_’Here are our thoughts--voyagers’ thoughts_,
_Here not the land, firm land, alone appears_, may then by them be
said;
The sky o’erarches here--we feel the undulating deck beneath our
feet,
We feel the long pulsation--ebb and flow of endless motion;
The tones of unseen mystery--the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world--the liquid-flowing syllables.’
The riding light was already garish in the early sunshine when we
turned out the next morning. The fragrance of the breeze coming in
faint puffs off the land, the clean taste of the air, the cries of the
sea birds, and the tender haze that overhung the land, set all our
senses tingling. Yet what a creature is man! As we stood by the main
rigging there came wafted aft to us from the forehatch the bubbling
sound and the smell of frying bacon, and we could scarcely endure the
delay of staying to wash down the decks, though that was a duty to be
performed before hunger might be satisfied honourably.
We got under way soon after breakfast, but the wind was fluky and we
drifted rather than sailed. About low water we anchored in a clock
calm to wait for the easterly breeze which we knew would come later,
for the gossamers hung on the rigging. In the afternoon the wind duly
‘shot up at east,’ as the fishermen say, and we fetched over the
Dengie flats, opened the Blackwater, and bore away for Mersea Island
to pick up the other children.
We anchored in the Deeps, for there was no room for such a large
vessel as ours in our old haunts up the creeks, but before the anchor
was down two small figures in white came running down King’s Hard.
Inky and Margaret had been watching for us. We soon had the sailing
dinghy going off for them. How pleased they were, how excited about
their cabins, how astonished at finding their toys ready for them!
At last, then, our scheme was complete. The family was reassembled
under a new roof, and that roof was a deck.
We met several sailing friends at West Mersea, and found our old
yacht, the _Playmate_, from whose owners we heard an account of their
first trip to Mersea. Off the entrance they hailed the man on board
the watchboat, to ask the way into the quarters. The watchman, who had
known the _Playmate_ for years, and had seen her going in and out
scores of times, answered the question in the spirit in which he
supposed it had been asked. He had not heard that the vessel had
changed hands.
‘Go on. _Yaou_ knaow,’ he shouted back.
‘No, we don’t,’ bawled the new owners.
‘Go on. _Yaou_ knaow,’ he repeated, as the _Playmate_ forged on.
‘No, we don’t,’ yelled the new owners, becoming nervous of running
aground.
‘Yaou let the ould girl goo herself, then. _She_ knaow the way in!’
was the last they heard.
During our short cruise we found out how best to arrange everything on
board so as to avoid breakages in a sea. Our furniture, of course, had
not been specially made for a ship; some of it had already been
screwed to the walls or bulkheads; the rest of it could be quickly
wedged. The shelves were all fitted with ledges, so that china and
silver had only to be laid flat behind the ledges. On deck we hung
thin boards over the windows, as these might easily be broken.
At Osea Island in the Blackwater we took in eight hundred gallons of
water. We then visited Heybridge, Brightlingsea, and Wivenhoe, and
still left ourselves ample time to make the passage to Newcliff and
settle down comfortably before the boys were due at their school.
To revisit the Essex sea-marshes is always to discover something new.
The dim low land may be called dreary compared with the more
vivacious Solent, but when the spell of this Dutch-like scenery has
been laid on you it has touched your heart for ever.
Not all people who are in love with Essex have always been so. The
charms of the county inland, as well as on the coast, have to be
discovered gradually, because they are widely spread.
Essex has no cathedral which gathers up the interest to one point. Yet
its houses are an epitome of its history and character; they look as
though they were part of the landscape, as though they had grown up
with the trees. Some houses in Essex--farmhouses and inns--often
welcome you with a clean white face, but the complexion of a whole
village seen far off is nearly always red, and a thin spire generally
tapers above the roofs. Churches and houses alike were built with the
materials which were ready to hand. There is much timber in the
building, because Essex has few quarries. In hundreds of churches,
too, you may see the relics of the Roman occupation. The Roman bricks
are worked into the lower parts of the walls; flint commonly comes
above the brick, and stout timbers are used not only for the roof, but
in the whole construction. Sometimes the spire is made entirely of
wood, and there is surely something beautiful and touching in the
exaltation to this use of the characteristic material of the county.
When a beam was wanted for a house, or a roof for a church, chestnut
was the wood, no doubt because of the belief that no insect takes
kindly to it. The great building age of what is now rural Essex must
have come immediately after the suppression of the monasteries, and
you can hardly go into an Essex village without finding a Tudor house.
If it be a manor-house, it may have a moat or a monkish fishpond; and
perhaps the pigeon tower, which dates from the times when the lord of
the manor had his rights of pigeonry, is still standing. The old inns
have a spaciousness which informs you of the well-being of
agricultural Essex when they were built. Where the land is good there
the inns are good also; where the land is poor the inns are built on
niggard lines. You can come across Essex villages--such as the
Rodings, the Lavers, and the Easters--which for remoteness of air and
unsophistication could not be matched except in counties so distant
from London as Cornwall and Cumberland.
Certainly Essex has no great hills, even as it has no great buildings.
But the value of hills is relative. From many places in Essex only
about sixty feet above the sea there are wide views, and you may gaze
upon the Kentish coast thirty miles away on the other side of the
Thames. The secret of the Essex coast is the illusion of immensity.
The dome of sky is scarcely interrupted by the small frettings of land
and wood along the edges. In this vast atmospheric theatre a change of
weather may be seen at almost any point of the compass planning its
tactics on a clear hard line of horizon, and thence swinging up the
sky, showing the soft white flags of peace or the threatening front of
a battle formation. One even has an important sense of the monstrous
nearness of natural forces when the ‘inverted bowl’ is filled with a
dark low-flying scud that seems to be crushing down on you in a kind
of personal assault.
Men who have become captivated by the marshes have been able to
measure the gradual and unconscious change in their feelings about
hills and flat lands by a visit to some such spot as the Italian
Lakes. The beauty of the lakes has always to be admitted--the purity
of the water, the affluence of the colour, the abrupt fall of the
hills to the water, the sweetness of the glinting villages perched
high up as though resting in a long and difficult climb to the sky.
But at the end of a week the visitor may have found himself insisting
on these beauties; he has felt that the sense of them is slipping
away. He who needs to argue with himself is losing ground. He becomes
unreasonably conscious that the water is imprisoned, and does not lead
to the sea round the distant headland; that the sky is filched away;
and that the winds are false, being misdirected by the hills and
simply blowing up or down a long corridor, so that Nature is
frustrated in these coddled and enchanted haunts.
In shallow estuaries like those of Essex the tides have necessarily to
be studied more carefully than in deep waters. The ebb tide runs
faster than the flood; for the ebb is hurried seawards, pressed on its
flanks as it goes, by the weight of water that pours off the flats
from either side of the channel. The flood comes in from the sea like
a cautious explorer. It is as though it could afford to be slow
because it has the authority of the sea behind it. Moreover, it has
nothing to do with the joy and madness of escape from confinement, but
daily performs a sober function of renewal. It is a deliberate,
sightless creature, pushing before it sinuous fingers with which it
gropes its way through the crushed jungles of matted weed.
For the gulls, the redshanks, the stint, the herons, and the curlew,
the important moments of the day are when the water first leaves the
banks and a refreshed feeding-ground is once more laid bare. But to
the yachtsman the vital time is when the sea advances, bringing its
salt breath among the drowsier inland scents, raising the weed from
the dead, and changing into sensitive buoyant things the smacks and
yachts which have been stranded on their sides, heavy and immobile for
hours.
There are two yachtsmen at least who are almost ashamed to confess how
childish in its reality is their pleasure in watching the return of
the tide over the flats or up some shallow creek. They have not
counted the number of times they have leaned over the side of a yacht,
knowing she could not float for an hour or more, watching the tiny
crabs scuttle into fresh territories as the oily flood bearing yellow
flecks of tide-foam brims silently over one level on to the next;
watching each weed being lifted and supported by the water until its
whole length waves and bends in the tide like a poplar in a breeze;
watching the angle at which the yacht has been lying correct itself
until she sits upright in the mud; watching, perhaps, in the proper
season, the swish and flutter of the water, and the little puffs of
disturbed mud drifting away like smoke, as mullet thresh their way
through the entrancing green submarine avenues. And then there is
always the thrill of the moment when the rising water touches with
life the dead hull of a yacht, and turns her into a creature of
sensitiveness and grace swaying to the run of the tide. One moment she
is as a rock against which you might push unavailingly with all your
might; the next she has sidled off the ground, and will sheer this way
and that in response to a finger laid upon the tiller.
As the tide rises towards its height you may see smacks--oyster
dredgers, trawlers, shrimpers, and eel boats--filling the shining
mouth of the estuary. The lighting of this part of the coast is like
nothing else in England. A pearly radiance seems to strike upwards
from the sea on to the underpart of the clouds, which borrows an
abnormal glow. In these waters, when the sea is not grey it is
generally shallow green, and sometimes, when there are thunder-clouds
with sunshine, it becomes an astonishing jade. At sunset the vapours
over the marshes burn like a furnace, and the cumulus clouds sometimes
glow underneath with the dusky fire of a Red Underwing moth. When the
water has left the flats the lighting does not change appreciably,
because the gleaming mud, glossy and shining like the skin of the
porpoises which sport along the channels, has the quality of water.
The most characteristic effect is the mirage, which swallows up the
meeting-point of sea and sky in a liquid glare, exalts the humblest
smack with the freeboard and towering rigging of a barque, and
separates the tops of trees from visible connection with the land, so
that they appear to be growing out of air and water. Often one might
fancy that the trees of the Blackwater and the Crouch, thus seen in
the distance, were the palm-trees of some Polynesian island.
On the marshes, or reclaimed lands, which are inside the sea-walls,
and are intersected by tidal dykes called fleets, sea-fowl and
woodland birds mingle: curlew with wood pigeons, plover with
starlings, rooks and gulls, feeding harmoniously. Here and there the
mast and brailed-up sail of a barge sticking out of grazing-land tell
of a creek winding in from some hidden entrance, and remind you that
in Essex agriculture and seamanship are on more intimate terms than
are perhaps thought proper elsewhere.
Outside the sea-walls are salt marshes (‘salts’ or ‘saltings’) which
are covered only by the higher tides. In the early summer the thrift
colours them with pink and white, and later a purple carpet is spread
by the sea lavender. The juicy glasswort (called ‘samphire,’ though it
is not the samphire of Dover Cliff in ‘Lear’) changes from a brilliant
green to scarlet. Herons wade in the rivulets; the whistle of the
redshanks, the mournful cry of the curlew, and the scream of the gulls
which fringe the edge of the water like the white crest of a breaking
wave, sound from end to end of these marshes. In the winter you may
hear the honking of Brent geese. But by far the most beautiful sight
is hundreds of thousands of stint or dunlins on the wing together.
These birds are also called ox-birds, and the fishermen call them
simply ‘little birds.’ When they wheel, as at the word of command, the
variations in their appearance are almost beyond belief; now they are
wreathed smoke floating across the sky, and scarcely distinguishable
from the long smudge that pours from the funnel of a steamer on the
horizon; now the sun catches their white underparts, and they are a
storm of driven snowflakes; now they present the razor edge of the
wing, and then disappear in the glare as by magic; again they turn
the broadest extent of their wings, and a solid and heavy mass
blackens the sky.
[Illustration: BEAUMONT QUAY]
In May, when the sea-birds are hatching their young, the spring-tides
are slack and do not cover the saltings. In a pretty figure of speech
the fishermen call these tides the Bird Tides.
The lives of the fishermen are ruled by the tides. For them the
working hours of the clock have no significance. On the first of the
ebb, be it night or day, their work begins, and it is on the flood
that they return to their homes. They have no leisure or liking for
the time-devouring practice of sailing over a foul tide. The tide in
the affairs of these men is absolute.
And although they do not confess in any recognizable phrase of lyrical
sensation that the sea has cast a spell upon them, it is obvious that
that is what has happened. On Sundays, when they are free from their
labour, they will assemble on the hard--a firm strip of shingle laid
upon the mud--and, with hands in pockets, gaze, through most of the
hours of daylight, upon the sweeping tide and the minor movements of
small boats and yachts with an air at once negligent and profound. The
mightiness of the sea, like the mightiness of the mountain, draws
mankind. Men have learned the secrets of these things in a way, and
have turned them to their profit or amusement; but the mastery is
superficial, and it is man who in these great presences is
unconsciously and spiritually enslaved.