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

after part whence you steer, have some little splash of white or what not which shows you from the tiller that they are still alight. And as for your riding light, which so often has to do duty when all are asleep aboard, see that it is sound and of capacity and filled. You can hardly have too large a one; not for the sake of the light, but for the sake of the number of hours it will burn. And this I say, never having possessed one in my whole cruising life which did not leak or blow out in a gale, or come crashing down on deck through insecure fastening, or in one way or another behave in the fashion true and consonant to the Nona, which is the chief boat of all the boats in the world, and therefore, like the chief men of this world, is in trouble all the time. Indeed, I think that there stand out among all the boats of history, supreme, singular, incomparable to lesser things, like the two horns of Hattin, or the Twin Stars, two boats—Noah’s Ark and the Nona; and of these two, the Nona is the better ship. I judge this by the pictures of the ark I have seen upon match-boxes, which I take to be upon the whole our best text, though late and somewhat corrupt. Such a craft could not have been handled with any satisfaction. It has no gear, only a sort of deckhouse; but it is famous, and of such antiquity that it should be revered—from its time onwards there has been nothing but the Nona. You talk of the Niña; of Columbus’s other ships—whose names I never knew, nor you either; of the Mora, that brought William of Falaise to Pevensey; of the White Ship and of the Ark Royal; of the Victory (which is now, they say, to sail upon dry land); of the Great Harry, of the Vengeur, of the Hood, and of the two beautiful enamelled motor-boats which are (I hope) to be purchased out of our pockets for the Salaried League of Nations at Geneva, and there moored along the wharf of its private garden, well called Tom Tiddler’s Ground. But none of all these ships is to be mentioned in the same breath as the Nona. The wind dropped quite suddenly while it was yet dark before we had passed Fairlight, that is, within an hour’s running. It left, though it had been an offshore wind, something of a lump behind it, as nearly always does such a sudden cessation of strong weather. I have often noticed this; it is as though the wind blew the sea flat, and then, when the pressure of it was relieved, the water would move up again to show its freedom. It not only dropped; it also, after half an hour’s calm, began to run right round ahead to the west, and even to the south of west, so that we had to put out far into the sea upon the starboard tack, and then beat back again towards the shore to make our course. In this way, the holy light of day had already begun to grow by the time we were opposite Hastings and the odd broken breakwater of the place; whereby they have attempted to restore, but failed to restore, something of the old harbour. That harbour of Hastings has to-day quite disappeared, its defences worn down by the sea, but the Castle still stands there to show how important a haven it was; one of the great ports of mediæval England. What I have read upon the matter has not left me much clearer as to the exact lie of the sheltered water, but my interest in the place (apart from this, that certain of my forbears are buried there) stands in that odd disappearance of a great political function. Hastings was a port, and it is a port no more. Yet the town has survived, and even its use of the sea has survived; though now they must draw up their boats upon the shore. I hope that Hastings has reasserted its right to christen the great battle. When I was at Oxford it was a favourite piece of humbug among the academic to call the Battle of Hastings ‘Senlac.’ This queer Gascon name they got out of a footnote of Lingard’s. Now it happens to be a sacred rule at Oxford never to admit any obligation to Lingard. Lingard is the creator of documented, exact English history. Three quarters of the things you hear put forward as modern conclusions upon the English past come first from that great and unique historian. He invented the science. Before his time no one had written a history from original texts; nor had any one taken a general survey. Since his time he has become a quarry for all those who can, or pretend to, teach and write history. But it is an unbroken rule at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to boycott his name. Lingard made that one bad error. He called the Battle of Hastings ‘Senlac.’ Like schoolboys who give themselves away by copying, Freeman and his gang, following Lingard’s one mistake, worked the thing to death. They seem to have thought in their ignorance that ‘Senlac’ was an Anglo-Saxon term! And then, it was so grand to give a shock to general usage, and to introduce that note of the unusual which is the mark of the charlatan. Round demolished them. How often have I not studied that famous field. It was but this year that I went all over it with a clinometer, taking contours, with two friends to help me, so that I might reëstablish the battle. I know not what that fascination is which attaches to seeing, touching, standing on the very site of some great business of the past. I cannot analyse its nature, but I feel the strength of it profoundly, and I would I could recover the hours I have wasted all my life long in exactly establishing this, that, and the other topographical point of the past. What reverence do I not feel, and how justly, for such work as Rice Holmes’, in which every movement of Cæsar’s in those fateful August days of the first Invasion, is clinched down with iron proof, exact, converging. There is nothing more delightful in the ocean of modern historical work, the moving empty sea of guess and unproved affirmation, than these few solid rocks of industry and common sense. The people who get the thing settled once for all are as different from the question-mongers and theory-spinners as is a vigorous air from confused harmonies; or better, as is the grasp of a living hand from the ghostly touches of the spooks. What could be more masterly than Holmes’ establishment of the landing-place upon Deal beach, the calculation of the march to the Stour, the crossing-place, the storming of the camp on Bigberry Hill. It is like the fitting in of a jig-saw puzzle, everything made complete, certain, absolute, where before all had been chaos. Over and over again have I climbed that hill and sat me down on the rampart, in order to look below towards the ford of the river where the seventh legion crossed, and over and over again, sailing in the narrows of the channel, I have called up that great armament on its summer’s day, the galleys rowing with the tide round the South Foreland and the heavier transports far away towards the French shore. It is, I fear, an evil pleasure of the mind, but it is a very real pleasure, none the less, which a man takes in that which should, if he were honest and charitable, provoke him rather to indignation, and the abominable follies of the academic fool do give me that pleasure, which I suppose I ought to fly. When a don shows his great learning by spelling Clovis ‘Hclodhovech,’ I feel not pain, as I should, but pleasure: it makes me think of ‘Clodhopper.’ When the official historian, hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that the great officials of fifth-century Rome knew no Greek, or when his fellow, similarly hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that Homer’s poems were composed by a committee, I, who ought to be pained, laugh. So I do when they tell me, as one professor solemnly told the world in the pages of, I think, the ‘Spectator’ (but possibly it was another learned organ), that the French for ‘very beautiful’ was ‘_beaucoup belle_,’ or that the phrase ‘_La volonté générale est toujours droite_,’ means ‘The general will is always right.’ There is another trick of theirs which gives me infinite delight, and that is the solemn perversion of authority, of which the pleasant name is ‘Mumbo-Jumbo.’ The power to affirm anything at will to an audience of young and quite unread undergraduates, without fear of contradiction or examination, produces an impotent sort of pride in which the very nature of authority is forgotten. A great scholar steeped in Greek literature says, ‘The style of this passage is the style of the third century.’ That is the voice of authority. A man thoroughly familiar with the language can say a thing like that, and men not familiar with the language must accept it, unless they find it challenged by any authority at least equal. If they all find similar scholars making a similar affirmation, humility and common sense demand that the affirmation should be taken as true. But when the affirmer goes on to say that, because the style of a passage is that of the third century, therefore it cannot possibly have been written a hundred years later, he is talking nonsense so appalling that it makes one catch one’s breath. A man steeped in English can say with authority to a foreigner, ‘This letter is in the style of Dr. Johnson, and of the eighteenth century; it cannot possibly have been written in the seventeenth.’ But of what value would his statement be if he added, ‘Nor could it possibly have been written in the nineteenth’? Scholarship has authority when it possesses data which those who accept that authority have not had the leisure or the industry or perhaps the power to examine. It possesses no authority whatever against the common sense of the most ignorant man. I come across a document in which there is used strong language against Richard III. The manuscript, which denounces him as the murderer of his nephews, qualifies the advent of the Tudor, and draws up arguments in favour of his claim. A competent expert who can say to me, ‘By the nature of the handwriting, I, who am most learned in such documents, can tell you certainly that this was not written shortly after Bosworth, but a hundred years later,’ must be believed. The statement has authority. He can judge the date of the handwriting, and I cannot. But if he goes on to say, ‘Therefore the statement is not contemporary,’ he is talking the wildest nonsense, because our common experience is sufficient to tell us that men do, and may, take manuscript copies of things written before their time. If a man steeped in all the details of Elizabeth’s reign, says of a particular manuscript it is spurious because ‘at such a date in the late sixteenth century, a document of this particular kind would be found reduced to print and not recopied in manuscript,’ I should answer, by the use of my common sense, ‘Why not? How do you know what motive the man may have had who copied it? How do you know whether it has not been reduced to print in some form which we have lost? How do you know that it may not be some family possession which the owner did not want spread broadcast, or which he only had the curiosity to copy out himself?’ It is the nature of human pride to assume powers beyond those really possessed; but new forms of such assumption go for a long time unrecognised. The abuse of religious authority is a commonplace. Men are only beginning to wake up to the modern abuse of academic authority. Heaven knows how much we have heard of priestcraft, and it is true that men holding only spiritual authority have not infrequently pretended to an authority in other fields beyond their lawful scope. But such extravagance is far more forgivable than the academic assumption of false authority based upon supposed or affirmed proof when proof there is none. For the former is a mere exaggeration, but the latter implies a falsehood. If a man really possessed of second