial successes; even this poor fellow had made some
shillings by it. But also it led me to consider how astonishingly in
the modern world we live side by side and know nothing of one another.
There was certainly never a time in the history of Christendom, nor
of the paganism that went before it, never a time in the history of
our race, when we Europeans (I cannot answer for the Asiatics or the
niggers) were so split up, one small set of men knowing nothing about
another small set of men at their elbows.
The worst form it takes, of course, is the division between rich
and poor, which is quite a modern thing, and an abominable one—the
product, I suppose, of what people call ‘democracy.’
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and I would often talk of this in connection with
my own dear county of Sussex. He was much older than I, between
twenty-five and thirty years older, and he could, therefore, remember
a simpler and a better time than that into which we have descended;
yet he confirmed me in my judgment that, no matter how fond a man might
be of his country, or how long he might live in it, he would never, if
he were of the wealthier, cultivated sort, know the lives of the poor
people about him. I had lived among them on and off all my life, and so
had he; and I certainly loved them with all my heart, and so did he;
but as for knowing how they live or what they really think, there is a
gulf dug between us. It ought not to be so.
Apart from this modern separation of the rich from the poor, there
are any number of side separations. It is only by an accident that
the writing or teaching man knows anything of business, though the
commercial man more often knows something of writing. But the greatest
anomaly of all, the one that has puzzled me most of a hundred such, is
the complete ignorance of what the Catholic Church is and means—the
ignorance even of what its doctrines may be. One would think it should
be a mere matter of encyclopædias and textbooks—easy for any one
to look up. In nations of Catholic culture, of course, the Church
is thoroughly well known, even by its worst enemies; but in nations
not of Catholic culture the absence of all contact with, and of even
elementary information upon, this essential thing, is stupefying.
Here is the corporate tradition which made Europe: the Thing which is
the core and soul of all our history for fifteen hundred years, and
on into the present time: the continuator of all our pagan origins,
transformed, baptised, illumined; the matrix of such culture as we
still retain. For any European not to know the elements of that affair
is to be in a blind ignorance of all his making, and, therefore, of
his self. Yet it is perfectly true that the Englishman or Scotsman,
cultivated to excess, saturated with the knowledge of all he thinks
there is to know, fatigued and cynical after too much sounding of the
world, says things with regard to that great affair which show him to
be as little acquainted with its essentials as he might be with another
planet. He has many Catholic acquaintances; he probably has some
reading of his own country before the death of Elizabeth; he is certain
to have read Shakespeare—a writer who wrote for and in a Catholic
England, and a writer whose whole atmosphere is Catholic. He may
justly pride himself upon his knowledge of the architecture, or even
the institutions of the Occident before the great sundering of three
hundred years ago. Yet, when he is dealing with this mighty business,
he says things more grotesque than anything said by any Colonial about
that very governing class to which he himself belongs. He produces an
effect, when he touches upon the Faith, which—I say it honestly—is
as startling and as comic as the effect produced by those ingenuous
millionaires from the backwoods who come barging in among the London
subtleties of ancient wealth.
And if this is true—as it is true—of the old governing class, who
have some few of them direct family traditions connected with the
Faith, nearly all of them relatives and every one of them friends and
acquaintances who are Catholic, it is, of course, still more true of
the average writing and speaking man of lower birth upon whom general
opinion depends.
Now and then one comes across a man who talks or writes with some
knowledge, if not of what lies beyond the boundary, at least of the
boundary itself; but it is exceedingly rare. The latest example I know
of the thing is the preface by Mr. Bernard Shaw, written for his play
‘Saint Joan.’ Here there is a clear recognition of the boundary between
the Faith and what lies outside: between the garden and the heath, or
marsh.
He is writing there of the voices which Saint Joan of Arc heard, and
which determined her mission. He points out that people often hear
voices through a morbid faculty of projecting what they have themselves
imagined. It is well known that that may happen to any one; and most
people recognise that such a phenomenon is within themselves, and
has no value of reality. Indeed, pretty well every one has at one
time or another vividly heard not-present sounds, whether through the
recollection of a loved voice or through some other emotion of fear
or violence; and it is only a question of degree whether you call the
impression ‘hearing’ or no. He also points out that in the case of
diseased people this imaginary stuff takes on a false reality, and
that many lunatics, criminal and other, imagine themselves to have
heard voices commanding them to do this or that—usually something very
unpleasant, nothing half so fine or sane as conducting a triumphant war.
All that is perfectly true. Then he comes to the specific point of
Saint Joan’s voices, and he says that, having been brought up a strong
Protestant (and, indeed, a strong Protestantism is the note of all his
writings), he cannot accept the idea that these voices were real.
Now, there you have a perfectly clear and lucid statement of the
boundary between the Catholic world and what lies outside it. The
specific difference between the Catholic and the non-Catholic—so
far as Europe is concerned—lies in what is roughly called (it is