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
impossible task of upsetting what had become the national religion,
cannot have been large. It is true that popular illusion is capable of
anything—witness ‘the Russians in England’ during the war. But I see
no sign of that absurd accusation against James having taken root in
the masses. The number who objected to his policy of toleration and to
his proposal that Catholics should have the same rights as their fellow
subjects was large; but it certainly was not, and could not have been,
an enthusiastic majority. On the other hand, the number who objected to
the idea of their national king belonging to what was to them an alien
religion was certainly very large indeed: nearly three quarters of
England.
But then you get another cross category: the number who desired to see
the Stuart dynasty extinguished was insignificant. Charles II had been
immensely popular and deservedly so, and James, the reigning King,
represented legitimacy. Had not the two princesses remained to carry
on the idea of the royal house—the symbol of it at least—I think
one can safely say that the nation would not have tolerated a change;
as for those who desired the reign of William, who were attached to
his character and who respected, let alone loved him as a leader,
there were none. Monmouth, if he had had the money, if the moment of
his attack had come after the birth of the Prince of Wales, if he had
intrigued at length and with skill to get the full support of the small
wealthy group which was conspiring against the King, would have had a
better chance of success than William.
I wish we had more details on the way in which he recruited his little
army. It seems to have been mainly got together from the very poor
miners of the Mendips: men who could be hired for any adventure: who
had nothing to lose. They seem to have been pretty well the only
material available, and, of course, they were worthless as soldiers.
They must have been quite untrained. Sedgemoor was not a battle.
There is also in this coast an entry called Charmouth, where the Danish
pirates of the Dark Ages fought hard against the King of Winchester,
but I know it only as a slight mark caught far off from the sea.
What I have made over and over again in this way, in one boat or
another, and often in the Nona, is Lyme Regis.
What produced Lyme Regis? How came there to be a harbour there?
Men need harbours almost as much as they need the gods.
Men so much need harbours that in any long stretch of harbourless coast
they will catch at any small advantage of reef, or projecting headland,
and make shift with that. Thus, all down the line of eastern Italy,
where for hundreds of miles the Adriatic meets nothing but one low even
line of coast, they have caught at the sorry opportunity of Ancona. But
this coast has plenty of harbours, small and large. A British or Roman
road came down to Lyme Regis, but that could not have produced the
harbour. It must have been the other way about. The road can only have
come down here because there was a harbour here. Perhaps there was here
something like what was for centuries at Hastings (but is now washed
away), a crumbling piece of harder rock curling out to sea in an arm
and giving shelter within, and perhaps it was upon this that the Cob
was afterwards built.
The modern great havens, which we can artificially make, spoil us
for the harbours of antiquity, and make them small in our eyes, but
Lyme Regis was a port of entry all through history, and did not lose
its position until almost within the memory of men now alive. How
characteristic it is of the growth of our towns inland, and of the
change in English life through that growth, that, when men and women
hear of Lyme Regis to-day, they think not of the English seas, nor
of armed men landing here, but of works of fiction by Miss Austen!
Tennyson wrote admirably of the Revenge, and believed himself a seer in
the matter of the English waters and their command, but his interest in
Lyme Regis was from Miss Austen. For my part, I am not ashamed to say
that in my nineteenth year, when I capsized all by myself in a little
open boat under Golden Cap, and with difficulty saved myself, though
I was quite close to shore (it was in the month of December, dear
friends, and poor weather for such gambols), I had not so much as heard
of Jane Austen; nevertheless from that moment Lyme Regis was vivid
enough to me without her aid, and so it was when, three years ago,
touching Lyme Regis again for the tenth or twentieth time, the Nona
herself capsized.
’Twas a dark and stormy night, _camarades_, and the wind blew from the
southwest, which is the stance it likes to take up when it proposes to
drive at doing a devilry. I knew well that the tide running out during
the darkness would leave us high and dry, and by lantern-light I made
every kind of contraption and fastening from the mast to the quay,
so that she should lie even when she took the ground. But at four in
the morning, with a noise like thunder, she fell over enormously to
starboard upon the then dry bottom of the harbour and threw us all one
on top of the other—we were three. That night we slept no more.
The English do well to build their boats deep, for only such boats can
hold the sea, or rather I should say, they _did_ well to build their
boats deep in the days when they did so build them, before lines were
ruined by racing. But there is this disadvantage about your deep boat:
that it will not sit, but lies over. So did the Nona on that stormy
night; and damnably. You will tell me that when the tide rose she
floated. Yes; but not until very much water had trickled in through the
dry seams, so that the pale and stormy dawn from over Dorset, and the
distant grey of Chesil and the Bill saw us still bailing. And so much
for Lyme Regis.
Thence eastward, coasting back home, any man who belongs to my county
and to its harbours must face the passage of Portland Race and the
difficult rounding of the Bill. So had I always done, whether coming or
going, whether easting or westing, leaving aside all that long coast
of Dorset hither of the Isle of Portland, and watching afar off the
endless unbroken patch called the Chesil Beach quite empty of men.
What a gift of compensation it is that the horror of our great towns
and the ease of our new communications has produced deserts between!
No one knows those deserts as well as the man who sails along the sea,
following the coasts of England. The foulness of the great towns is
discharged by the trainload upon beaches of sand; but all in between,
or nearly all, is left more lonely than ever it was before in our
history. Those cliffs of Dorset coming down on to the sea are less
known to travelling Englishmen than much of foreign land. That Chesil
Beach along which I have so often run is utterly bare and silent except
for the noise of the sea.
There never was such loneliness! One big house, built there I suppose
for the sake of the isolation, inland, under the cliff, where some old
landslide has oddly disfigured the face of the earth: then, for miles
and miles, nothing. At the eastern end salt waste lagoons forbid
human habitation, and between them and the sea comes the strange
formation of huge rounded stones, falling very steep down into the
water, so that you have many fathom deep within a stone’s throw of the
beach; and at last, that forbidding Chesil Cove where a few houses of
fishermen, huddled together, look out upon the most inhospitable mass
of threatening waters I know.
There are few corners of the English seas which give the effect of a
curse; but this is one of them. The terrible Race of Portland lies
three miles out, at the end of the Bill. The prison with its abominable
memories stands above. The main traffic of the Channel lies far out.
The gaunt and bare rocks of the Bill come down stark upon a lonely
water, and that water heaves and turns unnaturally, even when there is
little wind. For the roaring and the movement of that huge turmoil, the
Race, send on their effect to the false shelter of Chesil Cove.
And it is a treacherous anchorage. Eastward, well inshore, there is
good holding-ground, but it is only a patch, and one must be careful
not to disturb the fishermen’s snares. Just outside this, in deep
water, there is nothing but the rough and tumble shingle of great
stones, and the anchor drags on any burst of wind, even from offshore:
with a strong wind on shore you are done: and if such arise there is
nothing for it but to up-anchor and beat out into the teeth of it: for
that lee shore is deadly.
I have never been caught by the rising of the southwest wind in this
desolate place of peril, but I have read the sailing directions about
it, and I have often talked to men who have been so caught. There is
nothing for it, I say, but to beat right out, unless it has come from
a quarter far enough round south to enable one to scud down along the
coast towards Devon, with enough sea room to spare. Chesil Cove is in
the very eye of the great gales, and if a man should have taken up his
insecure anchorage too near the shore, he is on it before he has got
the first wind into his sails. An abominable spot!
The evil is recent. It is the work of the historic centuries. Portland
Bill was once an island: and those strange tides which are now baulked
and therefore twist and boil round its point, once ran normally through
the strait between it and the mainland. But it has been joined to the
mainland these hundreds of years by a very narrow belt, high piled, of
these great rounded stones, which the sea and the wind shovelled up
westward until they closed the entrance.
It is a strange feeling to leave one’s little ship at anchor in the
dreadful cove, to land as best one can on that steep shore, risking the
dinghy under the pounding of the sea, pulling it up over the screeching
stones beyond the mark of the tide and then, in a few minutes’ walk, to
be on the great placid expanse of the new Portland Harbour on the other
side. It is like coming indoors out of evil weather, into firelight
out of the dark; for it is only this minute or two on foot from the
outer beach to the inner water; but to sail it, you must run down the
millrace of the tide along the Bill and risk the buffeting of the Race.
If you fail to hit the narrow belt of smooth water at the end of the
Bill you are swept into the Race, and even if you just hit that smooth
patch, you must calculate exactly, so as to catch the other tide up the
eastern face under the old prison, and at last make Portland Harbour
after ten long miles—and as many hours, and as much peril as God sees
fit to send you.
Portland Harbour is one of the very, very rare successes of man in his
coaxing of the sea.
I will not be sure, for I have not the knowledge, but, at any rate,
I know of no other in my narrow experience except Cherbourg; and
Cherbourg is not thoroughly closed. Dover is a failure—they say it
ought never to have been built. Newlyn in part dries out. Fishguard
and Holyhead are open to certain winds. Boulogne is not finished, and,
perhaps, never will be (I have been told, I do not know with how much
truth, that the Germans were paying for the building of it to receive
their great liners and that the War checked the effort). Casablanca is
not finished yet, so we cannot judge it—and how many more are there? I
can recall no others of the great artificial harbours, unless we admit
Genoa, with its noble mole, but, if I mistake not, it is not quite
upon this scale. Of the artificial harbours which man has attempted in
imitation of the few great natural harbours, how few have succeeded!
It would seem to be like man’s attempt to resist time in the case of
his own body, of which the poet has written: