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
also that the boats were helped up stern foremost, but how on earth
the thing could be done with a very large armament rapidly, and upon a
beach unprepared, baffles us.
There is another problem I have never seen solved. How did Barbarians
organise and commissariat the enormous bodies which came across the
Alps for the plunder of Italy, and were as a rule destroyed by the
Italian armies in antiquity. How did they get such a force as that of
Radagasius across the Alps, or that of Brennus? I choose the Alps in
particular because it is an extreme case, but it is almost as difficult
to understand how they moved across flat country. In the case of the
Alps, you had narrow tracks for much more than a day’s march, often
for a week’s march; tracks from which it was impossible to deploy to
right and left. There must, therefore, have been a very long column in
file, a column of many, many miles. It is easy to calculate, in the
case of Radagasius, that he could not possibly have extended over less
than thirty miles, and probably his column covered a good deal more.
Our academic writers seem to think that a body of this sort moves as
a matter of course, like an individual, or like a small body which
can easily organise its movements: a dozen people out for a walk. But
here you have numbers in respect of which any one with an elementary
knowledge of military history, knows that high organisation alone could
prevent disaster.
Ask a modern staff with every modern advantage, and even with a good
modern road on which the columns could advance on a front of four, to
move by a single road a quarter of a million human beings, half of them
fighting men, from Augsburg to Milan. Consider the preparation such
a march would mean; the exact forethought required, establishing the
position of each column at the end of each day’s march; the calculation
of provisions, the arrangement for the passing up and down of waggons
or of pack animals, the strict discipline necessary to prevent bunching
throughout the whole column; the confusion—these and a hundred
other points. We all know that very good staff work, taking plenty of
time, and with every modern advantage of map and transport, will do
it in such and such a fashion. We also know that a few mistakes on
the staff might easily so bungle the affair that only a dribble would
get across in time, and the bulk would starve and die. Yet these huge
barbaric forces, in some undescribed way, so traversed the mountains
and debouched upon the plains of Italy, having evidently thought out
some form of screen or advance guard—otherwise they would have been
blocked on emerging from the pass—having some clearly elaborate system
of commissariat, and so on. Not a word of all that has come down to us
from antiquity. We do not know how it was done. What is more, we cannot
see _how_ it was done by men who had no writing, and only the vaguest
notions of topography.
The harbour of Poole, for which we were making during that run along
the Dorset coast when we were hailed by the Needle man, has a problem
of the sort attaching to it.
You come round the Anvil Point, and there, if you are lucky, you catch
another tide. There are many such points on the coast where you can
carry the tide with you much longer than the due six hours or so, by
coming into the midst of a fresh tide at the very end of the old one.
The main stream seems to shoot past Anvil Point, towards the Island. If
you come to Anvil Point and the corner of Dorset just at the very top
of the flood and have the good fortune to get round and open Swanage
Bay, you are out of this main stream just before the ebb begins, and
another, younger flood takes you up past Old Harry and towards Poole.
Old Harry is an isolated chimney of chalk rock which still stands,
expecting doom. He had a wife standing by him for centuries—a lesser
(but no doubt nobler) pillar. She crashed some years ago and now he
is alone. He cannot wish to remain so much longer, staring out to sea
without companionship. I think he longs for his release.
Beyond Old Harry you come to that odd entry of Poole, the history of
which is, I say, inexplicable to me. It was a main harbour for the
Romans; and when the Scandinavian pirates came down to destroy this
outer province of Christendom, they used it as a known base. It was
sailing out of Poole that a great fleet of their ships—ninety I am
glad to say—coming to pillage this Roman land, were piled up and
destroyed in Swanage Bay; and it was from Poole that they went up water
to Wareham, and thence made their foray by land to Exeter.
Yet Poole, thus easy to the ancients, could never be entered without
local knowledge. It is a trap, baited and set. As you look from
overseas, there stands clear before you the entry to a great harbour.
You see plainly a narrow gate, an obvious door into a wide sheet of
sheltered water within. But if you steer for that entry, you strike.
For, running down parallel with the coast for more than a mile, is a
long, high, hidden sandbank, so that you must get into Poole to-day by
making for the shore more than a mile below the entry to the harbour,
and then running up a trench of which you can see nothing from the
surface of the sea, but which you must keep to or wreck your ship.
To-day that strange approach is amply buoyed with a bright light at the
seaward end, and no one can miss it. But what did the ancients do, who
had, it may be presumed, no charts—certainly the pirates had none—and
who could not, save in some very special weather, have determined the
exact point of entry by the lead? The savages from Norway may have
depended upon captured pilots, or upon men who had purchased their
knowledge of the fairway by disasters of their own in earlier pirate
raids. But we hear nothing of all this in the records. We are simply
told they came to Poole continually as though it were as simple a
matter as going up Spithead.
Poole harbour has traps within as well as this grinning trap of
an entry, and the worst of these traps is the patchiness of the
holding-ground. Unless you know where to drop anchor, you may be
dragged in Poole, upwards, upon as fierce a tide as I know, with the
flukes of your anchor dragging as easily through the soft mud almost as
they would through water. But with all that, and although the Nona has
caught fire there (the sea brings all adventures), Poole is a harbour
that will always have good memories for me; and perhaps the Nona will
go there at last to die.
Now that I am upon the home seas steering eastward out of Poole after
rounding that last great buoy of theirs (for I dare not try the
Swatchway), I am concerned to defend the proposition that there is more
exploration to be done in things familiar than in things unfamiliar.
With what hesitation do I not set down those words! For they are
paradox, and paradox is to my personal taste as detestable as
advertisement. I will even confess to a little distaste of too much
metaphor—or, indeed, of any trick or hook for catching the attention
of the reader. Why should I suppose him jaded when I have so many
interesting things to say?
But here paradox is unavoidable; for it is clear that in the plain
sense of the words the exploration of a place unknown must yield more
matter than the exploration of a place familiar. What I mean is that
where one knows a thousand things, each of those thousand leads on to
another thousand, and so quickly makes you a million. Whereas where you
know nothing, you go on from your first discovery to one or two more,
and then to ten or a hundred all in a chain. So that the exploration of
the known is like multiplication, and the exploration of the unknown is
like addition. Or again, the survey of the known is like the sowing of
a field with a manifold harvest; whereas the surveying of the unknown
is but the lengthening out of a trail.
And all this mass of words am I tempted to because I am entering the
home seas, which I count from the Anvil to the South Foreland as being
my garden or back yard; though it is true that my general estate
extends much farther afield. What is more, the home seas themselves
expand a little during these last years of too much sailing along the
coast of our Great Island, and I am not sure that Portland Bill is not
now my gatepost, instead of the Anvil. But all this matters not at all.
The Bay between Poole and the Wight is so domestic and inward a thing
that many would laugh to hear it called the sea at all. But let them be
as I was on that night and they will find it is the sea right enough,
and that it can raise a fine hubbub, and that the salt water of it can
tumble about with the best of them.
I take it that there is no trial more trying in the sailing of a
little craft than taking her through blinding weather at night close
inshore—whether that weather be blinding through feather-white slants
of snow or through violence of sudden rain.
Well outside you make your course and keep to it indifferently, for you
have all the room you need; but when you are running from a coast point
to a coast point with the wind on shore through the darkness it is
another matter.
The wind that night had backed to the east of south; having so far
favoured me, however, that it never backed round enough to make me go
about. I was abominably short-handed, and on that particular occasion
could only count upon myself, for reasons which I will not debate.
My course was for the North Channel under Hurst Castle, where there
is a passage so narrow that even the Nona could hardly beat through
it between the shingle bank and that odd spit of land on which Hurst
Castle itself stands, and where Charles, the last true King of England,
lay a prisoner after having lost his power. That channel has to be made
with skill. You must lie close to the land, but if you lie a thought
too close you touch a hump of gravel which lies off the point. Your
business in shooting at that mark on such a blinding night is to keep
Hurst Light just on your landward bow until you judge that you are
perhaps a mile off. Then you must pass it over your bow just to the
starboard side, and then, when you are close up against it, so that it
seems you might strike almost, you must pay away again, put the light
to port, and skirt the land by half a cable or less, and so you will
round the long spit of Hurst and find yourself inside the sheltered
water of the Solent; all this if you have a leading wind.
At the setting out from Poole you must make a course lying well outside
Hengestbury, not going too close inland, for there are shoals and, I
think, rocks. It is only when you have the mass of Hengestbury Head
standing up like a sort of dull island against the night and a mile or
two north of your beam that you can begin, or a little later, to make
the Hurst Light your mark; and it was there on this stormy night that
my troubles began; for both the Needles far away a-weather and Hurst
itself were continually obscured by the most violent sheets of rain,
which came in gusts driven before the wind.
I would not go about into the open and try the Needles channel itself
for three reasons: first, that it would have meant a long beat to
windward; next, that in the Needles channel I should have had to meet
all the outward and inward shipping, which on a night like this might
have put me in some danger; and, lastly, that I should have missed my
tide and, I think, met the ebb; that is why I made for Hurst and for
the narrow passage between that light and the Shingles Bank: a shifting
mass of gravel that shows its changing back like a whale above the
seas. Now that passage demands skill.
For the first five miles or so beyond Hengestbury Head it was easy
going, for after each heavy gust of rain the light appeared again, and