|I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me
to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a
doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and
had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of
interrogation. “I offer you a draw,” I said with a regal wave of the
hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or
something substantial like that. “Accepted,” he cried with a gesture no
less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck.
For the cry we had heard was “Land in sight!” And if there are three
more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the
ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.
For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the
Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely
facetious when he said he was “disappointed with the Atlantic.” But now
I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way
I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order
to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until
he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to
his conception of the sea because “we have in us the glance of the
universe.” But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to
the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are
not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense
of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the
geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are
told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before
yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility
to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured
by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is
perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn
by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have “a
drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.” You
conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth
which hangs over the sides.
For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue
cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption
of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey
cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth
and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the
table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth
flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under
the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment
suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like
a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning,
every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful
strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching
the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling
ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there
is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler
in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the
horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and
unearthly beauty.
But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are
moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our
magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or
Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we
are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers
progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is
indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the
sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its
hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the
sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as
abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is
no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the
imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned
in a double sense--in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in
his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted
to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations--sewermen,
lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on--I shall henceforth
include ships' stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being
shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New
York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the
ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending
mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would
rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall
in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their
joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, “Land in
sight!”
It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
however familiar it may be.
The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the
monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with
the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of
the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three
hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of
that immortal little company of the _Mayflower_ caught sight of the land
where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down
through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in
the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to
the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see
that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great
drama of the ages.
But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English
eyes as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this
sunny morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the
sight there is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself
heaving with a hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders.
I have a fleeting vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling
down there amid a glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to
sea, and standing on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home
to the Ark that is for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is
a rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his
hills hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager
comes from, whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic
from the Cape, or round the Cape from Australia, or through the
Mediterranean from India, this is the first glimpse of the homeland that
greets him, carrying his mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the
journey's end. And that vision links him up with the great pageant of
history. Drake, sailing in from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and
knew he was once more in his Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck
beside me with a wisp of hair, curled and questioning, on his baldish
forehead, and I mark the shine in his eyes....
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