My first attempt to read at sea was a dreary failure. Yet how I desired
a way to salvation. We were over the Dogger Bank. It was mid-winter. It
was my first experience of deep water. A sailor would not call fifteen
fathoms deep water; I know that now; yet if you suppose the North Sea
is not the real thing when your ship is a trawler, and the time is
Christmas, then do not go to find out. Do not look for the pleasure of
travel in that form.
That morning, hanging to the guide rope of a perpendicular ladder, and
twice thrown off to dangle free in a ship which seemed to be turning
over, I mounted to watch the coming of the sun. It was a moment of
stark revelation, and I was shocked by it. I could see I was alone with
my planet. We faced each other. The size of my own globe--the coldness
of its grandeur--the ease with which swinging shadows lifted us out
of a lower twilight to glimpse the dawn, an arc of sun across whose
bright face black shapes were moving, and then plunged us into gloom
again--its daunting indifference! Where was God? No friend was there.
There were ourselves and luck. That night a great gale blew.
So I tried Omar Khayyam, which was an act of folly. I could not resign
myself even to the ship’s Bible, the only other book aboard. Printed
matter is unnecessary when life is acutely conscious of itself, and is
aware, without the nudge of poetry, of its fragility and briefness. I
tried to read the Christmas number of a magazine, but that was worse
than noughts and crosses. “You come into the wheel-house,” said the
mate, “and stand the middle watch with me. It’s all right when you face
it.” In the still seclusion of the wheel-house after midnight, where
the sharpest sound was the occasional abrupt clatter of the rudder
chains in their pipes, where the loosened stars shot across the windows
and back again, where the faint glow of the binnacle lamp showed, for
me, but my companion’s priestly face, and where chaos occasionally
hissed and crashed on our walls, I found what books could not give me.
The mate sometimes mumbled, or put his face close to the glass to peer
ahead. They had a youngster one voyage, he told me, who was put aboard
another trawler going home. The youngster was ill. That night it blew
like hell out of the north-west. In the morning, so the hands advised
the mate, “the youngster’s bunk had been slept in, so they said the
other trawler would never get to port, and she didn’t.” I listened to
the mate, and the sweep of the waves. The ship trembled when we were
struck. But it seemed to me that all was well, though I don’t know why.
What has reason to do with it? Is the sea rational?
After that voyage there were others, and sometimes a desert of time to
give to books. Yet if to-night we were crossing the Bay, going out,
and she was a wet ship, I should have a dim reminder of the sensations
of my first voyage, and much prefer the voice of a shipmate to a book.
The books then would not be out of the trunk. They would do well where
they were, for a time. The first week, uncertain and strange, the ship
unfamiliar and not at all like the good ships you used to know so well;
her company not yet a community, and the old man annoyed with his
owners, his men, his coal, and his mistaken choice of a profession--the
first week never sees the barometer set fair for reading. Some minds
indeed will never hold tight to a book when at sea. Mine will not.
What is literature when you have a trade wind behind you? I have tried
a classical author then, but it was easier to keep the eye on the
quivering light from the seas reflected on the bright wall of my cabin.
It might have been the very spirit of life dancing in my own little
place. It was joyous. It danced lightly till I was hypnotised, and
slept in full repose on a certitude of the virtue of the world.
But recently there was an attempt, the time being spring, to cut
out the dead books from my shelves, the books in which there was no
longer any sign of life. Then I took that classical author, rejected
one memorable voyage, and looked at his covers. When he was on the
ship with me I found him meagre and incommunicative. Something has
happened to him in the meantime, however. He is all right now. His
covers, I notice, have been nibbled by exotic cockroaches, and their
cryptic message adds a value to the classic which I find new and good.
Scattered on the floor, too, I see a number of guide books. They are
soiled. They are ragged. Their maps are hanging out. When I really
needed them I was shy of being seen in their company, and they were
left in the ship’s cabin during the day, or in the hotel bedroom. The
maps and plans were studied. Sometimes they were torn out of a book and
pocketed; I could never find the courage to walk about Rome or Palermo
with a Baedeker. It always seemed to me like the wearing of a little
Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes on the coat collar.
Those guide books were more interesting on the wet days of a
journey, when it was impossible, or undesirable, to go roaming. They
were full of descriptions of those things one must on no account
overlook when in a country. Yet in the fine morning after a wet day,
when I went out without a guide book, the little living peculiarities
of the town, which the book had not even mentioned--because everybody
ought to be aware of them, of course--were so remarkable that the place
where Ariadne was turned into a fountain, and where Aphrodite tried to
seduce another handsome young mortal, were forgotten.
[Illustration: _I met a cheerful goatherd._]
So once, when hunting near Syracuse for “the famous _Latonie_, or stone
quarries, in certain of which the Athenian prisoners were confined,”
and several of whom were spared, so the book said, because they could
repeat choruses of Euripides, I met a cheerful goatherd, an old man,
with a newly fallen kid under his arm, who told me, in an American
language so modern that I hardly knew it, that he used to sell peanuts
in Chicago. He did not repeat choruses from Euripides, but even the
great dramatist, I am sure, would have been surprised by the fables of
the peanut merchant. I forgot the quarries, while listening to them.
The fabulist and I sat with our backs against a boulder over which
leaned an olive tree. The goats stood around, and stared at us; and
not, I believe, without some understanding of their master’s stories.
I am reminded of this because a map of southeastern Sicily is hanging
out of a book, the banner of a red-letter day. I rescued the volume
from the mass of discarded lumber, and found that inside the cover
of the book I had drawn a plan of the harbour of Tunis. Why? I’ve
forgotten the reason. But I remember Tunis, for I had been drawn
thither by this very book, which had said that nobody should leave the
Mediterranean without seeing Tunis. There it was, one day. From the
deck of my French ship I saw electric trams and the familiar _hôtels
des étrangers_. A galley with pirates at its sweeps was pulling almost
alongside us, and desperately I hailed it, threw in my bag, and
directed them to take me to a steamer flying the Italian flag, for that
steamer, clearly enough, was leaving Tunis at once. That was the ship
for me. There was some difficulty with the dark ruffians who manned the
galley, who followed me aboard the steamer. There they closed round
me, a motley and savage crew. They demanded gold in some quantity,
and with menacing flourishes, shattering voices, and hot eager eyes.
Their leader was a huge negro in a white robe and a turban, whose
expressive gargoyle, with a loose red gash across its lower part, had
been pitted by smallpox. I did not like the look of him. He towered
over me, and leaned down to bring his ferocity closer to my face. Some
Italian sailors stopped to watch the scene, and I thought they were
pitying this Englishman. But the latter was weary of Roman ruins, of
hotels, of other thoughtful provision for strangers surprising in its
open and obvious accessibility, and of guides and thieves--especially
of thieves, shameless, insatiable, and arrogant in their demands for
doing nothing whatever. At first he had paid them, for he was a weak
and silly stranger who did not know the land; but now, sick of it
all, he turned wearily on that black and threatening gargoyle while
it was still in full spate of Arabic, shook his fist at it, and cried
suddenly what chief mates bawl when things are in a desperate plight
and constraint is useless. To his astonishment and relief the negro
stepped back, turned to his crew and said to them sadly, in plain
English, “Come on, it’s no bloody good.” The gang left that ship as
modestly as carol singers who find they have been chanting “Christians
Awake” to an empty house. Now, evidently guide books cannot lead you
to such pleasing interludes, and may even beguile you away from them.
I mean that books cannot guide you to those best rewards for travel,
unless, of course, they are old and stained. They are full then of
interesting addenda of which their editors know nothing, and of symbols
with an import only one traveller may read. So when the days come in
which, as guide books, they will not be wanted, you may read in them
what is not there. This very guide book to the Mediterranean, for
example, under the heading of “Oran,” describes it as “the capital of
a province, military division, 60,000 inhabitants. It is not certain
that Oran existed in the time of the Romans.” Some people would like us
to believe that no place on earth can be of much interest unless the
Romans once flattened it into meekness. But we have heard far too much
of these Romans. They bore us. To-day we call them captains of industry
and company promoters. Oran, or what I could see of it in the dark when
we arrived, was as rich in promise as though it were thoroughly impeded
with classical ruins. There were lights that were a concourse of
planets, and as I lay reading in my bunk the ship was so quiet that you
could hear the paint crack on a bulkhead rivet. I was reading this very
guide book then, and it told me that beyond those calm and mysterious
planets were Tlemçen, and Ein Sefra, “an oasis 1,110 metres above
the sea level belonging to the Duled Sidi Sheikh. Here one catches
a glimpse of the Algerian desert, which is the fringe of the Great
Sahara.” I caught that glimpse, too, the next week.
These guide books, when you are home again, are as good as great
literature. There, for another instance, is Baedeker’s “Switzerland.”
Now the truth is, that book, bought for the first journey to the Alps,
was among the things I forgot to pack. It was never missed. It is only
to-day that we find it is indispensable. For it was bought in the
winter of 1913. Again it was night, when we arrived. A sleigh met us,
and took us noiselessly into the vaguely white unknown. Pontresina is
a good name. In the morning there were the shutters of a bedroom to
be opened, and a child who was with me gazed with wide eyes when the
morning light discovered to him a field of ice poised ethereally on
clouds, though the night had not gone from the valley below us; above
the ice was a tincture of rose on far peaks. Is it likely that he will
forget it? Or I? In any case, there is a diorama of those peaks in our
guide book, and what rosy light is absent from that picture we can give
to it.
X
Mayne Reid once persuaded us that to have a full life we should kill
grizzly bears, bison and Indians. We were so sure he was right that
school and work in London were then the proof of our reduction to
pallor in servitude. We have been, since then, near enough to a bison
to try it with a biscuit, but have never seen the smoke of a wigwam
even in the distance. There remains with us a faint hope that a day
will come when we shall see that smoke, for such a name as Athabasca
is still in the world of the topless towers of Ilium; but some records
of modern hunters of big game, published exultingly, have cured us of
an old affliction of the mind. So far as we are concerned the lives of
lions and bears are secure.
We now open a new volume on sport with an antipathy increased to a
repugnance we never felt for Pawnees, through the reading of a recent
narrative by an American writer, who had been collecting in Africa for
a museum. He confessed that if he had not been a scientist he would
have felt remorse when he saw the infant still clinging to the breast
of its mother, a gorilla, whom he had just murdered; so he shot the
infant, without remorse, because he was acting scientifically. As a
corpse, the child added to the value of its dead mother; a nice group.
That tableau, at that moment when the job was neatly finished, must
have looked rather like good luck when collecting types in a foreign
slum. He must have had a happy feeling when skinning the child.
The heroic big-game hunter, with his picturesque gear, narrow escapes,
and dreadful hardships, is a joke it is easy to understand since our
so very recent experience of man himself as a dangerous animal. The
sabre-toothed tiger of the past was a dove compared with the creature
who is pleased to suppose that he was created in the likeness of
his Maker. No predatory dinosaur ever equalled man’s praiseworthy
understudy of the Angel of Death. Some years ago, on the arrival of
fresh news at Headquarters in France of another most ingenious and
successful atrocity, I remarked to a staff officer of the Intelligence
Department that if this sort of thing developed progressively it
would end in the enforced recruitment of orangutans. But that officer
happened to be a naturalist. “No good,” he replied. “They wouldn’t
do these things.” Such acts are the prerogative of man, who won the
privilege in his upward progress.
With his modern weapons and ammunition, an experienced sportsman
challenging a lion stands in little more danger than if he were buying
a rug. The shock of his bullet would stagger a warehouse. It pulps the
vitals of the animal. There is a friend of mine whose pastime it is to
shoot big game, and we should pity any tiger he meets. It is not a
tiger to him. It is only a target, which he regards with the composure
into which he settles when someone brings him a long drink on a salver;
and his common habit with a target is to group his shots till they
blot out the bull’s eye. What chance has a tiger against so tender a
creature? A rabbit would have more, for it is smaller. But at least
it can be said for my friend that it merely happens that he prefers
such fun to golf; he attaches no importance to it. Though he has
shot an unfortunate example of every large mammal Asia has to offer,
he does not plead that he has done so in the name of Science. Man
himself, with appliances that reduce the craft of the tiger to a few
interesting tricks, and an arm which paralyses a whale with one blow,
is the most terrible animal in the world. He is the Gorgon. It is his
glance which turns life to stone. Science, as stuffed animals are often
called, excuses the abomination of any holocaust. If a nightingale were
dilated with cotton-wool instead of music, that would be “science,”
supposing it were the last of the nightingales. The reason given for
the slaughter of so many harmless gorillas in the neighbourhood of
Lake Kivu by several travellers was that those rare animals are dying
out, and museums required them. Yet it may be said for us that these
sportsmen find it necessary to excuse their behaviour to-day. They
must explain at least why they feel no remorse. No longer may one
destroy a family of apes and boast of it afterwards. If the crime is
mentioned publicly, its author is careful to observe that he so acted
as a naturalist, no doubt that we may thus distinguish him from a man
who would have done the same in the name of religion. We are sometimes
advised that the value of a training in science is that it makes
honesty of thought more usual than we find it in the ordinary man, who
merely rationalises his desires; and for guidance we are directed to
examine the sad mental results which come of a purely literary or a
political training. We should like to believe this, yet when we find a
zoölogist writing to the _Times_ to confess that he would have flinched
from the slaughter of a certain rare and fragile creature had he not
known that his deed was excused because it was committed in the name of
a museum, then a confusion of thought, probably literary, compels us to
suggest that science may be no better an apology for a blackguardly act
than is rum-running; and we are not forgetting that some of the worst
of man’s ferocities have been performed solemnly and with full ritual
in the name of God.
But the ethics of the hunt are not to be defined by men whose own
boyhood was in the period when the rapid growth of factories and
railways was causing a first wholesale clearance of wild life, both
human and bestial, from the earth. We are too near to the raw trophies
and benefits. That becomes clear, when, as we read in the news not long
ago, American warships used live whales as targets for gun-practice.
Makers of soap, too, would protest that it is right for commerce to
send explosive harpoons into the same creatures, because the supply of
fat is thereby increased. The matter is very difficult. Obviously if
we want the land the buffaloes cannot have it, and if we want their
oil the whales must part with it. The stage which Thoreau reached
when he gave up fishing is several centuries ahead for most of us. My
own notions about hunting would not bear a close inspection by either
humanitarians or sportsmen. If one has heard only a rat whimper when an
owl clutched it, and heard it continue to cry as the bird, with talons
set vice-like, sat blinking leisurely in deep and complacent thought,
then the scheme of things does seem a little sorry, though rats with
their fleas are what they are. The scheme, too, includes liver-flukes
and ticks. There are forms of life as deadly to man as he is to other
animals. One’s right to kill is no more than one’s need and ability to
kill. But if man brought compassion into the world, and bestows it on
creatures other than his fellows, how did he come by it, and what may
be its value in the evolution of life? Is it useless, like saintliness?