Dungeness then was. That old lighthouse is now about one mile inland.
It does happen, and I am witness to it with hundreds of others, that
the modern lighthouse on the extreme end of the point may be obscured
by day, when the old lighthouse is visible. In that case a man tends to
steer for the old lighthouse, thinking it to be the new one, and he is
aiming, of course, right on-shore when he thinks he is just going to
miss the point.
The worst mistake of this sort I myself ever made was mistaking the
Varne Buoy for the South Goodwin Lightship. It is not so impossible as
it sounds. The weather was thick; I had been drifting for many hours
without much wind, and with no certitude of where I was except that I
was somewhere in the Straits. I looked up-weather, to the northeast,
and saw in the brume what looked like a hull and a pole. I could not
be quite certain whether there was a ball on the pole or not, but I
certainly took it for a lightship; and, judging from the time that I
had left the French harbour, and the sort of pace I thought I had made
in my little boat, and tricked by the weather (which was much thicker
than it looked), I made sure that this apparently distant object was
the Goodwin. It was not till I came within a hail of it that I knew
it for what it was—the Varne Buoy, not a hundredth the size of a
lightship.
I suppose that the regularity and certitude of modern mechanical life
on land tend to make men exaggerate the fixity of evidence. When men
dealt more with the caprice of Nature, they were more ready to admit
two things which modern men underestimate: the possibility of marvel
and the fallibility of the senses.
Different periods take quite different standards in such affairs. Our
own time prides itself on a specially clear vision of reality, and
ridicules the credulity of the past. Yet I notice a hundred things
in which I could imagine posterity stupefied at our inane credulity.
We accept, in everything which does not immediately concern us, a
bare newspaper statement made anonymously. We accept it as we accept
the evidence of our own senses, or more; we accept it although it is
unvouched for, unproved, untested. We accept it—to be brutal—because
it is printed, and because it is printed on a large scale.
There is a whole mythology of ‘prehistory,’ which has grown up,
mushroom-like, in less than a lifetime, which pretends to explain the
unknown past of man, and which has already become more fixed and sacred
to the multitude than any mythology accepted by our fathers. Not one of
the millions who accept that mythology could give you even the briefest
account of the supposed steps of evidence upon which it reposes. In
this process the strange mechanical, universal, influence of what is
called ‘popular education’ plays a very great part, and whereas the
half-educated man was always a danger, to-day he is a catastrophe.
Or, take not prehistory—which is a mere imposture—but recent recorded
real history. Millions of children are told that the American Colonies
revolted because they were unjustly taxed by England; that after a long
struggle they won, and that they won because they were right; because
they had the same qualities as our own sacred selves, being of our own
sacred blood; that the trouble ought never to have arisen, and was only
due to the folly of a few misguided and pigheaded English gentlemen who
happened then to hold political power. I will bargain that—above the
labouring mass—this is the attitude taken by nine men out of ten in
England to-day towards the American War of Independence. On the top of
that all are told—or given the impression, at any rate—that England
soon repented of her error, and came to regard the United States as the
noblest of her children.
They are not told that an expensive war had been waged by the
Mother Country in defence of the Colonies; that long and difficult
negotiations had been undertaken to see how that expense could be
shared; that certainly a majority of the colonists—and probably a
large majority—were on the side of England, and against the rebels,
and that the final defeat of England was mainly due to the intervention
of the French, and especially to the more close concentration of the
French fleet. They are not told that the English people regarded
themselves as perfectly right, that they continued to detest the
Americans with the most vivid hatred for a hundred years afterwards,
or that the policy of pretending a friendship with America is quite
recent, and only grew up after the strength of the new country was
apparent, when the long agony of the Civil War had turned in favour
of the North. Worst of all, they are not told that this pretence of
identifying the United States with England is being carried on against
increasing odds, as the United States becomes less and less English in
tradition, in blood, in morals, and everything else.
The false legend is swallowed whole, and it is a very good example of
how mythology can have a direct practical effect for ill. Our general
opinion is only now beginning to be shocked by the foreignness of
America, and is still bewildered by the refusal of Americans to regard
themselves as English. You can always be certain of middle-class and
lower middle-class support in England (I do not say popular support,
for the populace are quite indifferent to the whole affair) for any
foreign policy which takes for granted that America is but another
England overseas.
I saw a very good example of this at the beginning of the last year,
1924, when I was watching opinion at home and abroad upon what were
then called the ‘Expert Committees,’ and later, the ‘Dawes’—that is,
the two committees sitting in Paris to decide whether the Germans had
concealed large assets abroad, and also to decide what the Germans
could pay by way of reparations.
For three solid years the international financial powers which
directed our policy in the matter of German reparations had denied the
accumulation of German wealth abroad, and had persistently clamoured
that the Germans could never pay more than a small fraction of the
sums claimed of them, if that. From the same sources there had been
in England a persistent clamour for ‘expert’ examination of the
question under American direction, and the basis of this last demand
was the certitude that America would only act in the matter as the
willing helpmate of England. The committees met, but the initiative
for calling them together was American; the American delegates, and
behind them the American Government, were the deciding forces. When
the reports came out, there was a stupefaction, gallantly concealed;
for those reports, insisted upon by the American delegates, completely
contradicted in every point the propaganda of the past three years.
They insisted that the Germans had accumulated vast sums abroad,
especially in the United States, and that Germany could soon pay
indefinitely, at the rate of £125,000,000 a year. The result of having
nourished these illusions upon American relations to England was that
the foreign policy adopted officially by the British Government was
thrown out of gear. The English Governments (acting in this respect
differently from the way in which the English public as a whole would
have acted) had supported Germany to the fullest of their ability. They
had postponed all efforts of reparations, they had insisted that all
demands to obtain payments by force were illegal; they had refused to
help their Allies to obtain such payments; their Treasury spokesman had
told everybody that Germany had nothing concealed abroad to speak of,
and certainly could not pay on any considerable scale. They then asked
for a Committee of Experts, took it for granted that American pressure
on this Committee would be in their favour, openly pledged themselves
beforehand to accept the report, and were bewildered, when the report
came out, to find it opposed to them.
Those who govern us have been compelled to accept the Dawes
Report—even to set it working—and they watch anxiously its coming
effect upon that balance whereby England lives. They are caught in a
trap. Had they known a plain, modern historical truth, that America is
a foreign country, they could have preserved an independent national
policy. It is now too late. America has mastered us.
The next port from which I have taken the Nona after the turn of the
land is Fowey, for, though I have gone into Mevagissey once in my life,
it was but in an open boat, sailing across Saint Austell’s Bay; and
there, in Mevagissey, I did not learn what I had always desired to
learn, and what to this day remains a mystery to me, and that is, the
history, nature, and fate of the busy little buzzer the Mevagissey Bee.
It was in the port of Boston, in Lincolnshire, that I first heard of
this animal, having then not yet arrived at my thirtieth year. Perhaps
I had heard its name before, and had not noticed it; but it was there
that I was first struck by the account of its strange demeanour.
There lay in the narrow river a very large, hideous, and dirty steamer,
and I could not see how she would have room to turn, for she was
pointing upstream, under the distant benediction of that marvellous
great tower. I said to a sailorman who was leaning on a post, and
looking moodily at this steamer (which may have been his ship for all
I know): ‘How will she get out of this?’ To which he answered: ‘Starn
foremost, like the Mevagissey Bee.’ I asked him what that Bee was, and
by way of answer he lurched away. I have asked many men since, and no
one has been able to tell me.
Fowey, then, I say, is the most western port to which, or from which, I
ever took the Nona. And Fowey is a thing by itself. One may say of it
what Mr. Barry Pain said in his review of that ought-to-be-most-famous
book called ‘Delina Delaney’: ‘This is a thing which only happens once
in a thousand years.’
Fowey is the harbour of harbours, and the last port town left without
any admixture of the modern evil. It ought to be a kingdom of its own.
In Fowey all is courtesy, and good reason for the chance sailing-man.
For your provision, or your transport, or your mooring, you pay no more
than you should, and whatever you may need in gear is to be had at
once; and in Fowey have I had a sail made for me in, perhaps, one sixth
of the time it would have taken anywhere else along the coast eastward.
It was a jib, and it fitted. In Fowey, also, there is security from
all winds, good holding-ground, and, what is best of all, an air in
which all other places may be forgotten, and in which the cares of
this crowded island melt away. I suppose when the crash comes, and the
ruins have been more or less cleaned up, Fowey will remain to carry
on the traditions of a better England. I hope so. There is no fault
to be found with it. Now, can this be said of any other town except
Leominster? I think not. I have never sailed into Fowey or out of Fowey
without good luck attending me. I have never had to beat in or out of
Fowey; I have always had a leading wind. I have had light airs, of
course, outside, but I have never been becalmed. The last time I left
that blessed land—to which, perhaps, I never shall return—it was
under so gallant a northwest breeze, so clear a light in the first of
the midday tide, that the career along the coast to Plymouth Sound was
like a song.
It is unreasonable, but those stretches of coast-wise sea in which one
has had good fortune remain in the mind exceptional, and carry with
them a sort of false air of security, as though they were always so.
Men must have had the terror of their lives time and again off that
coast; but to me it always seems, when it returns as a picture in my
mind, sunlit, and framed in vigorous small seas, with the attendance of
a noble and a sufficient breeze. With what pleasure have I not noted
the speed she made as she passed the measured mile by Polperro, and how
pleasant to see Rame Head growing perpetually before one, until the
Nona opened the majestic breadth of Plymouth Sound.
As for Plymouth, I fear there is some evil of perversion about that
mood which makes so many men (and I am one of them) disgruntled with
exaggerated fame. Modern legend has got a way of selecting a few
abiding places of its own, and there trampling down the grass and
all around with such a multitude of repetition and exaggeration and
ready-made phrase as corresponds, in the things of the mind, to the
most intolerable mud in the things of the soil. Is it print which has
done this, and steam—newspapers and the railway? No! So much evil
could not have come from material things: its real source was in the
degraded modern mind. What with Drake and the Armada, and the Bowls,
and the Rock upon the other side of the sea which failed to land upon
the Puritans, and the perpetual reiteration of all these things, I
would rather see Plymouth breakwater from the Sound, and so sail past,
than look on the Sound from the Hoe. But I admit that this mood is
evil, and that it is something of a perversion to feel such irritation
against mere wearisome repetitions. One has only to leave them alone.
It is a heavenly piece of coast, all this southern bulge of Devon,
with its little secret rivers and untainted towns. The people are good
and the land. So, with reservations, is its sea even beyond the Sound.
Though once, indeed, I did suffer off Bolt Head one of the two most
abominable spills of wind I ever suffered—and the first was off Beachy
Head by Birdling Gap on Whit-Tuesday, 1902, a day ever to be remembered.
For the air fell off Birdling Gap just like water out of a bucket, and
nearly blew the Nona flat upon her beam. I let go the sheet with a
run, but as it was she dipped, perhaps, a third of her mainsail, and
nearly broke her lover’s heart with fear. It is so sometimes with
these high lands. The wind does not run true. It blows over them, and
curls through a depression upon their edges, and curves, splashing down
solid, in a bolt, on to the deep below. For, on that day by Beachy, all
those years ago, the true wind was but just enough northerly to let me
keep a course for Newhaven, hauled very close and saving every inch.
But that gust came suddenly right on the weather beam, from far east of
north, and nearly settled my then young craft and him that cherished
and still cherishes her.
As for the spill off Bolt Head, it fell after a clear midnight, since
the War, and it was more than a spill; for it blew steadily for the
best part of an hour and then ceased. But, like its younger brother off
Beachy, it was peculiar to the high land; for it came due northerly,
whereas the main wind had east in it. I was watching the morning star
burning like a sacred furnace on the edges of the black hills when
Satan sent that wind and tried to drown three men. But we reefed in
time—there were three of us, one for the helm and two to the reef; and
when dawn broke, and the blessed colours of the east renewed the day,
strange!—one end of the boom had three reefs down, and the other only
two!
A coast of good memories: may it stand for ever in spite of petrol and
every other evil thing. There might be no London at all, so kindly and
so well guarded are all the men and women of its little harbour towns,
and so uncrowded its hills. The Erne and the Avon I have never entered,
but the Yealm I know: a difficult river in which to anchor, on account
of innumerable moorings, a winding water in a wooded gorge, difficult
also for wind. And Salcombe I have sailed in and out of—I suppose the
happiest harbour in the world. It has many little beaches of its own,
the homes of men standing separate upon them, far inland creeks, not
too strong a tide, a bar somewhat shoal but always deep enough for the
Nona, and a clear fairway to be fetched from within and from without, I
take it, upon any wind; for the harbour opens well inside the narrows,
and the seaward shores open well outside them.
Upon this piece of coast, setting out once from Plymouth, there came to
me an experience of no particular moment as history, but of powerful
effect upon my mind. It marked, in a sort of mysterious omen way, or,
perhaps, I should say in a sort of visionary way, the unleashing of the
Great War.
It so happened that in that summer of 1914 I had had occasion to go
from Hampshire to one of the western ports, where I was to pick up my
boat, and take her ultimately into Plymouth Sound, and thence, when I
should have the leisure, I proposed to take her out again, and stand
eastward up the coast.
I was staying in Hampshire with a friend who had a house in the New
Forest. It was on a Sunday I set out thence. He sent me in his motor to
Salisbury, where I wished to get Mass before going on by train. During
the Mass, the priest, after his announcements, asked the congregation
to pray for the soul of the Archduke heir-apparent of Austria, who
had been murdered at a place called Sarajevo. I had never heard the
name, and I had but a vague idea of who this archduke was, of his
relationship to the Emperor, and of his heirship to the throne of
Hapsburg-Lorraine. I came to the Nona, where she lay, and sailed out
with her into the sea for some days. I had no conception that anything
could be brewing.
When I came to land again, and went up to London, I found the air to be
filled with all the possibilities of that time. The Austrian Government
had sent to the Servian Government a note, the like of which had not
been heard in the history of Christendom. It made demands which no
government claiming to sovereignty could accept. For my part, when I
read the terms of the note, I was in no doubt that it was of Prussian
dictation. I am in no doubt to this day that it was of Prussian
dictation.
There are two ways of ascertaining the origin of such a thing. One is
the material way, the consultation of the only available documents, and
the only certified direct human evidence. The other is the moral way,
when one says: ‘This can only have been written by So-and-So, or, at
the very least, can only have been inspired by So-and-So.’ Thus, if I
find upon the table of a doubtful, weak kind of a man—and a courteous
one at that—a letter framed in the very terms and manner of a bully,
constantly his associate, then, though the letter be in the handwriting
of the former, and on his own paper, even if there were convincing
proof that when the actual writing was done the man was alone, I should
yet say that the real author was the bully, and not the gentleman. He
may have learnt it by heart at dictation. He may have copied it from
the other’s draft. At any rate, it is morally certain that the one man,
and not the other, is the true author of the thing launched—is the one
responsible.
Now, in the case of this note to Servia, the whole thing is Prussian
from beginning to end: the extreme arrogance, the deliberate
provocation, the exactitude, the aridity, and, above all, the
unintelligence. And as for proof upon the other side, we have none,
except what the various culprits chose themselves to give us.
As I went about London getting all men’s views, as is my custom when
grave things threaten, I heard many judgments passed upon the probable
consequences of the note. The man whose judgment in European affairs
I trusted most, one who had been largely employed in the foreign
business of this country, and who also had a deep and solid knowledge
of history, told me that there would not be war, even between Austria
and Servia, let alone an extension of the peril.
The reason he gave for this was curious. He said that a document of
that extreme violence would not have been issued if war were the
object. The object was to make bargaining acutely necessary, and to get
a further hold over Balkan land as a result of a long haggling. For
very violent actions—of which this was the most extreme case yet known
to Europe—the excess of offensive and inhuman brutality could only, he
said, be used as a blind.
Though I then knew very much less of the European situation, I
hesitated to agree with him as to the motive; but, on the other hand,
I certainly did not think there would be war. I thought Servia would
yield in all save the very worst and most humiliating points, and that
these would at last be waived.
Many other opinions of various colours did I gather in that interval,
but only one foreseeing a war; and to that one I paid no attention,
because it was very foolishly expressed, and for the wrong reason. It
was given me by a man who had travelled widely, and who was an expert
in many languages, as well as a man of great knowledge in certain forms
of mechanical construction. He had also a high scientific training. He
had no public post. This man said to me there would be war, because
Austria was known to be in a rotten condition, because upon the
outbreak of war the various sections of her tessellated dominion would
break apart, and the Servians, knowing this, and having the Russians
behind them, would take up the challenge. The Prussian power, or
‘Reich,’ would be so alarmed at the prospect that it would attempt to
stave off hostilities, or, failing that, to leave the Austrian Crown
to its fate. Such was the folly and ill-judgment of the only man who
thought that war was coming, among all those whom I consulted. It was
a good example of hitting a mark by firing wide: like the duellist in
the dark room who in mercy shot up the chimney, yet brought down his
opponent.
For note you that though a great many men up and down Europe had said
that Prussia was making for war, and that a conflict must come about
in some near future, and though I myself had written it over my own
signature (if I remember rightly), when, in 1911, Prussia raised her
special war tax, and the French were compelled to reintroduce the three
years’ service; yet _this_ did not seem to be the occasion—for it was
too abrupt. There seemed to be no plot or plan; and the season was
already late.
I did not know what we know now, that Prussia firmly calculated on
two things: first, the neutrality of England, and, secondly, a very
complete and very rapid victory over the French, a decisive victory,
destroying the whole of the French army within a month of the frontier
crossing; a battle beginning as did Charleroi, but ending very
differently from the Marne.
When I next had occasion to leave London, in order to find again my
boat at Plymouth, and to take her out, nothing was decided. One might
almost say that the suspense, such as it was, seemed less burdensome,
and the sense of peril less acute. I came down by night; I saw no
morning papers; I got aboard with my companion, and spent the whole
forenoon before the slight tide would serve in putting things to right
for the cruise.
We dropped out under a soft air, which soon died away. We spent the
whole mortal day drifting down to the Mewstone, and then, in that
exasperating calm, the turn of the tide took us up again towards
the breakwater. It was not till the fall of day that a breeze arose;
I cannot remember from what quarter, but I think it was off the
land—that is, from the northeast—but, at any rate, it served us; we
could go eastward without having to beat, and we made out down the
Sound. It was still light when we passed the Mewstone again. Through
the last of evening and through all the darkness we ran along the coast
to Devon for the Start.
I knew that the times were perilous, but I knew no more than any other
man, in that odd week’s lull before the storm, exactly how perilous
they were. It was nearly a month, I think, since I had heard the priest
read out, from those altar steps of Salisbury, prayers for the Archduke
who had been murdered at Sarajevo.
When I had set out from Plymouth there was nothing but rumour, nothing
certain. The Fleet had dispersed already some days past from the
great review at Spithead, and was, as we were told, in the Atlantic
at manœuvres. A night, a day, and now another night had passed; I had
heard no news.
Nothing was further from my mind than war and armament as the sun rose
on that glorious July morning, right out of a clean horizon, towards
which the wind blew fresh and cool. It was a light but steady wind of
morning that filled my sails as I sat at the tiller with a blanket
about me, and laying her head to the north.