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
idea that the witness in a legal case may justly be confused and
harried in order that the truth shall be concealed; and that capacity
of so confusing and harrying a witness is the great test of a man’s
moral aptitude to administer Justice. And it is an approved idea that a
lawyer may do his utmost to have an innocent man condemned, if only he
be paid highly enough. But the breakdown of the idea of justice is only
one department of the great change. There are a score of others to be
surveyed; notably the novel doctrine that a man’s wealth is the test of
his value in the State.
Well, what will come out of that welter, that corruption into which the
decomposition of the Christian culture is now dissolving?
What I think will spring out of the filth is a new religion.
I think there will arise in whatever parts of Christendom remain, say,
two hundred years hence, cut off from the advancing restoration of
the Faith, some simplified, odd, strong code of new habit, comparable
to the sudden code of habit which Arabia constructed on the ruins of
Christian doctrine in the East. Whatever refuses to accept the Catholic
restoration will sooner or later develop a new religion, because human
society cannot live on air, and to men of our strong Western blood
the substance of a doctrine and a ritual are especially needful. This
conception of a new religion (and, therefore, an evil one) arising
out of the rottenness of the grave of truth, seems to-day at once
fantastic and unpleasant. Unpleasant I admit it is; fantastic I do not
believe it to be.
From that Cornish town I had the next morning to make my way back
to London; and Stephen Reynolds, whom I met, got her round the land
safely to the ports upon the southern side, whence later I resumed this
cruise: Stephen Reynolds, that strongest-souled and most sincere of
men, who desired and did good all his life. It is the meeting with such
men, and the comparison of their public label with their true function,
of their false renown or lack of renown with their certain standing in
the eyes of their Maker, which lead all wise men to a perfect contempt
for the modern world.
Does any one remember him now of those who are reading this? Perhaps
one or two, perhaps no one. He loved the poor: he understood the sea.
He was a brother and a support to sailing-men, and he had charity,
humility, and justice in equal poise. But the truth is, I take it,
that our world is no longer fitted for governance by, nor even for
advice from, its rare great men. It is fitted for governance by those
who boast so exact an admixture of folly and of vice as makes them
reasonably consonant with the stuff they have to govern. As for those
who are too good for us, or too wise for us, why, the sooner they are
out of it the better for them. And so it is the better with Reynolds....
But I wish that I could come across him again in this world, somewhere
at the meeting of sea and land, and talk with him again about the
schools of fishes, and the labours of those who seek them along our
shores, and the souls of sailormen.
I confess to a complete ignorance of going round the land, that is, of
turning the point of Cornwall, and of passing from the northern to
the southern coast. Three times have I set out from Saint Ives with
the firm intention of passing the Longships, and putting her round
up-Channel. Never have I done so. For the Seven Gods, or one or another
of them, forbade it. Had I ever fallen so low as to put a motor into
the Nona, she would have gone round like a bus or a taxi; but under
sail alone it was forbidden me. Each of those three times I started
with a light wind and was becalmed; and at the end of the each of those
calms I drifted back so far upon the flood that I sickened of the
attempt. Saint Ives is a very long way from London, and a still longer
way from Sussex, and a man cannot spend his life indefinitely taking
that immense journey back and forth for nothing. And that is why I sent
the Nona round the land.
I have never made Newlyn. I have never gone into Falmouth, so there
is still something left for me to do. I have, indeed, seen all that
coast from within, and walked back and forth across the last peninsula
of England, and compared Mounts Bay and its rock with the towering
brother island upon the further shore: for every such sea-girt height
is dedicated to Saint Michael, being a natural perching place for
winged things. The two Mounts are little models of the two national
histories: each begins as a monastery; but one becomes a king’s prison,
then derelict, then a sort of national showplace; the other becomes a
country house.
You may trace a parallel in the fate of the Templars in the two
capitals. The secret society of the Templars, with its gigantic wealth
and universal conspiracy, was suppressed (to the salvation of Europe)
six hundred years ago. Their centre in Paris fell to the King, became
in its last stages an appanage for younger sons and cousins of the
Crown, then a prison. It was at last destroyed in the very beginnings
of the new Paris under Napoleon. Its memory has almost disappeared.
The Templars’ centre in London passed gradually to the lawyers, and now
fulfils, among other functions, the very useful one of preventing cabs
from getting too quickly from the Embankment to Fleet Street.
As for the two round churches, the mysterious symbols of that great,
now dead, freemasonry (which for a moment threatened all our lives),
that one in which the Mass was preserved has disappeared from that
capital of Europe where the Mass has perhaps most power, but that from
which the Mass was driven out is still carefully maintained in its
externals, and stands there still in the midst of London—dead.
It was upon this coast of Cornwall that I once, to my shame, wholly
misread the outline of a headland, not from sea but from land.
Standing upon the shoulder of the Lizard peninsula, and looking
eastward upon a clear summer’s day, I misread the Dodman. Now from land
this is unpardonable, because one has on land points of reference, and,
indeed, had I been careful, and with a map before me, I could not have
made such an error. But from the sea it is a thing that happens very
much oftener than sailing-men are willing to admit.
I remember once, many years ago, coming in from far outside, and making
sure of a point of French land, which I thought I knew by heart. I saw
a characteristic dip, and, in front of it, the nearer lump of land
which I knew for an island, and then there was a gap, or ‘V,’ which
I could have sworn to be the harbour town I knew. It is true that I
was surprised to find it lying so far over my starboard bow. I had
thought it to be right before me, but I trusted my eyes rather than my
reckoning. As we drew nearer I found all that inference in error. I
had, indeed, failed in my reckoning somewhat, but it was the other way
about, and the place I was looking for lay more than twenty miles to
the eastward, and, when I first saw land, my harbour was hidden below
the last horizon, over the port bow.
One would think that the outline of a headland, once one had known it
from a particular side, was an unmistakable thing, and one would think
that the same would be true of a characteristic range of hills seen
lengthwise, or even of the entrance to a valley harbour.
After all, the same sort of thing is at once recognisable by land: a
man does not mistake the Wrekin, or the Malvern Hills.
But at sea, for some mysterious reason, you never can be sure; and
that is why such pains are taken in the elaborate descriptions and
plans of sailing directions, and in the little pictures which they
make in the official books. It is not only a matter of what is called
to-day ‘visibility,’ though it is true that the thickness of the air
makes a great difference to one’s judgment of distance. No matter what
the conditions, the most absurd mistakes can be made, and are made
continually, and that by practised men. It was only the other day that
I mistook Grisnez for the end of the cliff some miles to the east of it
above the flat of Calais. You would think that Beachy Head, seen from
up-Channel looking westward, was unmistakable; for it has the exact
outline of a hippopotamus, with its little ear and fat forehead and
snout, and there is a long flat before it, so that anything rising up,
one would think, was bound to be Beachy Head, but it is not so. A man
who has been knocking about the Channel at night, and does not quite
know where he is, except that he is somewhere off the Sussex coast, may
(it sounds absurd, but it is true) take Fairlight in a haze for Beachy
Head, or (coming eastwards) he may catch in a dull dawn the low cliffs
beyond Newhaven, and, if the thick air hides Beachy from him, he may
take these for that headland.
Much more excusable, and yet much more common than mistaking the
outline of hills, or a headland, is the mistaking of a light. All of
them have carefully marked spaces of time, a flash for so many seconds,
or a change of colour, or what not. But a man cannot always be bothered
to time these things, and in a little boat under a strain he may not
be able to do so. But the very commonest form of error in this, as in
everything else, comes from an absolute and false certitude. You say to
yourself, ‘There is no doubt at all that that light is such-and-such
a light.’ You have been waiting to pick it up, and when you pick up
a light you are certain it is that light, unless the timing of it is
quite grossly different from what you expected. But you may be quite
wildly wrong. I suppose no one will believe me when I tell them that I
have known Saint Catherine’s mistaken for the Hogue.
But there are more absurd cases still. Many years ago, a ship called
the Mohegan struck the rocks called the Manacles, which are inside
Black Head, in Cornwall. She was going down the Channel, and there
would seem to be no question of danger in the matter. The Lizard Light
is there, staring plain enough; one only has to keep it well on the
starboard bow going down-Channel, and one is sure to miss England.
One cannot hit the Manacles so long as the light is well off one’s
starboard bow, for they lie inside the Point. Therefore, when the
Mohegan struck, she must have had the Lizard Light on her port bow, and
the lookout man, and the man steering, and the man setting the course,
and the man in command on the bridge must have known perfectly well
(one would think) that the situation was impossible. Yet strike she
did, and no one has ever really explained how it happened.
There are some of these mistakes which cannot be avoided, and which
are explainable, not by any failure of the human reason, but by a very
natural confusion between similar things. Thus, any one runs a risk at
Dungeness on account of the two lighthouses there; I mean any one going
up-Channel, and aiming at giving that point a very close shave.
Dungeness grows out to sea at a certain rate, so that, at long
intervals, a new lighthouse has to be built to mark its extremity.
Though it grows outwards thus into the Channel, the end is steep-to,
and there is plenty of water right up alongside the land. Therefore,
any one going up-Channel makes for the lighthouse direct, intending to
pass within a few yards of the shore, for this shortens an up-Channel
course. Also, if you have the tide with you, you have a strong stream
there to help you.
Now, about one hundred years ago, they built the old lighthouse where
Dungeness then was. That old lighthouse is now about one mile inland.
It does happen, and I am witness to it with hundreds of others, that
the modern lighthouse on the extreme end of the point may be obscured
by day, when the old lighthouse is visible. In that case a man tends to