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
hesitation. In the provincial society of England, 1829, there was more
than hesitation—there was contempt and silence. Man older than 4004
(or 4005) B.C. was a mad blasphemy. The idea was not to be tolerated.
It took a solid thirty or forty years before even educated people in
this country could be made familiar with so simple an idea. Now—after
less than a hundred years—not only has that idea soaked right through
society to its lowest depths, but a new conservatism has taken root,
and we find the same provincial people clinging tenaciously to-day to
exploded nonsense like Darwin’s Natural Selection, and the imaginary
evidence of embryology.
On the whole it is a good thing, this ultra-conservative instinct. It
has ridiculous sides to it, but it is a great deal better than the
iconoclast spirit. It does harm when it is used to bolster up injustice
or false doctrine, as in the case of men who still go on defending
human cruelty and oppression on some muddle-headed plea called
‘survival of the fittest’—which simply means survival of that which
survives; or when they convince themselves of some impossible blind
process of uncreative change without a Creator, and therefore conceive
that they may at once abandon even such poor wrecks of moral discipline
as have survived in them.
More interesting to me (I am sorry to say—for I have few companions in
this, and it is a lonely interest) than the discovery of evidence to
the great antiquity of man, is the absence of evidence which _ought_
to be there in the nature of things, but which no one has yet come
across. What I ardently desire is discovery showing, or even hinting
at, the way in which man became what we call _civilised_.
As far as you can go back you see civilised man existing, and, side by
side with him, barbaric man: I mean, ‘as far as you can go back’ in any
real record not only of writing, but of monument. Take the whole period
of surviving record, whatever it may be (no one really knows: but it
is certainly more than five thousand years, and may be more than six
thousand). You find at the origin of it men sculpturing, building with
cut stone and bricks, and leaving record of their actions; inhabiting
cities; possessed of laws—and all the rest of it. Then there is a
halt. You come to the end of a blind alley. You come up against a wall
and there is nothing beyond.
There is plenty of guesswork, of course, passing for knowledge—but
that is negligible. All you have in the way of real evidence is
a few bones which are almost certainly older than the records of
any civilisation, and quite numerous relics of barbaric culture,
fish-hooks, and coarse weaving, and coarse pottery, and so on.
Behind that you have—but after an impossible gulf—roughly-chipped
stones, of which some small proportion may have been fashioned by an
intelligent being, but of which most, in spite of the cocksureness of
those who collect and describe them, are very doubtful indeed. No one
really knows how far back these things go, for no one knows the rate
at which earth may be or was laid down in floods, of what nature the
catastrophes of the past may have been. But of transition from such
doubtful fragments to the neolithic and from this to civilised man who
carves splendour out of granite, and who measures earth and heaven, not
a trace.
What is most remarkable, no one that I have ever read has properly
tabulated the rough stone implements in a series.
Now that is what we want. We ought to have some large monograph,
properly illustrated, showing in a graduated series such so-called
‘paleoliths’ as are possibly of human handicraft; then others less
likely be so, and so on down to the most doubtful. It is of no use
to the ordinary educated man to be told by self-styled experts that
this or that lumpish thing was (though it doesn’t look it) of human
handiwork; he can judge that for himself: and as the expert is all out
for making it human if he possibly can, he is to be discounted. What
we want is, I say, a monograph giving specimens in a graded series:
and then, side by side with these, a full description of the place and
conditions where they were found.
When that is done we shall be able to judge for ourselves, and not to
accept the priestcraft of the people who call themselves scientists;
we shall be able to make some rough judgment on the comparative age of
such implements. If evident paleoliths are discovered under a depth
of stratified stone (not gravel or earth) which argues some very long
period of accumulation, I should conclude that man did make them in
some very remote time, to which, perhaps, a minimum limit can be set;
but until we have them all graded, and discussed according to their
grades, and with proof of the rate of stratification, we are at the
mercy of men whose business it is to bring forward as many marvels as
possible, as it has been the business of all who in all times desire to
cut a figure before the people.
And, again, even if we had (which we have not) a proper analysis of
this sort of evidence, there would still remain the unbridged gulf
between the barbaric and the civilised man.
It stands to reason that civilisation cannot have been born complete.
It must have arisen from simple origins; of what sort were those
origins? The only reply so far is silence on the part of the wise, and
loud, unsupported affirmation on the part of the popular writer. We
have, for instance, no series in sculpture proceeding from the rude
to the complete. There is a series from the archaic onwards, but the
archaic is the work of a high culture. Nowhere in the world is there,
so far, apparent, in any art, a set of vague beginnings gradually
becoming more definite. The same is true of writing. You may show,
indeed, the development of picture writing in the Valley of the Nile,
but no one has yet shown the groping and the tentative origins of the
thing—if tentative and groping origins there were. Sergi launched
what was merely a guess, quite unconvincing, that certain marks upon
Western rough monoliths were the origins of the alphabet; the proof he
adduced was quite insignificant. No one would invest five pounds on the
strength of it in a prospectus.
The truth is that we do not know where writing came from, nor how
it was developed. Nor do we know where building with cut stones and
with bricks came from. Nor do we know where any of the origins of
civilisation are to be found.
One despairing suggestion has been that its origins are now drowned
under the sea. That is as likely a guess as any other. At any rate, we
know nothing of the way in which the full life of man took its rise. It
may have come catastrophically in a very short period of time; under
what influences, through what accidents or guidance, we cannot tell.
All humanity remembers dimly a very good state of affairs a very long
time ago—and beyond that mere memory and tradition we have nothing to
go on.
So much for ‘prehistory’—I am weary of it and of its now discredited
prophets. Speculation is the concealed material of their Mumbo-Jumbo;
assertion its ritual. Rather let me consider the known past, and,
entering Torbay all alone under so glad a morning, let me consider
that other, that real, that known affair, the landing of the Prince of
Orange, the Patron of Belfast and of Saint James’s Square and of other
things, less suitable to ears polite.
I should like to have seen that big Dutch fleet, with its few English
renegades on board, come sweeping into Torbay. I should like to have
seen the crowded boats passing to and fro, landing the Dutchmen and
other foreign troops, and the great lords who were conspiring against
their king, and the saturnine William himself. I should like to have
seen that mercenary army of adventurers, hired to give the last blow
to so great a victim as the wounded kingship of the English, formed in
column, and the march up to Exeter: with the villagers timidly peeping
from behind closely shut windows at the strange faces, hearing alien
speech, and wondering what the issue of the invasion would be.
There was a fine pageantry about all that miserable business which
ended the age-long, but dying, tradition of monarchy in Britain, and
put the rich in the saddle for good, without a master. From the moment
when the huge armament bowled through the Straits of Dover under a
southeast wind (forming such a crescent that the horns of it neared
either shore) to that afternoon, two days later, when the high gilded
poops of the Dutchmen stood out in line across Torbay, the whole evil
thing was full of grandeur and of colour.
Whenever I recollect that business of the fall of the Stuarts, two
things stand out in my mind: so much pageantry and so much comic stuff.
For, to my thinking, there is something comic in the financing of the
expedition with Dutch money, secured upon taxes promised _beforehand_
as sure to be levied from the English (specifically on their tobacco),
should it succeed. This way of making the victim pay for his own
execution without his knowing it, and without consulting him, is full
of the spirit of comedy. There are a hundred other comic details.
Churchill leaning his handsome, villainous face over the dinner table
of the inn, and trying to persuade the unfortunate James to come out
for a ride on that fine moonlight night; Churchill well knowing how,
on that fine moonlight night, the scouts of the enemy were waiting to
carry off the King. And, again, the picture of the subsequent dinner
at Andover; James dining with his daughter’s husband, the Prince of
Denmark, that great bagful of stupidity, repeating to everything
that was said, ‘_Est-il possible!_’ then he and his suite excusing
themselves for a moment to attend to some business; James, the King,
wondering when they would return to the room. They never returned. That
business on which they had excused themselves was treason, and the
woman in town and her husband at Andover had betrayed.
What a Calvary James had to climb! It is a pity that Anne should have
done such a thing, for she seems to have been the best of all that
gang—which is not saying much. I have always trusted Swift’s judgment,
who wrote of her: ‘The only good woman I ever met in my life.’ But
there he exaggerated; for he certainly profoundly admired at least two
others, and he would not have admired them if he had not thought them
good in a very evil world.
From Torbay westward the bold man in the small boat makes direct for
Portland Bill, cutting across the Bay, and looking for the bell buoy
halfway, if it is too thick to see his direction. There is nothing
to disturb him here, no strong current, very little inset, and he is
pretty certain of making the Bill by his card, even in thick weather.
He will do well to keep a little north of his course, so that he may
have a choice of coming down the Bill on the strength of the flood, and
of anchoring to wait for his tide, if that be necessary; though it is
true that anchoring-ground has to be carefully picked in that corner by
Chesil Cove.
But I am not bold; and when I leave Torbay, I run to Lyme Regis.
The mouth of the Exe puzzles me with an unanswered question, which
recurs in one river-mouth after another all over the West. It is this:
How were they used by antiquity?
The trade of the ancients and of the earlier Middle Ages (and sometimes
the later trade), the pirate fleets, every form of seafaring, used
these silted rivers from the Gold Coast to the Baltic. How did they
do it? Some say that even Salisbury was reached from the sea, and
Winchester. Certainly Exeter was; Arundel still can be by ships of some
size. Bramber was so reached, and Rye, and, I suppose, in its day,
Lewes. And the Stour formed a harbour, once at Canterbury, later at its