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
And all these things you find out if you get mixed up in it on a very
small boat.
Perhaps the reason why Portland Race does not take the beetling place
it should in the literature of England is that those who turn out the
literature of England by the acre to-day never go through it, save in
craft as big as towns—liners and the rest. Even these have been taught
respect. During the war Portland Race sank a ship of fourteen thousand
tons, loaded with machinery, and if you were to make a list of all the
things which Portland Race has swallowed up, it would rival Orcus.
Portland Race is the master terror of the world.
And here I can imagine any man who had sailed saying to me that there
are many other races abominable in their various degrees. I have
not been through Alderney Race since the nineties, but I suppose it
is still going strong. The Wild Goose Race you have already heard
of—a very considerable thing. The Skerries also—I mean the one off
Anglesey—is worthy to be saluted. And even little Saint Alban’s,
though it is a toy compared with Portland, is a nuisance in any wind.
But the reason Portland deserves the master name which it has never
achieved, the reason I write so strongly of the ignorance of England
toward this chief English thing, the reason that Portland Race makes
me seriously consider whether literary gents be not, after all, the
guardians of greatness, and whether their neglect be not, after
all, the doom of the neglected, is that this incredible thing lies
to everybody’s hand, and yet has no place in the English mind. The
Saxon and Danish pirates of the Dark Ages must have gone through it
(and—please God—foundered). Every one making Dorset from France for
two thousand years must have risked it. To-day the straight course of
innumerable ships out of Southampton, making for the Start and the
Lizard to the ocean, leads them right past it—yet I know nothing of it
in our Letters, unless it be one allusion of Mr. Hardy’s to the ghosts
which wander above it. But there is no ghost so full of beef as to
wander above Portland Race!
It is, perhaps, in that word ‘Southampton’ that I have struck the
cause. Until Southampton became the port for the Americas the Race lay
off the track. No man running down-Channel from the Thames need touch
the Race: no man running up. Even beating down or up-Channel you are
free to go about before you touch the broken water; running, you need
not go near it. And steam need have nothing to do with it—except all
that steam which, during the last thirty years, has begun to use again
more and more our one inland water of the south inside the Isle of
Wight.
There is a great deal more I had intended to write about Portland
Race. I had intended to talk about the folly of the Bill challenging
the sea, and how it ought to be an island, as it was for centuries.
I had intended to say something of that canal between Portland Roads
and the West Bay which ought to have been dug long ago, and which some
day people will wish they had dug, when it is too late. I had intended
to give rules for getting round by the narrow smooth. I had intended
to curse the absurd arrangement whereby the tide, instead of behaving
like a reasonable human tide, and running six hours either way, runs
southerly nine hours out of the twelve from both sides of the Bay,
leaving only three for the dodge round. I had intended to add much more.
But I cannot. Let me end with this piece of advice.
Never trust any man unless he has gone round Portland Bill in something
under ten tons. Never allow any man to occupy any position of import to
the state until he has gone round Portland Bill under his own sail in
something under ten tons. But most of all, never believe any man—no,
not even if you see it printed on this page—who says that he himself
has done the thing.
After Portland Race, as you run down that coast, there comes only
one other patch of sea (for you will avoid the Shambles), which is
a nuisance, and that is Saint Alban’s Race. When you have just been
through Portland you hardly notice Saint Alban’s, but if you are
going westward, so that Saint Alban’s comes first, you notice it more
than a little. For all the way down England, from the North Sea and
the Straits onwards, you will have come across nothing of this kind.
Everything to the east is more or less reasonable. If the sea rises, it
is because there is a wind. If you are checked, it is through a known
tide. But off Saint Alban’s Head you run into a piece of water which
has no rules.
You are first suspicious of something odd by an inability to follow
the rhythm of the seas. So far you have been going well, say, with a
south wind, luffing regularly to every sea and paying off again in
the hollows; the regular beat of the successive ridges has become
companionable; when all of a sudden a little sea from nowhere jumps
up on your beam, and catches you a smack, and immediately you are
in a tumble of water without rhyme or reason—nothing perilous, but
intolerably inconsequential. You will suddenly find the helm pulling
hard for no reason, and then as suddenly losing grip; and with
all this, there is no guessing the rate at which your stream will
move. I have been half a night passing Saint Alban’s with a leading
wind—light, it is true, but sufficient; and that only just after the
neaps, when the flood should be running slack. I have watched there in
the darkness hour after hour the blacker line of cliffs against the
blackness of the sky, and the shore, apparently immovable, refusing
to slip by. What is worse, Saint Alban’s Race is a sentient thing. It
knows all about you, and whether in its heart it only desires to play,
or whether it has a wickeder mind, a mind it certainly has.
Some years ago I was running down this coast with many companions—too
many for so small a craft. All was with us: an excellent wind, bright
sun, and a clear air. I warned my companions about this mischievous
patch (which is also haunted), and I said we would go right outside
and cheat it. So we put the bow a point or two off the course we were
making, so as to get right out into the open and leave the exasperation
of Saint Alban’s inshore in the place to which his bad temper belongs.
But not a bit of it. Even as we were looking landward, and laughing
to see the tumble of water between us and the cliff, which tumble we
thought to have thus escaped, even as we thought we had passed it, _the
thing ran at us_.
It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up
to play. It was abominably conscious and alive. It had said, ‘Here is a
boat which thinks that, because it has gone outside, it can escape me,’
so it galloped up in a rush, and swarmed all around us, and we were in
for an hour of it before we got to the regular water beyond.
I know a man who so dislikes this patch of curse upon the sea that he
boasts of passing it as of a feat, though, in truth, there is no feat
in it at all, but only an annoyance. So much did he pride himself upon
the passage of it once that, in coming into harbour, and being asked to
write something in the visiting book of the inn, he put down his name,
and the date, and this poem:
‘I made my passage through Saint Alban’s Race
And came to anchor in this bloody place.’
The person who owned the inn was very angry on seeing this poem, and
asked that it might be rubbed out. This the man of whom I speak very
humbly did, and substituted for the offensive couplet a long, long poem
in the heroic style, all in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, and iambic
at that, which poem is to be read there to this day.
You gentlemen of England—if gentlemen I may still call you—who travel
about in mechanical ships as big as a street of houses, know nothing of
these things.
But I will tell you one last thing about Saint Alban’s Race. I have
said that it is haunted. Well, what do you think of this? As I was
passing there once, there came up to me, catching me up, at a pace far
faster than the dear Nona could ever sail, such a fine rich little
boat, with canvas so new and so tight, and so white, and painted and
enamelled, and gear well trammelled, and the brasswork shining like
the sun, and the cordage new, and varnish upon all the combings, and
on the tiller, and at her helm a man dressed as though for Cowes Week
in opéra bouffe. She foamed, and was running past in a streak. The
day was bright, well past its noon, and the shores of England stood
clear all abeam. There was the Wight, with its brilliant chalk cliffs
taking the sunlight, and there, very clear, the Hampshire coast, and
right at hand, Purbeck: all as neat as a picture. But the man in the
exhibition-shop-window boat hailed me, and shouted through a horn,
pointing fiercely eastward, as he stood up and steered with his knee,
‘Are those the Needles?’
Now what could such a portent mean? What was the explanation of that
mystery? The sea brings all adventures, but what adventure was this?
Whence did this man come? How could any man so lay a course from the
Bill eastward without knowing what the Needles were, and without
recognising them when he saw them? It is true we were end on; but they
are the most conspicuous rocks, by their shape, in all the Channel,
and they are as familiar as Piccadilly. Even a man who had never
seen them must know by his chart where they lay, and by the obvious,
unmistakable, glaring white point of the Island. To ask ‘Are those the
Needles?’ was like asking ‘Is that the Eddystone?’ when one had been
sailing with a good breeze southward from Plymouth, and perceived a
tall tower standing up utterly alone in the midst of the seas, very far
from land. This man could not have crossed the Atlantic (though men
have done so in boats no larger), for she was spick and span. And even
had he crossed the Atlantic, he would have a chart. Was he, perhaps, a
Western man, who had lived all his life as in Devon or Cornwall, and
had set out thus in middle age to explore the strange Eastern people
beyond Portland Bill?
There may be some few such remaining who wisely root themselves in
their native place, and such a man might for so short a course take no
chart—in which case he would have only himself to blame for running
through the Shambles, and drowning if God so willed. At any rate, there
he was, asking poignantly whether, indeed, those were the Needles.
For a moment I hesitated whether I should not tell him it was the Old
Man of Hoy or the Giant’s Causeway, but the spirit of truth entered
into me, and I answered, ‘Yes.’
He remains a problem, and to me, therefore, fascinating; for there is
nothing so holds the mind—my mind at least—as a problem connected
with reality. I know that many men get an equal pleasure out of
problems set them in fiction; that is why a good detective story very
properly commands a large sale, especially among the intelligent:
that is why a good detective story is bought by men as well as by
women, whereas your ordinary best-seller, so full of what they call
‘psychology,’ is fed to the other sex, not mine. Bismarck also,
intelligent among the Germans, delighted in the detective stories
of fiction; but, for my part, though I take pleasure in them also
(especially when they are of first-rate construction and diction, like
‘Trent’s Last Case,’ Mr. Bentley’s book, which is, without a doubt,
the best detective story in English to-day), yet it is a pale pursuit
compared with problems set in the midst of reality: it is all the
difference between dreaming and doing. Moreover, the wretched writing
man can never forget that a story written is at the author’s pleasure.
That author knew the solution from the beginning—as is proper to a
creator—and as we read we know that he can make the evidence fit any