Travel, we are often told, gives light to the mind. I have wondered
whether it does. Consider the sailors. They are supposed to travel
widely. They see the cities of the world, and the works of the Lord
and His wonders in the deep. And--well, do you know any sailors? If you
do, then you may have noticed that not infrequently their opinions seem
hardly more valuable than yours and mine. Yet it must be said for them
that they rarely claim an additional value for their opinions because
they have anchored off Colombo. They know better than that. They know,
very likely, that all the cities of the world can no more give us what
was withheld at our birth than our unaided suburb. As much convincing
folly may be heard at Penang as at Peckham. The sad truth is, one is
as likely to grow wiser during a week-end at Brighton as in a “black
Bilbao tramp
With her load-line over her hatch, dear lass,
And a drunken Dago crew,
And her nose held down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail,
From Cadiz, south on the Long Trail--the trail that is always new.”
The fascination and illusion of that Out Trail! The other day, a man, a
wise and experienced traveller, who knows deep water better than most
of us, who has hunted whales, and even enjoyed being out of soundings
in literature, overheard a voice near us on a dock-head exclaim in
delight at the sight of a ship outward bound: “I wish I were aboard
her.” He said to me quietly, “I felt like that, too, but really, you
know, I don’t want to be aboard. I’m a little bit afraid of the sea.”
So am I. That is one thing, at least, I have learned in travel. I do
not love the sea. The look of it is disquieting. There is something in
the very sound of it that stirs the apprehension we feel when we listen
to noble music; we became inexplicably troubled. It is not the fear of
mishap, though that may not be absent. It is more than that, for after
all one is much safer in a good ship than when crossing the road at
Charing Cross.
It may be a surmise of one’s inconsequence in that immensity of sky and
water. And our inconsequence has not been always obvious to us. The
ministrations of a city nourish the pride of the social animal and yet
make him a dependable creature. Turn him into the open and he shrinks
from all that light. The dread problems that our energetic fellow-men
create in the cities of the plain make us myopic through the intensity
of our peering alarm. We become sure that even the empyrean must watch
our activities with grave interest. Yet we may be deceived in that;
for on blue water one cannot help noting that the sky does not appear
to act with any regard for our interest, and the sea itself is so
inscrutable, so vast, and moves with a rhythm that so diminishes one’s
own scope and measure, that a voyager may imagine he is confronted by
majesty, though an impersonal majesty, without ears or eyes or ruth.
That is not comfortable to a sense of self-importance.
Do we travel to learn such things? Of course not. The promise to
diminish a feeling of self-importance in a traveller is not one of
Messrs. Cook’s happy inducements. We do not travel for that. If we get
it at all, we are welcome to it, without extra charge. You must pay
more if you want to have a cabin to yourself. There are additional
charges, too, if you would deviate from the schedule of your voyage.
Should you put off at Penang for a week, and continue by the next
ship, that fun must be paid for. Eager still for the end of the
rainbow--which, so far on a long voyage, you have not reached, to
your surprise and disappointment--you leave your ship at Barbadoes,
consult the chart, and judge that what you really want is at Yucatan,
at Surinam, at Trinidad, or some other place where you are not; and at
a great expense of time and money you go. No use. There again you find
that you have taken yourself with you. No rainbow’s end!
I have often wondered what people see who travel round the world in a
liner furnished with the borrowings of a city’s club-life and other
occasions for idling; Panama, San Francisco, Honolulu, Yokohama,
Hong-Kong, Batavia, and Rangoon, all those variations of scenery for
the club windows; and so home again. What do they see? The anchorage
of Sourabaya is no more revealing than that of Havre, if warmer: a
mole, ships at rest, some straight miles of ferro-concrete quays in the
distance, flat grey acres of the galvanised roofs of sheds, and a tower
or two beyond. True, there are the clouds of the tropics to watch, and
a Malay polishing the ship’s brass. Only the mate and the captain are
at lunch, for the others have gone ashore. You may make what romance
you can out of that.
The others have gone ashore? All the great seaports I have seen have
been very much alike; and these liners rarely stay at one long enough
to make easy the discovery of a difference. You have no time to get
lost. You arrive, and then an inexorable notice is chalked on the
blackboard at the head of the ship’s gangway, to which a quartermaster
draws your attention as you leave the ship. The old city is two
miles away, and the ship sails in two hours. No chance, you see, to
get comfortably mislaid and forgotten. Besides, you run off with a
car-load of other passengers. Unless the car skids into a ditch the
game is up.
Well, after all, that grudging sense of disappointment comes of
intemperance with fascinating place-names and illusions. We expect to
have romance displayed for us, as though it were a greater Wembley,
and it is not. Travellers who “dash” round the world, as the febrile
interviewers tell us, who dash across the Sahara or the Atlantic, then
get into other speedy engines and dash again, expectant of a full life
and their money’s worth, might as well dash to Southend and back till
they run over a dog; or dash their brains out, and thus fulfil their
destiny. But I am not decrying travel, though sailors, I have been made
painfully aware, are much amused by the expectations of those to whom
a ship is an interlude of variegated enchantment between the serious
affairs of life. I enjoy travel, and a little of it now and then is
good for us, if we do not make demands which only lucky chance may
fulfil.
The best things in travel are all undesigned, and perhaps even
undeserved. I had never seen a whale, for instance, and recently was
watching the very waters of the Java Sea where one of them might have
been good enough to reward me. Nothing like a whale appeared. Too late
for that sort of thing, perhaps. This is the day of the submarine.
Or perhaps I stared from the ship listlessly, and with no faith, not
caring much whether there were whales and wonders in these days or not.
Anyhow, my last chance went. On my way home, while just to the south
of Finisterre, I came out of my cabin a little after sunrise merely
to look at the weather (which was fine) and a tiny cloud, rounded
and defined, was dispersing over the waves, less than a mile away.
Shrapnelling? Then a number of those faint rounded clouds of vapour
shaped intermittently. The ship was in the midst of a school of whales.
There was a sigh--like the exhaust of a locomotive--and a body which
seemed to rival the steamer in bulk appeared alongside; we barely
missed that shadow of a submerged island. The officer of the watch told
me afterwards that the ship’s stem nearly ran over it.
That was a bare incident, however, and perhaps not worth counting.
Yet all the significant things in travel come that way. Once in heavy
weather I saw a derelict sailing ship; our steamer left its course to
inspect her. But she was dead. There was no movement aboard her, except
the loose door of a deckhouse. It flung open as we drew near, but
nobody came out. The seas ran as they pleased about her deck fixtures.
It was sunset, and just when we thought she had gone, for she had
slipped over the summit of an upheaval, her skeleton appeared again in
that waste, far astern, against the bleak western light. I felt in that
moment that only then had the sea shown itself to me.
It is the chance things in travel that appear to be significant. The
light comes unexpectedly and obliquely. Perhaps the gods try us. They
want to see whether we are asleep. If we are watchful we may get a
bewildering hint, but placed where nobody would have expected to find
it. We may spend the rest of the voyage wondering what that meant. A
casual coast suddenly fixed by so strange a glow that one looks to
the opposite sky fearfully; the careless word which makes you glance
at a stranger, and doubt your fixed opinion; an ugly city, which you
are glad to leave, transfigured and jubilant as you pass out of its
harbour; these are the incidents that give a sense of discovery to a
voyage. We are on more than one voyage at a time. We never know where
Manoa may be. There are no fixed bearings for the City of Gold.