Personally I should call it “Getting It up,” but I have always seen it
in print called “weighing anchor”—and if it is in print one must bow to
it. It does weigh.
There are many ways of doing it. The best, like all good things, has
gone for ever, and this best way was for a thing called a capstan to
have sticking out from it, movable, and fitted into its upper rim,
other things called capstan-bars. These, men would push singing a song,
while on the top of the capstan sat a man playing the fiddle, or the
flute, or some other instrument of music. You and I have seen it in
pictures. Our sons will say that they wish they had seen it in
pictures. Our sons’ sons will say it is all a lie and was never in
anything but the pictures, and they will explain it by some myth or
other.
Another way is to take two turns of a rope round a donkey-engine,
paying in and coiling while the engine clanks. And another way on
smaller boats is a sort of jack arrangement by which you give little
jerks to a ratchet and wheel, and at last It looses Its hold. Sometimes
(in this last way) It will not loose Its hold at all.
Then there is a way of which I proudly boast that it is the only way I
know, which is to go forward and haul at the line until It comes—or
does not come. If It does not come, you will not be so cowardly or so
mean as to miss your tide for such a trifle. You will cut the line and
tie a float on and pray Heaven that into whatever place you run, that
place will have moorings ready and free.
When a man weighs anchor in a little ship or a large one he does a
jolly thing! He cuts himself off and he starts for freedom and for the
chance of things. He pulls the jib a-weather, he leans to her slowly
pulling round, he sees the wind getting into the mainsail, and he feels
that she feels the helm. He has her on a slant of the wind, and he
makes out between the harbour piers. I am supposing, for the sake of
good luck, that it is not blowing bang down the harbour mouth, nor, for
the matter of that, bang out of it. I am supposing, for the sake of
good luck to this venture, that in weighing anchor you have the wind so
that you can sail with it full and by, or freer still, right past the
walls until you are well into the tide outside. You may tell me that
you are so rich and your boat is so big that there have been times when
you have anchored in the very open, and that all this does not apply to
you. Why, then, your thoughts do not apply to me nor to the little boat
I have in mind.
In the weighing of anchor and the taking of adventure and of the sea
there is an exact parallel to anything that any man can do in the
beginning of any human thing, from his momentous setting out upon his
life in early manhood to the least decision of his present passing day.
It is a very proper emblem of a beginning. It may lead him to that kind
of muddle and set-back which attaches only to beginnings, or it may get
him fairly into the weather, and yet he may find, a little way outside,
that he has to run for it, or to beat back to harbour. Or, more
generously, it may lead him to a long and steady cruise in which he
shall find profit and make distant rivers and continue to increase his
log by one good landfall after another. But the whole point of weighing
anchor is that he has chosen his weather and his tide, and that he is
setting out. The thing is done.
You will very commonly observe that, in land affairs, if good fortune
follows a venture it is due to the marvellous excellence of its
conductor, but if ill fortune, then to evil chance alone. Now, it is
not so with the sea.
The sea drives truth into a man like salt. A coward cannot long pretend
to be brave at sea, nor a fool to be wise, nor a prig to be a good
companion, and any venture connected with the sea is full of venture
and can pretend to be nothing more. Nevertheless there is a certain
pride in keeping a course through different weathers, in making the
best of a tide, in using cats’ paws in a dull race, and, generally, in
knowing how to handle the thing you steer and to judge the water and
the wind. Just because men have to tell the truth once they get into
tide water, what little is due to themselves in their success thereon
they are proud of and acknowledge.
If your sailing venture goes well, sailing reader, take a just pride in
it; there will be the less need for me to write, some few years hence,
upon the art of picking up moorings, though I confess I would rather
have written on that so far as the fun of writing was concerned. For
picking up moorings is a far more tricky and amusing business than
Getting It up. It differs with every conceivable circumstance of wind,
and tide, and harbour, and rig, and freeboard, and light; and then
there are so many stories to tell about it! As—how once a poor man
picked up a rich man’s moorings at Cowes and was visited by an
aluminium boat, all splendid in the morning sun. Or again—how a
stranger who had made Orford Haven (that very difficult place) on the
very top of an equinoctial springtide, picked up a racing mark-buoy,
taking it to be moorings, and dragged it with him all the way to
Aldborough, and that right before the town of Orford, so making himself
hateful to the Orford people.
But I digress....