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
have brought us round out of the cauldron into smooth water and a run
for some quiet anchorage right under the protection of the coast, when
(since at sea bad luck always goes gathering impetus) the jib blew out
with a noise like a gun. A few rags hung on to its fastenings; the rest
of the canvas went away out to sea like a great wounded bird, and then
sailed down and flopped into the seething of the water.
You may guess what that did to a boat in our straits! It made the helm
almost impossible to hold with the violent gripe of the mainsail, half
our head canvas being gone; and at the same time it stopped our way.
We drifted back again into the worst of the water, and lost in five
minutes what it had taken us more than an hour to make. The danger was
real and serious. The man that was with us expressed his fears aloud;
my companion, though new to the sea, took it all with great calm. As
to what happened to myself, I will record it though it is a little
detailed and personal: I will record it for the sake of the experience,
of which others may make what they will.
I looked at the Carnarvonshire coast there close at hand, the sinking
lines of the mountains as they fell into the sea, and I discovered
myself to be for the first time in my life entirely indifferent to my
fate. It was a very odd sensation indeed, like the sensation I fancy
a man must have to find he is paralysed. Once, under the influence
of a drug during an illness, some such indifference had pervaded me,
but here it was in the broad daylight and the sun well up above the
mountains, with a clear sky, in the grip of a tremendous gale and of
an angry countering sea, ravening like a pack of hounds. Yet I could
only look with indifference on the sea and at the land. The sensation
was about as much like courage as lying in a hammock is like a hundred
yards race. It had no relation to courage, nor, oddly enough, had it
any relation to religion, or to a right depreciation of this detestable
little world which can be so beautiful when it likes.
Such as it was, there it was. I had always particularly disliked the
idea of death by drowning, and I had never believed a word of the
stories which say that at the end it is a pleasant death. Indeed, as a
boy I was once caught under the steps of a swimming-bath and held there
a little too long before I could get myself out, and pleasant it was
not at all. But here in Bardsey Sound, I was indifferent, even to death
by drowning. All I was really interested in was to watch what way we
lost and what chance we had of getting through.
Indeed, the whole question of fear is beyond analysis, and there is
only one rule, which is, that a man must try to be so much the master
of himself that he shall be able to compel himself to do whatever is
needful, fear or no fear. Whether there be merit or not in the absence
of fear, which sentiment we commonly call courage when it is allied to
action, may be, and has been, discussed without conclusion since men
were men. The absence of fear makes an admirable show, and excites our
respect in any man; but it is not dependent upon the will. Here was I
in very great peril indeed off Bardsey, and utterly careless whether
the boat should sink or swim; yet was I the same man who, in a little
freshness of breeze that arose off the Owers a year or two ago, was as
frightened as could well be—and with no cause. And if this be true of
change of mood in one man, it must be true of the differences of mood
in different men.
I had occasion during the war, when I had been sent to write upon the
Italian front, to be swung to the high isolated rock of a mountain
peak in the Dolomites by one of those dizzy wires which the Italian
engineers slung over the gulfs of the Alps for the manning and
provisioning of small high posts. It was an experience I shall ever
remember, a vivid, hardly tolerable nightmare; but the man I was
with, an Italian officer of great and deserved fame, earned during
that campaign, not only felt nothing, but could not understand what
my terror was. We sat, or rather lay, in one of those shallow trays
which travel slowly along these wires over infinite deeps of air; and
during the endless crawling through nothingness he told me, by way of
recreation, the story of a private soldier who had been coming down
from the isolated post some weeks before. The machinery had gone wrong,
and the tray remained suspended over the gulf, halfway across, for some
twenty minutes. When it worked again and they hauled it in they found
that the man had gone mad.
When the time came for the return journey, I very well remember
asking myself whether I had the control to face that second ordeal or
no. It was an obscure crisis, unknown to others, but as real and as
great within as any of those which stand out in fiction or history.
I would rather have gone down by the path which clung to the steep,
the precipitous mountainside. This was forbidden because it was under
direct Austrian fire; I knew that I should not be allowed. So I faced
the return—and it was worse than the going.
Also in my life I have known two men who have hunted lions, and each of
them has told me that fear in the presence of peril from the beast was
wholly capricious, and that sometimes when an exceedingly unpleasant
death seemed certain, the man who had just missed his shot felt
indifferent. I can believe it.
Anyhow, here I was in Bardsey Sound, with many deaths moving over the
howling fury of the sea, and not one of them affecting me so much as a
shadow passing over a field.
The end of that adventure was odd and unreasonable—as things will be
at sea. It was perhaps because we had been buffeted and pushed into
some edge of the conflict between wind and water where the tide runs
slacker; or it was perhaps because the wind had risen still higher.
But, at any rate, after three separate raids forward (in the second
of which we were very nearly out of our peril and into smooth water),
and as many set-backs (one of which got us into the worst violence
we had yet suffered), the Nona, in a fourth attempt (it was her own,
not ours—we could do nothing but keep her, as best we might, to her
course), slipped out and reached an eddy beyond the tide. For a moment
it was very difficult to keep her to it, she slewed round; but then
again she got her head southerly, and we found ourselves running past
the great Black Rock which stands there—the Carrig Dhu—and marks the
smooth water beyond the edge of the tide.
We breathed again; and as I took her on through an easy sea, close
under the land with not too much strain upon the helm (for the high
shore now broke the gale), I was free to look over my right shoulder
and watch, passing away behind us, further and further, the hell of
white water and noise through which we had barely come to safety.
Danger keeps men awake and makes them forget necessity, but with this
relief our fatigue came upon us. My friend and I had now been awake for
some twenty-five or twenty-six hours, and it was time for sleep.
We got the poor Nona, which had behaved so well, up into a lonely
little bay where was an old abandoned mine working, but no other sign
of man. The Welshman with us told us it was good holding-ground; we let
go the anchor and stowed sail. I remember how I fell half asleep as I
stretched the cover over the mainsail boom and yard and tied it down at
the after end. The gale still blew, yet, as it seemed, more steadily
and less fiercely. There was no danger of dragging. We were well under
the lee of the land. I gave one look, under the violent but clear
morning sky, to seaward before I went below; and there I saw how, at a
certain distance from the land, in a long line, the white water began.
It was like being in a lagoon, like being protected by a bank from the
sea outside; but really it was only the effect of the lee of the land
making a belt of smooth water along shore. Then we all lay down to
sleep and slept till evening.
When I awoke, the hurricane—for it had been no less—had died down to
a fresh gale, and it promised to fall still further before night. There
were a few hours of daylight left, but I thought it hardly worth while
to up-anchor and run further along the coast. We were snug as it was
and still fatigued after the struggle in Bardsey Sound, so I thought
we would still lie there through the night and start eastward the next
morning.
As I looked lazily over to Bardsey, with sunset on its streaming rocks,
from the shelter of this quiet bay, I considered the islands.
Bardsey, they say, has a little community on board which governs itself
and elects its own king. Whether it also pays tribute to some rich man
on land, I do not know. But all the islands around Britain tend to be
little kingdoms of their own: Lundy is like that, and over and over
again one finds similar islands owned by one man, living either alone
like a beast or companioned like a patriarch with his family and his
servants and tenants all round about him; and the truth is that man is
happier in small kingdoms than in great.
Except for the pride and honour of belonging to a great kingdom, to
be citizen of a small one seems to me to have all the advantages. In
a great kingdom you have to pay heavy taxes. You are made falsely
concerned with men whom you never see, and in doings far distant,
which you do not understand; you bear on your shoulders the burden of
millions, and you must suffer a capital city, which will be a sink of
crime. Your rulers will grow rich by deceit—for a very large community
can always be deceived; nothing about you will be real, and the mass
of your fellow citizens will be desperately poor. For it is the nature
of large communities to separate into strata and for the mass to grow
indigent.
But now I come to think of it, there is one advantage in belonging to a
large kingdom, which is, that you can enjoy differences and contrasts
such as a small kingdom does not give you. Some day, perhaps very soon,
the modern organisation of society into great communities will break
down, and then it would be amusing to come to life again and see the
little communities living their own independent lives as they did in
the Dark Ages, and also in the beginnings of pagan history.
How pleasant it is to consider the little kingdom of Ithaca, and
Cephalonia alongside, and the little territory of the Athenians! How
pleasant it is to remember that there were four kings in Kent, grouped
there under one dread emperor at Canterbury! and also how there was
a king with two princes, his heirs, governing the Isle of Wight; all
pagan when the rest of England had already gone Catholic. For though
you often hear it said that Sussex was the last piece of English soil
to remain pagan (and it is, indeed, the great boast of my county that
it resisted the Faith for one hundred years, and only capitulated under
duress and famine) it is not so. Sussex was not the last of England
to growl in a reluctant font. The Wight beat us by a head. At that
time our king of Sussex and part of Hants as well, by name Cædwalla, a
Welsh name, was still pagan; and, when he did get religion, he thought
himself too grand to be baptised by anybody except the Pope of Rome. To
Rome, therefore, he went, and reached the City, was baptised, and then
died out of hand of fever—a warning to Pride.
But he had something to show for it all, since the Pope, very much
impressed that a king of Sussex itself (and part of Hants by conquest)
should have visited him, wrote a fine epitaph for him in Latin verse
and had it engraved on a stone which he put upon his grave in Old Saint
Peter’s. But they pulled it up when New Saint Peter’s was built, and to
this sacrilege I set down the very bad luck that Rome had afterwards.