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
to be more exhausted in all that can be known of it. But those who
think so, neglect the dimension of time. For, though you should know
every entry and every sounding, the first hour in every flood when
your craft can safely go over the banks, the dredged channel under the
Hampshire coast, and Lymington River, and Cowes Roads and Ryde Sands,
and Beaulieu and Buckler’s Hard, where I am told they launched great
men-of-war, and Portsmouth Harbour right up to Fareham, and the Hamble
to its bridge, and all the yard and wharfs of the Test and the Itchen,
yet you do not possess that piece of water unless you see moving upon
it the fulness of its past. You must see the last tragedy of the Civil
Wars: the craft that might have taken Charles away from Southampton to
freedom, and his young son cruising with the loyal fleet (which had
declared for the King against the oligarchy) cruising just outside the
Wight, but unable to save the King at Carisbrooke. You must see that
which I shall always regret that I am twenty years too young to have
seen—the great ships under full sail making out through Spithead in
line for the open water. You must see the pirate boats of a thousand
years ago stranded on the Bramble, because they did not know the water,
and Alfred’s men capturing them so, and taking them off to Chichester
to be hanged: a proper end for all Vikings. And you must see the great
fleet of Roman transports coming in by an August night with a comet in
the sky, for the recovery of Britain seceded and turned into a separate
realm; the German mercenaries landing and pouring up the Winchester
road, and meeting their fellow Germans in battle before London, and
the Emperor Theodosius riding up Ludgate Hill in triumph after the
usurper’s death.
Because of its size and of its security, because of its nearness to
Europe, because of its many harbours, and one great harbour, this patch
of water has been packed with history as no other in Britain, except
London River; and now in our time the great London Dock Strike, more
than thirty years ago, has brought Southhampton Water back to the mass
of modern traffic, and made it the great port of entry from the West.
For it was the great London Dock Strike of ’89 did that, of which you
may say, as of all the industrial battles of our time, that the victors
lost.
Well do I remember the fevers of that struggle! I was but nineteen
years of age; it was my delight to follow the intense passions of the
time; and those passions were real. It was before the socialist creed
had been captured for sham battle at Westminster. The leaders _did_
desire, and _did_ think they could achieve an England in which the poor
should be poor no longer, and in which there should be sustenance and
happiness for all. They _did_ still believe the amazing proposition
that what they called ‘the community’—that is, in practice, the
politicians—could own all we have and handle it with a superhuman
justice. Great God! They believed it!
I well remember that I was myself near to believing it, but I had
the excuse of youth. They had also another excuse: not intellectual,
indeed, but moral; for, intellectually, the socialist has not a leg
to stand on, seeing that his theory is but a piece of arithmetic, and
its application, coincidently with honour and freedom, a contradiction
in terms. Morally I say, those men, those socialists of ’89, were
justified by the imbecility of their opponents.
Nor has that imbecility grown less. The arguments for the capitalist
scheme have to-day, after half a lifetime, the same bewildering
fatuity they had then. In the interval the power of combined capital,
the control exercised over us by a few exceedingly unworthy men,
has multiplied I know not how many fold; but the valueless defence
of such a condition goes on. One might imagine, to hear them, that
the defenders of capitalism honestly believed their ephemeral and
empoisoned chaos to have been present amongst us from the beginning of
time, and to be normal to the human race.
It is no little irony to remember that those who have to state the most
contemptible of such arguments in the press are themselves men commonly
indifferent, or even hostile, to the interests they are paid to serve.
It is not your sudden millionaire out of the gutter who writes in the
paper he owns; he could not write ten lines if he tried. It is not
your monopolist in ships, who, bleeding his country dry during her
life-and-death struggle in the Great War, sets out to prove that his
vile wealth is of divine origin. It is not the great bankers, getting
their usury out of nothingness, who could put forward that apologetic
which is necessary for the continuance of the affair—even for its
doubtful and uncertain continuance to-day. No; it is a scribbling
proletariat, insecure and exigent, which regularly turns out column by
column daily to explain how right and just it is that he should himself
remain insecure and exigent. It is as though the torture were applied
to some poor prisoner to compel him to proclaim the beauty of torture.
That old socialist fervour of the great Dock Strike of ’89 and its
time is dead: I regret it, for there was something very noble in its
folly. A good half of it or more was made up of the love of men, and
of a passionate hunger and thirst for justice. There was also in it
that Apocalyptic, that Messianic, expectation of a new heaven and a
new earth, and of its near approach, which is out of place in men of
European blood, for it is not native to them, but it moves them all
the same with the flame of its enthusiasm. In those days one paper at
least, and that a paper of power in the London press, supported the
revolt of the poor. No one has such enthusiasm to-day.
It was a time when men who have since been caught into the net of
professional politics, and have lost their souls, went down to speak
fiercely at street corners, and to light in the hearts of broken men
the flame of human dignity.
I have seen in those days a young man, the heir to a great fortune
(later a minister of sorts) standing under the flaring naphtha lamps
of a muddy London evening, calling out the new gospel and the promised
land. I remember the eager, stupid, upturned faces of the men and women
who had come there from bestial depths of the slums to hear him; to go
back into those depths, and there to remain. They lie in those depths
to-day. It is not such a creed that will save them. I remember the
great mobs that followed John Burns, and how I myself would go miles
through the East End to hear him; and I remember that great whirlpool
of men in Trafalgar Square on the most critical day when he and others
accepted imprisonment. There is nothing now for which men would act
so; no one now has a creed; therefore, I call that time of my youth a
better time.
Of all that enthusiasm and conviction nothing came; the mill turned
noisily enough, but it ground no corn. Those fevered exaltations were
transformed within a few years to a contemptible shrieking and raving
called ‘imperialism,’ and that also went its way, and worked itself
out to its ignoble end.... We survive to-day to hear a perpetual
flattering of America, a perpetual grumbling against the workers, their
sullenness, and, overseas, the increasing peril of control over the
alien races once so easily governed. The vulgarians who invented this
music-hall cry of empire now suffer the vacillation and the increasing
peril into which their own base bullyings have led them. They must live
a little time longer and dree their weird, and learn what happens to
those forms of pride which have not even the merit of dignity.
Of those years, one thing remains: the dock strike made Southampton.
I see the monstrous ships of the Atlantic passage pass up and down
the dredged channel to Southampton Water, and, as I look at them
earning their millions for the few masters of such machines, I say to
myself: ‘This was the fruit—here is the only fruit—of those nightly
enthusiasms by the London Docks, and of the cry for freedom, and of the
passionate belief that within a few years after 1889 the poverty of
London would have passed into an evil memory.’
I carried on between the forts at Spithead under the new day, with the
wind steady from just west of south until I was relieved at the helm,
and hour by hour we made for the Looe.
Now, with the Looe Stream, which is the gateway to the Sussex seas, I
knew not whether I should take the coast in its order between the Owers
and the Forelands, or carry on day and night to the straits. For I have
cruised up and down that garden wall of my own land so much that it
stands in my mind as a perpetual come and go, sometimes far out into
the salt beyond sight of England, sometimes a run in before too much
wind, sometimes a beating up for Beachy, sometimes just missing, and at
others just making, any one of the impossible entries of my harbours.
For the county of Sussex—and Kent, too, for that matter—up to
Folkestone and beyond has had tricks played with it by the Creator
of the sea and land. There has been done to it what is often done to
a human life—that is, the granting of an insufficient opportunity;
opportunity enough to compel the use of a function, not enough
opportunity for the fulness of that use. All the harbours are such that
they can be made, but only on sufferance; Chichester Harbour (which
is also Bosham), Littlehampton, Shoreham, Newhaven, Folkestone in its
day, are not to be approached at low tide save for the work of man, and
Pevensey is dead, and what was once the shelter of Hastings has been
worn down by the seas, the chalk reef which came out like an arm to
keep off the southwest weather; nor is the breakwater they have made
there sufficient. Newhaven is dredged, indeed, and they have pushed out
a great pier of stone into the sea to stop the eastward making of the
bank at its mouth, and Folkestone has a roadstead made for it though it
is incomplete and open, but in their nature all these harbours are to
be used by the favour of the tide, and that is why it is so awkward to
be caught in a gale outside while Arundel River, or the Bramber River,
is still ebbing out over Littlehampton or Shoreham Bar; for both those
bars show out at a low spring tide. Sussex in this is less favoured
than the Caux Country of Normandy, which is her opposite number. For
Trouville and Dieppe, of course, and Fécamp, and even Saint Valery,
a boat like mine can get into at any time. This is for two reasons:
first, because the Norman streams do not come from the country beyond
the chalk hills as do our Sussex rivers, but are mere brooks, so that
there is no weight of water to bring the clay silt down through the
harbour-mouths; next, because they are not open to the southwest wind
and to the eastward drift.
The Sussex rivers left to themselves get a bar piled up in front of
their mouths by the southwest wind and the inshore tide, so that a bank
of gravel grows up eastwardly continually in front of them. Thus the
mouth of Shoreham river, the Adur, travelled eastward for three miles
and more between the Conquest and the civil wars; until at last it came
out into the sea right up near Hove. But later a great storm burst
through the bank and made the present entry, halfway down.
Exactly the same thing happened with the Ouse. Its bank of shingle
crept out eastward until, in the Middle Ages, the entry was at Seaford,
and that is why Seaford was called ‘Sea’ Ford, and that is why the
French would attack Sea Ford, and that is why, when they so attacked,
‘this Pelham did repel ’em back aboard,’ as you may read in Lewes
Church. After that a storm broke through the shingle bank, making a new
entry right down to the westward, and so brought into being what is
still called the ‘New Haven.’