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

‘There is no fortress of man’s flesh so made But subtle, treacherous Time comes creeping in. Oh, long before his last assaults begin The enemy’s on; the stronghold is betrayed; And the one lonely watchman, half-dismayed, Beyond the covering dark he hears them come: The distant hosts of Death that march with muffled drum.’ And, indeed, it is very ridiculous the way in which men try to withstand this influence of their enemy, Time. They had far better accept the condition of mortality and remember a truth which was plainly painted in large black letters upon a large white placard in Eden, which was restated by Dante, and then repeated by Malherbe, that our only peace lies in the doing of God’s will; which includes going to pieces in the fifties, or sixties, or seventies, like an old disreputable, sodden, broken-down hulk too long adventured upon the sea. Shakespeare (another of those poets) also said that we ripe and ripe, and then we rot and rot. It is all in the Providence of God. Yet will men talk like women ‘of keeping their figure,’ and they will wear stays, or hypocritically compromise by putting whalebone into their clothes, or they will tie themselves up with bands like the infants of Italy, or paint their faces after the fashion of the warlike Germans. But here it must be admitted in fairness to the fierce Nordic stock of Mecklenburg and Pomerania that since the little trouble of 1918 they have issued an army order forbidding any officer to paint his face until he has attained the rank of major; for they judge (does the present successor of the Great High General Staff) that until a man has become a major, the furrows in his heroic skin are not deep enough to be worthy of filling in with white lead or delicately disguising with cosmetics. To return to harbours. When Man became the master of Earth and supplanted Heaven—which was round about the middle of the last century—he bethought him of making great harbours where no harbour had been before, and of supplementing the few secure inlets of the sea. Cherbourg was the first of them, the French being here, as usual, in the vanguard of challenge. It was attempted even in the century before. There were rocks and islands to afford a foundation, then the great breakwater was flung like a bridge across them with a pass to the left and to the right. But though Cherbourg is secure enough, there can be a memorable swell when the wind is in a northerly point. Plymouth was, I think, the next and serves its purpose, but it does not wholly check the violence of a southerly wind. Did not this same harbour of Portland come third? At any rate, it is the one complete success. It has caught an angle and the defences have been made sure. It is deep, yet not too deep, and no gale alarms it. What Nature built up in the Chesil Beach protects it from the main gale, and the land so curls round that no weight of wind and sea can strike it from the northeastern side; and even from the southeast the Shambles are a sort of protection. Moreover, the entrances are not endangered by the make of the tide, nor, I believe, do they silt. The southern one was blocked during the war by the sinking of a ship; but even so, the great harbour is an easy refuge and a wonderful good gift for sailing-men. But when people thought that, on the model of this, they could continue indefinitely, they were disappointed: yes, even in the tideless Mediterranean. We shall see whether Tangier’s, standing outside and subject to the ceaseless strength of ocean, will succeed or no. But for the rest, the natural harbour still holds the field, and any one would rather have the roads of Corfu, or the inland water behind the Wight than anything man ever made. I wonder sometimes whether the Roman Empire did not attempt the same sort of thing. If it did, all the traces have gone. There are great Roman roads which come down now right on to open shores: that one, for instance, which I spoke of running through Pembrokeshire and striking the sea just above that narrow torrent of a tideway between Ramsey Island and the mainland. I thought when I first came across this strange ending of a great road, I thought, fantastically enough, what a fine harbor this narrow passage would have made had men of old blocked it on its northern entry. Then you would have had a good quiet inlet, many fathom deep, looking into the sheltered water of Saint Bride’s Bay and quite secure. I half persuaded myself that the lords of the world, from whom we inherit all that we have and are, did so block that northern entry, and did so create a harbour. But it was a nightmare guess not fit for the waking brain, for if they had built a wall between the Welsh mainland and the island, surely some traces would have remained, and there is nothing whatsoever. Yet why does that great road end so astonishingly to-day (and so many centuries past), upon an impossible coast, whence nothing could be shipped? The Pedlar’s Way through Norfolk, ending as abruptly on a coast some way from the harbour of Brancaster (itself now eaten away), may be explained by the disappearance of some former shelter engulfed by the sea, as Dunwich has been engulfed; or worn down as the natural breakwaters of Hastings were worn down under the influence of the waves. But I must confess that Saint David’s Road, ending sharply on that wild shore, puzzles me. The Lead Road of the Mendips comes down to where there is no harbour to-day. All the other Roman roads which I can call to mind in the island, and which reach the sea, reach it at a port, or at a ferry, or what was once a port or a ferry. But this Saint David’s road remains inexplicable. It is a strange thing, beyond the average of chance, that so very few deep landlocked harbours should be of service to mankind. One hears it said sometimes that the number is small in any case. This is not so. The number is not small, though ill-distributed: it is exceedingly large. The whole Dalmatian coast is made up of a mass of such shelters. The Fjords of Scandinavia are a wealth of the same, and the Arctic abounds in them. But there seems a perverse arrangement whereby the deep harbours and secure have nothing inland to serve, while endless stretches of coastline are to be found all over the world, with much for export, but to which, in the same most exasperating manner, harbours have been refused. Africa is quite astonishing in this. There are not four natural landlocked harbours, I believe, in the whole line of coast from Alexandria round by Barbary and the West and up from the Cape to the head of the Red Sea. The most that man can do is to use the shelter of islands, or the curl of a headland, or here and there a small and insufficient recess, or the mouth of a river. The French have made their small harbours in Northern Africa artificially, and Alexandria is artificial. The few openings which serve Morocco are very ill-provided, Rabat almost dries out at low tide, so does Laraiche, that charming little cleanly Spanish port, which I hope the coming perils will spare. All down the Adriatic coast of Italy, there is nothing between the thigh and the heel, since Ravenna dried away. Ancona is only a curl of headland, and Bari means very little. Brindisi is ideal, and Taranto must have been exactly what antiquity needed, shallower than, but as secure as, Cadiz. But for the rest, all the eastern shelf of Italy, and the heel of the boot, is without a base on the sea. Unwisely, pedantically, but much more hypocritically, the less exhausted countries, who were for the moment the masters of the settlement, refused the Dalmatian coast to Italy after the war. I trust that the force of things and the new vigour of the Italian people and the now increasing embarrassments of what is Puritan and base in Europe will, before I die, repair the error. And so for rounding the Bill once more—a thing by me always dreaded—for Portland Race is a terrible affair. Portland Race should, by rights, be the most famous thing in all the seas of the world. I will tell you why. It is a dreadful, unexpected, enormous, unique business, set right upon the highway of all our travel: it is the marvel of our seas. And yet it has no fame. There is not a tired man writing with a pencil at top speed in the middle of the night to the shaking of machinery in Fleet Street who will not use the word ‘Maelstrom’ or ‘Charybdis.’ I have seen Charybdis—piffling little thing; I have not seen the Maelstrom, but I have talked to men who told me they had seen it. But Portland Race could eat either of them and not know it had had breakfast. I have nearly always been successful in catching the smooth, narrow belt near the point: but I also once found that smooth belt fail me, and so have gone through the tail-end of Portland Race; only the very tail-end. I had seen it from close by half a dozen times before in my life. I had very nearly got into it twice. But this time I did actually make knowledge of the ‘thing in itself’—and there is no mistaking it. It is one of the wonderful works of God. Portland Bill stands right out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic tide. It is a gatepost, with Alderney and the Hogue for gateposts on the other side. They make the gate of the narrow sea; outside them you are really (in spite of names) in the air of the ocean, and look toward the Americas. Inside them is the domestic pond. Portland Bill thrusts out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic sea. In my folly, for many years I used to call it ‘William,’ but I will do so no longer. For there is something awful about the snake-like descending point, and dreadful menace in the waters beyond. And here Portland Bill differs from his namesake of the land. It would be familiar to call a William of the land ‘Bill.’ But in the matter of Portland it is familiar to call the Bill ‘William.’ I will never call him William again. I thought I had well known what the Race was before I first heard it bellowing years ago. I knew after the fashion of our shadowy nominal knowledge. I knew it in printed letters. I knew it on the chart. I knew it in the ‘Channel Pilot.’ Then I came to it in the flesh, and I knew it by the senses, I saw it with my eyes, and I heard it with my ears. I had heard it roaring like a herd, or park, or pride, of lions miles away. I had seen its abominable waste of white water on a calm day: shaving it by a couple of hundred yards. But there is all the difference in the world between that kind of knowledge and knowledge from within! He that shall go through even the tail-end of Portland Race in a small boat and in calm weather will know what he is talking about, and for so vast an accession of real knowledge, even that pain is worth while. Portland Race lies in a great oval, sometimes three, sometimes four or five miles out from Portland Bill, like a huge pendant hanging from the tip of a demon’s ear. It is greater or smaller, according to whether the wind be offshore or on, but it is immense always, for it is two miles or more across. It lumps, hops, seethes, and bubbles, just like water boiling over the fire, but the jumps are here in feet, and the drops are tons. There is no set of the sea in Portland Race: no run and sway: no regular assault. It is a chaos of pyramidical waters leaping up suddenly without calculation, or rule of advance. It is not a charge, but a scrimmage; a wrestling bout; but a wrestling bout of a thousand against one. It purposely raises a clamour to shake its adversary’s soul, wherein it most resembles a gigantic pack of fighting dogs, for it snarls, howls, yells, and all this most terrifically. Its purpose is to kill, and to kill with a savage pride.