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
steer for the old lighthouse, thinking it to be the new one, and he is
aiming, of course, right on-shore when he thinks he is just going to
miss the point.
The worst mistake of this sort I myself ever made was mistaking the
Varne Buoy for the South Goodwin Lightship. It is not so impossible as
it sounds. The weather was thick; I had been drifting for many hours
without much wind, and with no certitude of where I was except that I
was somewhere in the Straits. I looked up-weather, to the northeast,
and saw in the brume what looked like a hull and a pole. I could not
be quite certain whether there was a ball on the pole or not, but I
certainly took it for a lightship; and, judging from the time that I
had left the French harbour, and the sort of pace I thought I had made
in my little boat, and tricked by the weather (which was much thicker
than it looked), I made sure that this apparently distant object was
the Goodwin. It was not till I came within a hail of it that I knew
it for what it was—the Varne Buoy, not a hundredth the size of a
lightship.
I suppose that the regularity and certitude of modern mechanical life
on land tend to make men exaggerate the fixity of evidence. When men
dealt more with the caprice of Nature, they were more ready to admit
two things which modern men underestimate: the possibility of marvel
and the fallibility of the senses.
Different periods take quite different standards in such affairs. Our
own time prides itself on a specially clear vision of reality, and
ridicules the credulity of the past. Yet I notice a hundred things
in which I could imagine posterity stupefied at our inane credulity.
We accept, in everything which does not immediately concern us, a
bare newspaper statement made anonymously. We accept it as we accept
the evidence of our own senses, or more; we accept it although it is
unvouched for, unproved, untested. We accept it—to be brutal—because
it is printed, and because it is printed on a large scale.
There is a whole mythology of ‘prehistory,’ which has grown up,
mushroom-like, in less than a lifetime, which pretends to explain the
unknown past of man, and which has already become more fixed and sacred
to the multitude than any mythology accepted by our fathers. Not one of
the millions who accept that mythology could give you even the briefest
account of the supposed steps of evidence upon which it reposes. In
this process the strange mechanical, universal, influence of what is
called ‘popular education’ plays a very great part, and whereas the
half-educated man was always a danger, to-day he is a catastrophe.
Or, take not prehistory—which is a mere imposture—but recent recorded
real history. Millions of children are told that the American Colonies
revolted because they were unjustly taxed by England; that after a long
struggle they won, and that they won because they were right; because
they had the same qualities as our own sacred selves, being of our own
sacred blood; that the trouble ought never to have arisen, and was only
due to the folly of a few misguided and pigheaded English gentlemen who
happened then to hold political power. I will bargain that—above the
labouring mass—this is the attitude taken by nine men out of ten in
England to-day towards the American War of Independence. On the top of
that all are told—or given the impression, at any rate—that England
soon repented of her error, and came to regard the United States as the
noblest of her children.
They are not told that an expensive war had been waged by the
Mother Country in defence of the Colonies; that long and difficult
negotiations had been undertaken to see how that expense could be
shared; that certainly a majority of the colonists—and probably a
large majority—were on the side of England, and against the rebels,
and that the final defeat of England was mainly due to the intervention
of the French, and especially to the more close concentration of the
French fleet. They are not told that the English people regarded
themselves as perfectly right, that they continued to detest the
Americans with the most vivid hatred for a hundred years afterwards,
or that the policy of pretending a friendship with America is quite
recent, and only grew up after the strength of the new country was
apparent, when the long agony of the Civil War had turned in favour
of the North. Worst of all, they are not told that this pretence of
identifying the United States with England is being carried on against
increasing odds, as the United States becomes less and less English in
tradition, in blood, in morals, and everything else.
The false legend is swallowed whole, and it is a very good example of
how mythology can have a direct practical effect for ill. Our general
opinion is only now beginning to be shocked by the foreignness of
America, and is still bewildered by the refusal of Americans to regard
themselves as English. You can always be certain of middle-class and
lower middle-class support in England (I do not say popular support,
for the populace are quite indifferent to the whole affair) for any
foreign policy which takes for granted that America is but another
England overseas.
I saw a very good example of this at the beginning of the last year,
1924, when I was watching opinion at home and abroad upon what were
then called the ‘Expert Committees,’ and later, the ‘Dawes’—that is,
the two committees sitting in Paris to decide whether the Germans had
concealed large assets abroad, and also to decide what the Germans
could pay by way of reparations.
For three solid years the international financial powers which
directed our policy in the matter of German reparations had denied the
accumulation of German wealth abroad, and had persistently clamoured
that the Germans could never pay more than a small fraction of the
sums claimed of them, if that. From the same sources there had been
in England a persistent clamour for ‘expert’ examination of the
question under American direction, and the basis of this last demand
was the certitude that America would only act in the matter as the
willing helpmate of England. The committees met, but the initiative
for calling them together was American; the American delegates, and
behind them the American Government, were the deciding forces. When
the reports came out, there was a stupefaction, gallantly concealed;
for those reports, insisted upon by the American delegates, completely
contradicted in every point the propaganda of the past three years.
They insisted that the Germans had accumulated vast sums abroad,
especially in the United States, and that Germany could soon pay
indefinitely, at the rate of £125,000,000 a year. The result of having
nourished these illusions upon American relations to England was that
the foreign policy adopted officially by the British Government was
thrown out of gear. The English Governments (acting in this respect
differently from the way in which the English public as a whole would
have acted) had supported Germany to the fullest of their ability. They
had postponed all efforts of reparations, they had insisted that all
demands to obtain payments by force were illegal; they had refused to
help their Allies to obtain such payments; their Treasury spokesman had
told everybody that Germany had nothing concealed abroad to speak of,
and certainly could not pay on any considerable scale. They then asked
for a Committee of Experts, took it for granted that American pressure
on this Committee would be in their favour, openly pledged themselves
beforehand to accept the report, and were bewildered, when the report
came out, to find it opposed to them.
Those who govern us have been compelled to accept the Dawes
Report—even to set it working—and they watch anxiously its coming
effect upon that balance whereby England lives. They are caught in a
trap. Had they known a plain, modern historical truth, that America is
a foreign country, they could have preserved an independent national
policy. It is now too late. America has mastered us.
The next port from which I have taken the Nona after the turn of the
land is Fowey, for, though I have gone into Mevagissey once in my life,
it was but in an open boat, sailing across Saint Austell’s Bay; and
there, in Mevagissey, I did not learn what I had always desired to
learn, and what to this day remains a mystery to me, and that is, the
history, nature, and fate of the busy little buzzer the Mevagissey Bee.
It was in the port of Boston, in Lincolnshire, that I first heard of
this animal, having then not yet arrived at my thirtieth year. Perhaps
I had heard its name before, and had not noticed it; but it was there
that I was first struck by the account of its strange demeanour.
There lay in the narrow river a very large, hideous, and dirty steamer,
and I could not see how she would have room to turn, for she was
pointing upstream, under the distant benediction of that marvellous
great tower. I said to a sailorman who was leaning on a post, and
looking moodily at this steamer (which may have been his ship for all
I know): ‘How will she get out of this?’ To which he answered: ‘Starn
foremost, like the Mevagissey Bee.’ I asked him what that Bee was, and
by way of answer he lurched away. I have asked many men since, and no
one has been able to tell me.
Fowey, then, I say, is the most western port to which, or from which, I
ever took the Nona. And Fowey is a thing by itself. One may say of it
what Mr. Barry Pain said in his review of that ought-to-be-most-famous
book called ‘Delina Delaney’: ‘This is a thing which only happens once
in a thousand years.’
Fowey is the harbour of harbours, and the last port town left without
any admixture of the modern evil. It ought to be a kingdom of its own.
In Fowey all is courtesy, and good reason for the chance sailing-man.
For your provision, or your transport, or your mooring, you pay no more
than you should, and whatever you may need in gear is to be had at
once; and in Fowey have I had a sail made for me in, perhaps, one sixth
of the time it would have taken anywhere else along the coast eastward.
It was a jib, and it fitted. In Fowey, also, there is security from
all winds, good holding-ground, and, what is best of all, an air in
which all other places may be forgotten, and in which the cares of
this crowded island melt away. I suppose when the crash comes, and the
ruins have been more or less cleaned up, Fowey will remain to carry
on the traditions of a better England. I hope so. There is no fault
to be found with it. Now, can this be said of any other town except
Leominster? I think not. I have never sailed into Fowey or out of Fowey
without good luck attending me. I have never had to beat in or out of
Fowey; I have always had a leading wind. I have had light airs, of
course, outside, but I have never been becalmed. The last time I left
that blessed land—to which, perhaps, I never shall return—it was
under so gallant a northwest breeze, so clear a light in the first of
the midday tide, that the career along the coast to Plymouth Sound was
like a song.
It is unreasonable, but those stretches of coast-wise sea in which one
has had good fortune remain in the mind exceptional, and carry with
them a sort of false air of security, as though they were always so.
Men must have had the terror of their lives time and again off that
coast; but to me it always seems, when it returns as a picture in my
mind, sunlit, and framed in vigorous small seas, with the attendance of
a noble and a sufficient breeze. With what pleasure have I not noted
the speed she made as she passed the measured mile by Polperro, and how
pleasant to see Rame Head growing perpetually before one, until the
Nona opened the majestic breadth of Plymouth Sound.