sea upon which a god has determined that there shall be peril: that
these parts are of their inward nature perilous and that their various
particular perils are but portions of one general evil character
imposed by the Powers. For you will notice that wherever there is one
danger of the seas there are many. If it is an overfall or a race,
then in that neighbourhood you will also have reefs, unaccountable
thick weather, shifting soundings, bad holding, and all the rest of it.
Witness the western approach to the Isle of Portland, or the Bight of
Saint Malo, with the Channel Islands and their innumerable teeth; the
entry to the Straits of Messina and other places recorded in histories
and in pilot books. Our moderns will have it that such things are
chance and an accumulation of them a blind accident, but I hold with
those greater men, our fathers. Some one here in these places, some
early captain, first sailing offended the gods of the sea. Hence all
the tangle of the southern corner of Wales, Jack Sound and Ramsey
Sound and the Bishop and his clerks, and, worst of all, Wild Goose Race.
I write without knowledge of the Wild Goose Race. I have never been
through it; neither have you been through death, you who read this.
Yet, as we all know that death is a perilous passage and in accordance
dread it, so I with the Wild Goose Race, well so named. My book told
me that little ships like mine getting into that water were often
dismasted and ‘even foundered.’ I like that word ‘even.’
It seems that in Wild Goose Race a boat is taken up and pitched to
heaven and let drop again, twirled round like a teetotum, thrown over
on her side, banged off sideways with great stunning blows upon the
cheek-bone, and blinded all the time with cataracts of spray, the while
the air is filled with a huge mocking laughter. Many races do I know,
Portland Race and Alderney Race and Little Saint Alban’s Race, of which
you shall later hear, and the Race round the Skerries of Anglesey, if
you may call that a race, and the Race in Bardsey Sound. But there
are many races, which, thank heaven, I do not know and which I do not
propose to know, such as the Race of Ushant, and the very damnable
races of the northern headlands, including that Great Maelstrom of
which we hear so much and see so little, and which puts on great
airs: but none of these, I am told, is comparable to Wild Goose Race,
therefore did I let it alone upon this passage. Do not believe it when
you read it in books that a race is made by anything so simple as a
tide against a wind or a sudden precipice in the depths of the sea. It
is made by the anger of those that rule the sea. And yet of races there
is one that has always treated me kindly, and that is the race off the
Start. I have been through it I know not how many times and always was
the sea there either quite smooth, gentle, purring, and domestic; or
an honest running sea, parallel and ordered. But, perhaps, whatever
governs the Start Race had received from me without my knowing it, some
courtesy. I take this opportunity to thank whatever Powers govern that
little corner of the watery world for their kindness.
I have often seen pictures of these Powers, horses and men and women
with fishes’ tails and scales, and gods without scales that ride in
chariots over the sea. I suppose in that world, or in those circles,
the scales are a badge of service, making the link between the
immortals and the dumb fishes of the sea; just as our highbrows make a
link between the rich masters who rob the modern world and the millions
who work. Only there is this difference, that our highbrows have no
scales; they have nothing in common with the dumb millions who work.
But I will not pursue this metaphor lest I should offend Mr. and Mrs.
Able, who themselves indeed live in western suburbs but, upon the other
hand, are perpetually in the houses of the great.
Where then was I? Why, coming into the quiet and amplitude of Saint
Bride’s Bay, but having before me the terrors of Jack Sound. For it is
true of the sea here as everywhere, that it is the symbol of life, and
of our ceaseless duties, and of death. We must never expect long quiet
in the business of our living, nor any long security in any passage of
the sea. But I must say that this run across Saint Bride’s Bay was very
genial upon that summer noon, only there came with the early afternoon
those ominous patches of an oily look to windward, the falling of the
breeze, the sea still running, and yet the canvas not always over well
filled: briefly, the renewed menace of a deadly calm. That calm fell
upon us suddenly enough, just at the moment when we might, with the
last of the ebb, have run through Jack Sound. It came upon us at the
mouth of that forbidden passage, and left us idle and foolish, pointing
anyhow and seeing, to our despair, the marks upon the distant shore
slowly moving backward as (alas!) we drifted north.
Truly, indeed, did the immortal trio—Swift, Arbuthnot, and
Pope—exclaim in chorus: ‘What is mortal man but a broomstick!’ Never
are we in half a gale of wind but we pray crapulously for calm. Never
are we in a calm but we whine peevishly for wind. What, Dog, would
you have the weather cut out for you like a suit of clothes? Is all
the universe to arrange itself simply to your convenience, as it does
for the very rich—so long as they keep off the sea? Will you not be
content with sailing unless just that wind plays which is exactly
trimmed for your miserable barque, neither too strong nor too light nor
too far forward so that you have to beat, nor so far aft that you fear
a gybe, or pooping from a running sea? Will you never repose in the
will of your Maker and take things as they come? Why, then, drift round
Skomer like a fool!
Which, indeed, was what the Nona did, for as it fell dead calm, the
set of the sea took her in the most amusing unaccountable way on a
jolly little voyage of exploration. The sea took charge. The tiller
was not worth holding, the helm swung idle, and the canvas hung like
the flabby muscles on the face of an Opposition leader towards the end
of the third hour of a speech from the Front Bench to which he has had
to listen, sorely against his will. It hung loose and inept, like the
hands of a poor man waiting orders in the presence of a rich man, or
like the mind of a sceptic when he considers the ultimate nature of
good and evil—let alone beauty. The sea took charge and trolled the
little boat along, keeping her just so far from the shore, as who
should say, ‘See, my child, how remarkable is the Island of Skomer!
Come with me, I will show you every cranny of its outer shore.’ So were
we taken off round Skomer by the tide in that calm, further and further
from Jack Sound.
When they had played this farce with us long enough, the Powers halted
the sea, as is their fashion every six hours, and we found ourselves
close aboard a large ketch which lay at anchor off that Skomer shore.
There was one man upon the deck, smoking a pipe and keeping his mind
empty, as is the duty of all mortals in such few intervals of leisure
as heaven affords us. He bade us not knock into him, and we called out
to him (but not very loud, for we were at a familiar cast of but few
yards) that if we came too close aboard we would shove off and do him
no harm. We asked him who he was and where he was going. He did not
tell us who he was, but he told us where he was going, which was to
Cork, and what he had on board, which was a cargo of coal.
The lazy sun, halfway down the sky, looked indifferently upon us; the
quite smooth sea turned again in its perpetual come and go, and took us
slowly back in so many hours, till we found ourselves again by evening
where we had started, at the mouth of Jack Sound. What this current
or tide movement was which had thus taken us nearly round Skomer and
back again, I know not, but it was a journey that cost nothing, and,
tedious as it was, we had at least learned another few miles of shore.
It seemed, however, all of a set purpose, for the wind now blew again
lightly but steadily from the northeast. The ebb was well on its way,
and we could point through Jack Sound, and hope to be in Milford Haven,
round Saint Anne’s Head, before the late darkness of this day in early
June.
So did we enter that passage.
Jack Sound in that evening light was a repetition of Ramsey, only
more violent, for we were more in the full roar of the ebb. There
was the same rush as of a millrace, the same cataracts of falling
water over the landward rocks. We came out of it with the setting sun
glorious upon our starboard quarter, and ran quickly for the end of
Skokholm—another Scandinavian name—sure (in that steady breeze) of
rounding Saint Anne’s Head easily before darkness, and dropping anchor
in some cove of Milford Haven.
But nothing is ever certain at sea. We were, perhaps, a mile from the
Head when there rolled up with astonishing rapidity from out the main
ocean a solid bank of cloud, sweeping the level of the sea. I say cloud
rather than fog, because it was so solid and so dark. It caught us like
a cloak thrown over a man’s head; and, before we knew where we were,
we found ourselves steering hopelessly by the card, not daring to keep
too much out, lest we should lose the mouth of the haven; not daring to
keep too much in, lest we should strike: and nothing to prevent that
but listening anxiously to the great fog-blast, which was now hooting
regularly in its panic from the height of the headland.
What followed for nearly two hours was such an adventure as only
wretched amateurs would indulge in, and amateurs in a craft which did
not draw more than six feet of water. The wind, such as it was, had
dropped, of course, with the fog. It gave us only enough way to creep
eastward before it; and what we proposed to do was so to feel our way
in the fading light through that dense mist until we should hear the
slight surge of water upon the rocks of the haven mouth to port, that
is, on the north side of the haven entry. I had a large plan aboard,
and I knew that there was water close up to the shore, and that it was
plain enough going, with nothing hidden beneath the surface. So we
gingerly put her head slightly round, when we made out the mournful
menace of the fog-horn to have come just aft of the beam; my companion
took the helm, and I went forward with the lead, and also to call out
to him to put the helm up whenever that might be made necessary by our
getting too close. We faintly heard already the slight wash of the
gently heaving water, and I saw, some few yards off the bow, little
gleams of white through the mist, which were the foam sliding from the
rock surfaces, as we slipped by. The Nona’s movement was so very slight
that even if she had struck a glancing blow, nothing that was not
jagged would have harmed her greatly; but we were preserved and did not
touch.
We had this further good fortune, that, just as it grew quite dark,
the sound of the slight surge to leeward receded and disappeared so
that we knew we had turned the headland and opened the first bay of
that long inland arm of the sea. Our chart showed us good depth and
good holding-ground, and a good berth for the night, granted that there
should be no other craft about. We heard none such through the fog; no
voices, no swinging spars, no movement at all. So when we had got well
into the bight, we dropped anchor; trusting to luck that, as she swung
to her chain, she would not strike shoal ground nor anything near. Had
we still had the dinghy, I would have gone out and explored and made
certain, and risked my chance of getting back aboard through the mist,
but, having no dinghy, we had to take things as they were, and these
seemed secure enough, for we were well out of the fairway. The first of
the night was interrupted by that perpetual call of the great horn upon
the headland, but before midnight the fog lifted, the sound ceased, and
a profound silence fell upon the sea and the land. We had also the
comfort of seeing that we had plenty of room to swing, with the shore
perhaps a quarter of a mile away.
That night as I fell asleep I designed the second and third verses of
the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’
The next morning we found, following the flood up the Haven, a very
slight breeze from the west and north, not enough to allow us to beat
up against the current; so we passed the time till the beginning of the
ebb, or rather till the flood should slacken, sailing slowly up that
long fiord, Milford Haven, of which one reads so much in history, but
which to-day, having no industrial hinterland, has half dropped out of
men’s memories. Two evils of the past are rooted in its landscape, for
it was here that the first Tudor claimant, ‘the foul usurper, Henry
Tydder,’ landed with his French mercenaries to try for the crown, which
he grasped in two weeks on Bosworth Field. And it was hence that the
transports sailed for the Puritan orgy of lust, loot, and massacre in
Ireland under Cromwell’s leadership. I wondered as I cruised about,
watching the shores and the little town near by, what further fate
Milford Haven might hold for England. Things go by threes—especially
evils—what will the third curse arising from this inlet be?
The wind freshened just as the flood was slackening, so we turned to
beat out. It was well into the afternoon when we took the open sea,
with the wind a trifle north of west, so that our last board out of
harbour was a free run. We took her well outside so as to be able to
set a straight course for Lundy and beyond, intending a passage to
Bideford River, and the ending of this voyage.
The wind dropping somewhat, it was evening before we had well passed
Saint Goven’s lightship, and all that night we went quietly over the
seas with a gentle following wind until, before morning, we raised
Lundy Light full and clear. But the wind failed us at dawn, falling
first to irregular puffs, and at last, when we were about a mile and a
half northeast of the island and pointing right for Appledore Bar, it
fell off altogether. Little patches of slightly ruffled water, here and
there, fewer and more distant one from the other, at last faded out to
nothingness; and we lay helpless, hardly moving, until the set of some
slight current drew us half a mile further on into that strange piece
of water called the Great White Horse Race.
What this may be in heavy weather or even in a strong breeze I cannot
tell, for I have never been through it before or since. As things were,
in that dead calm, it was a perpetual succession of fairly even, long,
smooth, watery hills, with troughs astonishingly deep and rounded
crests astonishingly high for a morning without wind. There was no way
at all on the Nona; she lay buoyant enough, but like a log; broadside
on and rolling damnably for hour after hour; shaking her spars with
every lie-over, as though to so many hammer-blows; throwing the boom
with a bang, although I had made it as fast as I could, and giving a
violent jerk at the mainsheet each time she ended a swing. It was a
miserable ten hours or so that we endured, gazing at Lundy from the top
of each passing heave, and drifting there paralysed under the useless
sky.
Lundy is one of those neat things which you get now and then in Nature,
and which look as though they had been specially designed on a rather
careful plan with one simple object. One would think Lundy could do no
harm—yet I always remember the Montague.
It is so placed that it gives shelter in any weather. It is a sort
of little breakwater set up in the midst of the Bristol Channel,
offering security to all craft, coming up or down; for there is good
holding-ground everywhere about, and you can lie under the lee of
the land whichever way it may be blowing. The only drawback of the
neighbourhood for small craft is this same White Horse Race, in which
we had been caught by the calm. Even in that oily weather, its great
swells passed us half way to the height of our jaws, and our topmast,
excessive for the little craft, made her roll all the worse, while the
motion was so jerky that at times I feared for the fastenings of the
shrouds at the sides. But a larger craft would think nothing of this
patch of sea and, save for it, all the water round Lundy is exactly
made for security.
I have never landed on the island. I have heard many legends about it,
none of which I repeat for fear that they are false. But what I should
most like to know (only I have never met any one who could tell me) is
whether the pleasure of isolation which these places afford increases
with the years, or at last becomes intolerable? I knew a man once who,
during all the latter part of his life, was torn between the desire
of possessing an island, and his fear lest, once he had bought it, he
should find that he had purchased misfortune. All his friends told him
that islands were like those legendary objects of bad luck which one
man has to pass on to another and which each new holder soon finds
unendurable. To be king of one’s own land, to be quite cut off from
the complexity and futilities of the world, to have a little country
all of one’s own, neatly bounded, inaccessible if one chooses to make
it so—that is enough to tempt any one who has lived among men. But I
am assured by many who have not themselves tried it, that after a very
short experience in such things one has no desire but to be rid of
them. A community might find it endurable enough and, indeed, religious
communities have often found it so; but not individuals, nor one
family. Lundy, however, is larger than most, and perhaps the sense of
isolation is less.
When we had lain tossing in the White Horse Race all through that
morning and on to well past noon, there came, to our great joy, about
half-past one, a little breath, a little slant of wind, from off
Hartland Point. For all those hours we had had no steering-way at all,
merely drifting and tossing to the loud clapping of empty canvas. But
now the sails filled and, weary of the sea, we put her nose round for
Bideford River, with this pleasant little breeze slightly blowing and
coming right from the starboard quarter, so that she sailed at her
best. The tide was at the neaps, there was little current, we had a
straight course to steer.
The wind rose, the sun was clear and shining, and all the sea sparkled
and was alive. It was a weather in which to remember the little sacred
places of the shore; the little towns with their own gods of the sea,
and springs tumbling through them from the cliffs above: the little
places that preserve their own happenings. And one such place of which
I had very often heard was there, far off upon the starboard quarter,
and I knew it by the chart for Clovelly.
There are places holy to Apollo, Delian places, protected tiny
townships of the sea.
So from the tumbling water between Bideford River and Lundy, that
wooded coast, so isolated, remote, sacred, appeared the touch of white
in the green which marked Clovelly. Looked on thus over the water that
rushed by, and in the swirl of the ship’s way, Clovelly seemed what I
had read in books as a boy it was, and what I suppose it once may have
been, when England was England.
But England to-day from the land is a very different thing to
England forever from the sea. Some years later I had again to seek
Clovelly from the land, and I shall no more forget it than did that
Northumbrian man whom God raised from the dead, and whose experience is
told us by the Venerable Bede, could forget his glimpse of hell.
I had come with friends in a motor-car, because I had been told a man
should see Clovelly before he died. I had come from the noble isolation
of Hartland, where the great seas were running in upon the rocks after
a gale and thundering at the doors of that good inn which faces ocean
there. Our road ran high above the sea, and as we came near to the
turning beyond which the cleft of Clovelly would open below us, and its
vision of peace, we heard a murmur like that of bees swarming. As we
came nearer it was a confused clamour of human beings, and as we came
nearer still we saw the dreadful thing in its entirety.
A great mass of chars-à-bancs were parked on the road itself, on the
steep edge of the hill and cleft whence one looked down on the village
and the sea below. There, blocking the ridge road, an immense mass of
lost souls struggled and fought for the most part, or stood squeezed in
a sullen despair. Their function was—not their intention, but the use
to which the irony of Divine Vengeance had put them—their function was
to form a solid wall by which all access from the village below, all
further opportunity of climbing, should be forbidden. Meanwhile up that
cleft swirled, surged, pushed, strenuously and unfailingly, one mass of
packed, dark-clothed mortality, closely hemmed in by the cottages (I
wondered that their walls stood the strain!), and looking from where
we stood very much like black pressed German caviare, the acid stuff
which is sold for the destruction of the race. This wedge had its base
upon the seashore and was filled with a communal desire, with a mass
mind, impelling it to attempt the height—a hopeless task! For the
char-à-banc crowd above could not have been pierced by cavalry, let
alone by an untrained infantry such as was this mob working hopelessly
uphill.
So far so bad; but worse remained behind. For on the calm sea of that
bay were to be discovered three steamers, each of them looking like
a piece of cigar-shaped board on which innumerable black ants had
swarmed. Of these the one nearest to the shore was still discharging in
its boats further human beings, who were fighting to land on whatever
little strip of foothold could be found, while the two other ships
stood by ready to reënforce the attack.
So true is it that men desire beauty before all things and that great
beauty draws all men to it.
The atheists, of whom some few stalwarts remain, strong against the
pantheist flood; those who despise mankind when they are healthy
and when they are unhealthy despair of it; the men who make nothing
of life and think it immaterial whether man be or no—these are, in
my judgment, of a clumsy habit in argument. For they talk in mere
negations. But if they would breed (as is their intention) a proper
contempt for the supposed Divine in man, a proper negligence of our
fellow beings and a right view of the whole insignificant human affair,
they ought not to confine themselves to negatives, they ought to
present vivid images, concrete and striking, and say: ‘Look there and
judge mankind!’ I suggest to them Clovelly on a holiday; also the sands
of Weston-super-Mare; also Saint Lazare Station in Paris, the Frederick
Street Station in Berlin, or Liverpool Street in London, just after
office hours on a week-day; or again, a crowd in Catalonia, outside the
ring, when by some accident the bull gets loose.
There are other brilliant images all ready to the atheist’s hand: a
dining-table of the rich, with some thirty guests, men and women,
exactly alternate, like the red and the black cards in a patience,
the wretched couples turning ten minutes to the left and ten minutes
to the right, like jacks; the wine of only one kind—yellow and acid
with bubbles in it. Or again, they might give the same effect with the
vision of any public vehicle, designed to hold twenty-four but packed
with forty. Or again, they might do no more than distribute snapshots,
judiciously snapped, of the men who are most talked about in this our
day.
The truth is the atheists do not know their job; for it has been
clearly proved upon the thumb and the four fingers of the left hand
that men cut off from the Divine are also cut off from reason.
So we sailed on, leaving that tiny white point of Clovelly far behind
in its combe, dark against the afternoon sun, and ran straight for
Bideford River, till we came to the fairway.
We had also a mark to steer by which was unmistakable; it was a gate of
dark smooth water in a mass of white surge. For rollers, though there
was but a hearty breeze, through some mysterious process of the sea,
were bursting with violence upon the bar of the river as though it blew
a gale. The bar looked like one tumbling wall of angry white, even
from a long way off, and, between that wall and the east side of the
harbour-mouth, was this one narrow gateway of smooth water. We passed
through it safely enough, steering by the leading marks, which are here
quite clear, and brought up in the deep pool off Appledore, waiting for
the tide to take us up to Bideford.