they will catch at any small advantage of reef, or projecting headland,
and make shift with that. Thus, all down the line of eastern Italy,
where for hundreds of miles the Adriatic meets nothing but one low even
line of coast, they have caught at the sorry opportunity of Ancona. But
this coast has plenty of harbours, small and large. A British or Roman
road came down to Lyme Regis, but that could not have produced the
harbour. It must have been the other way about. The road can only have
come down here because there was a harbour here. Perhaps there was here
something like what was for centuries at Hastings (but is now washed
away), a crumbling piece of harder rock curling out to sea in an arm
and giving shelter within, and perhaps it was upon this that the Cob
was afterwards built.
The modern great havens, which we can artificially make, spoil us
for the harbours of antiquity, and make them small in our eyes, but
Lyme Regis was a port of entry all through history, and did not lose
its position until almost within the memory of men now alive. How
characteristic it is of the growth of our towns inland, and of the
change in English life through that growth, that, when men and women
hear of Lyme Regis to-day, they think not of the English seas, nor
of armed men landing here, but of works of fiction by Miss Austen!
Tennyson wrote admirably of the Revenge, and believed himself a seer in
the matter of the English waters and their command, but his interest in
Lyme Regis was from Miss Austen. For my part, I am not ashamed to say
that in my nineteenth year, when I capsized all by myself in a little
open boat under Golden Cap, and with difficulty saved myself, though
I was quite close to shore (it was in the month of December, dear
friends, and poor weather for such gambols), I had not so much as heard
of Jane Austen; nevertheless from that moment Lyme Regis was vivid
enough to me without her aid, and so it was when, three years ago,
touching Lyme Regis again for the tenth or twentieth time, the Nona
herself capsized.
’Twas a dark and stormy night, _camarades_, and the wind blew from the
southwest, which is the stance it likes to take up when it proposes to
drive at doing a devilry. I knew well that the tide running out during
the darkness would leave us high and dry, and by lantern-light I made
every kind of contraption and fastening from the mast to the quay,
so that she should lie even when she took the ground. But at four in
the morning, with a noise like thunder, she fell over enormously to
starboard upon the then dry bottom of the harbour and threw us all one
on top of the other—we were three. That night we slept no more.
The English do well to build their boats deep, for only such boats can
hold the sea, or rather I should say, they _did_ well to build their
boats deep in the days when they did so build them, before lines were
ruined by racing. But there is this disadvantage about your deep boat:
that it will not sit, but lies over. So did the Nona on that stormy
night; and damnably. You will tell me that when the tide rose she
floated. Yes; but not until very much water had trickled in through the
dry seams, so that the pale and stormy dawn from over Dorset, and the
distant grey of Chesil and the Bill saw us still bailing. And so much
for Lyme Regis.
Thence eastward, coasting back home, any man who belongs to my county
and to its harbours must face the passage of Portland Race and the
difficult rounding of the Bill. So had I always done, whether coming or
going, whether easting or westing, leaving aside all that long coast
of Dorset hither of the Isle of Portland, and watching afar off the
endless unbroken patch called the Chesil Beach quite empty of men.
What a gift of compensation it is that the horror of our great towns
and the ease of our new communications has produced deserts between!
No one knows those deserts as well as the man who sails along the sea,
following the coasts of England. The foulness of the great towns is
discharged by the trainload upon beaches of sand; but all in between,
or nearly all, is left more lonely than ever it was before in our
history. Those cliffs of Dorset coming down on to the sea are less
known to travelling Englishmen than much of foreign land. That Chesil
Beach along which I have so often run is utterly bare and silent except
for the noise of the sea.
There never was such loneliness! One big house, built there I suppose
for the sake of the isolation, inland, under the cliff, where some old
landslide has oddly disfigured the face of the earth: then, for miles
and miles, nothing. At the eastern end salt waste lagoons forbid
human habitation, and between them and the sea comes the strange
formation of huge rounded stones, falling very steep down into the
water, so that you have many fathom deep within a stone’s throw of the
beach; and at last, that forbidding Chesil Cove where a few houses of
fishermen, huddled together, look out upon the most inhospitable mass
of threatening waters I know.
There are few corners of the English seas which give the effect of a
curse; but this is one of them. The terrible Race of Portland lies
three miles out, at the end of the Bill. The prison with its abominable
memories stands above. The main traffic of the Channel lies far out.
The gaunt and bare rocks of the Bill come down stark upon a lonely
water, and that water heaves and turns unnaturally, even when there is
little wind. For the roaring and the movement of that huge turmoil, the
Race, send on their effect to the false shelter of Chesil Cove.
And it is a treacherous anchorage. Eastward, well inshore, there is
good holding-ground, but it is only a patch, and one must be careful
not to disturb the fishermen’s snares. Just outside this, in deep
water, there is nothing but the rough and tumble shingle of great
stones, and the anchor drags on any burst of wind, even from offshore:
with a strong wind on shore you are done: and if such arise there is
nothing for it but to up-anchor and beat out into the teeth of it: for
that lee shore is deadly.
I have never been caught by the rising of the southwest wind in this
desolate place of peril, but I have read the sailing directions about
it, and I have often talked to men who have been so caught. There is
nothing for it, I say, but to beat right out, unless it has come from
a quarter far enough round south to enable one to scud down along the
coast towards Devon, with enough sea room to spare. Chesil Cove is in
the very eye of the great gales, and if a man should have taken up his
insecure anchorage too near the shore, he is on it before he has got
the first wind into his sails. An abominable spot!
The evil is recent. It is the work of the historic centuries. Portland
Bill was once an island: and those strange tides which are now baulked
and therefore twist and boil round its point, once ran normally through
the strait between it and the mainland. But it has been joined to the
mainland these hundreds of years by a very narrow belt, high piled, of
these great rounded stones, which the sea and the wind shovelled up
westward until they closed the entrance.
It is a strange feeling to leave one’s little ship at anchor in the
dreadful cove, to land as best one can on that steep shore, risking the
dinghy under the pounding of the sea, pulling it up over the screeching
stones beyond the mark of the tide and then, in a few minutes’ walk, to
be on the great placid expanse of the new Portland Harbour on the other
side. It is like coming indoors out of evil weather, into firelight
out of the dark; for it is only this minute or two on foot from the
outer beach to the inner water; but to sail it, you must run down the
millrace of the tide along the Bill and risk the buffeting of the Race.
If you fail to hit the narrow belt of smooth water at the end of the
Bill you are swept into the Race, and even if you just hit that smooth
patch, you must calculate exactly, so as to catch the other tide up the
eastern face under the old prison, and at last make Portland Harbour
after ten long miles—and as many hours, and as much peril as God sees
fit to send you.
Portland Harbour is one of the very, very rare successes of man in his
coaxing of the sea.
I will not be sure, for I have not the knowledge, but, at any rate,
I know of no other in my narrow experience except Cherbourg; and
Cherbourg is not thoroughly closed. Dover is a failure—they say it
ought never to have been built. Newlyn in part dries out. Fishguard
and Holyhead are open to certain winds. Boulogne is not finished, and,
perhaps, never will be (I have been told, I do not know with how much
truth, that the Germans were paying for the building of it to receive
their great liners and that the War checked the effort). Casablanca is
not finished yet, so we cannot judge it—and how many more are there? I
can recall no others of the great artificial harbours, unless we admit
Genoa, with its noble mole, but, if I mistake not, it is not quite
upon this scale. Of the artificial harbours which man has attempted in
imitation of the few great natural harbours, how few have succeeded!
It would seem to be like man’s attempt to resist time in the case of
his own body, of which the poet has written:
‘There is no fortress of man’s flesh so made
But subtle, treacherous Time comes creeping in.
Oh, long before his last assaults begin
The enemy’s on; the stronghold is betrayed;
And the one lonely watchman, half-dismayed,
Beyond the covering dark he hears them come:
The distant hosts of Death that march with muffled drum.’
And, indeed, it is very ridiculous the way in which men try to
withstand this influence of their enemy, Time. They had far better
accept the condition of mortality and remember a truth which was
plainly painted in large black letters upon a large white placard in
Eden, which was restated by Dante, and then repeated by Malherbe,
that our only peace lies in the doing of God’s will; which includes
going to pieces in the fifties, or sixties, or seventies, like an old
disreputable, sodden, broken-down hulk too long adventured upon the
sea. Shakespeare (another of those poets) also said that we ripe and
ripe, and then we rot and rot. It is all in the Providence of God. Yet
will men talk like women ‘of keeping their figure,’ and they will wear
stays, or hypocritically compromise by putting whalebone into their
clothes, or they will tie themselves up with bands like the infants of
Italy, or paint their faces after the fashion of the warlike Germans.
But here it must be admitted in fairness to the fierce Nordic stock
of Mecklenburg and Pomerania that since the little trouble of 1918
they have issued an army order forbidding any officer to paint his
face until he has attained the rank of major; for they judge (does the
present successor of the Great High General Staff) that until a man has
become a major, the furrows in his heroic skin are not deep enough to
be worthy of filling in with white lead or delicately disguising with
cosmetics.
To return to harbours.
When Man became the master of Earth and supplanted Heaven—which was
round about the middle of the last century—he bethought him of making
great harbours where no harbour had been before, and of supplementing
the few secure inlets of the sea. Cherbourg was the first of them,
the French being here, as usual, in the vanguard of challenge. It was
attempted even in the century before. There were rocks and islands
to afford a foundation, then the great breakwater was flung like a
bridge across them with a pass to the left and to the right. But though
Cherbourg is secure enough, there can be a memorable swell when the
wind is in a northerly point.
Plymouth was, I think, the next and serves its purpose, but it does not
wholly check the violence of a southerly wind.
Did not this same harbour of Portland come third? At any rate, it is
the one complete success. It has caught an angle and the defences have
been made sure. It is deep, yet not too deep, and no gale alarms it.
What Nature built up in the Chesil Beach protects it from the main
gale, and the land so curls round that no weight of wind and sea can
strike it from the northeastern side; and even from the southeast the
Shambles are a sort of protection. Moreover, the entrances are not
endangered by the make of the tide, nor, I believe, do they silt. The
southern one was blocked during the war by the sinking of a ship; but
even so, the great harbour is an easy refuge and a wonderful good gift
for sailing-men. But when people thought that, on the model of this,
they could continue indefinitely, they were disappointed: yes, even in
the tideless Mediterranean. We shall see whether Tangier’s, standing
outside and subject to the ceaseless strength of ocean, will succeed
or no. But for the rest, the natural harbour still holds the field,
and any one would rather have the roads of Corfu, or the inland water
behind the Wight than anything man ever made.
I wonder sometimes whether the Roman Empire did not attempt the same
sort of thing. If it did, all the traces have gone. There are great
Roman roads which come down now right on to open shores: that one,
for instance, which I spoke of running through Pembrokeshire and
striking the sea just above that narrow torrent of a tideway between
Ramsey Island and the mainland. I thought when I first came across
this strange ending of a great road, I thought, fantastically enough,
what a fine harbor this narrow passage would have made had men of old
blocked it on its northern entry. Then you would have had a good quiet
inlet, many fathom deep, looking into the sheltered water of Saint
Bride’s Bay and quite secure. I half persuaded myself that the lords
of the world, from whom we inherit all that we have and are, did so
block that northern entry, and did so create a harbour. But it was a
nightmare guess not fit for the waking brain, for if they had built
a wall between the Welsh mainland and the island, surely some traces
would have remained, and there is nothing whatsoever. Yet why does that
great road end so astonishingly to-day (and so many centuries past),
upon an impossible coast, whence nothing could be shipped? The Pedlar’s
Way through Norfolk, ending as abruptly on a coast some way from the
harbour of Brancaster (itself now eaten away), may be explained by the
disappearance of some former shelter engulfed by the sea, as Dunwich
has been engulfed; or worn down as the natural breakwaters of Hastings
were worn down under the influence of the waves. But I must confess
that Saint David’s Road, ending sharply on that wild shore, puzzles me.
The Lead Road of the Mendips comes down to where there is no harbour
to-day. All the other Roman roads which I can call to mind in the
island, and which reach the sea, reach it at a port, or at a ferry, or
what was once a port or a ferry. But this Saint David’s road remains
inexplicable.
It is a strange thing, beyond the average of chance, that so very few
deep landlocked harbours should be of service to mankind. One hears
it said sometimes that the number is small in any case. This is not
so. The number is not small, though ill-distributed: it is exceedingly
large. The whole Dalmatian coast is made up of a mass of such shelters.
The Fjords of Scandinavia are a wealth of the same, and the Arctic
abounds in them. But there seems a perverse arrangement whereby the
deep harbours and secure have nothing inland to serve, while endless
stretches of coastline are to be found all over the world, with much
for export, but to which, in the same most exasperating manner,
harbours have been refused.
Africa is quite astonishing in this. There are not four natural
landlocked harbours, I believe, in the whole line of coast from
Alexandria round by Barbary and the West and up from the Cape to the
head of the Red Sea. The most that man can do is to use the shelter
of islands, or the curl of a headland, or here and there a small and
insufficient recess, or the mouth of a river. The French have made
their small harbours in Northern Africa artificially, and Alexandria is
artificial. The few openings which serve Morocco are very ill-provided,
Rabat almost dries out at low tide, so does Laraiche, that charming
little cleanly Spanish port, which I hope the coming perils will spare.
All down the Adriatic coast of Italy, there is nothing between the
thigh and the heel, since Ravenna dried away. Ancona is only a curl of
headland, and Bari means very little. Brindisi is ideal, and Taranto
must have been exactly what antiquity needed, shallower than, but as
secure as, Cadiz. But for the rest, all the eastern shelf of Italy, and
the heel of the boot, is without a base on the sea.
Unwisely, pedantically, but much more hypocritically, the less
exhausted countries, who were for the moment the masters of the
settlement, refused the Dalmatian coast to Italy after the war. I trust
that the force of things and the new vigour of the Italian people and
the now increasing embarrassments of what is Puritan and base in Europe
will, before I die, repair the error.
And so for rounding the Bill once more—a thing by me always
dreaded—for Portland Race is a terrible affair.
Portland Race should, by rights, be the most famous thing in all the
seas of the world. I will tell you why. It is a dreadful, unexpected,
enormous, unique business, set right upon the highway of all our
travel: it is the marvel of our seas. And yet it has no fame. There is
not a tired man writing with a pencil at top speed in the middle of the
night to the shaking of machinery in Fleet Street who will not use the
word ‘Maelstrom’ or ‘Charybdis.’ I have seen Charybdis—piffling little
thing; I have not seen the Maelstrom, but I have talked to men who told
me they had seen it. But Portland Race could eat either of them and not
know it had had breakfast.
I have nearly always been successful in catching the smooth, narrow
belt near the point: but I also once found that smooth belt fail me,
and so have gone through the tail-end of Portland Race; only the very
tail-end. I had seen it from close by half a dozen times before in my
life. I had very nearly got into it twice. But this time I did actually
make knowledge of the ‘thing in itself’—and there is no mistaking it.
It is one of the wonderful works of God.
Portland Bill stands right out into the Channel and challenges the
Atlantic tide. It is a gatepost, with Alderney and the Hogue for
gateposts on the other side. They make the gate of the narrow sea;
outside them you are really (in spite of names) in the air of the
ocean, and look toward the Americas. Inside them is the domestic pond.
Portland Bill thrusts out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic
sea. In my folly, for many years I used to call it ‘William,’ but I
will do so no longer. For there is something awful about the snake-like
descending point, and dreadful menace in the waters beyond. And here
Portland Bill differs from his namesake of the land. It would be
familiar to call a William of the land ‘Bill.’ But in the matter of
Portland it is familiar to call the Bill ‘William.’ I will never call
him William again.
I thought I had well known what the Race was before I first heard it
bellowing years ago. I knew after the fashion of our shadowy nominal
knowledge. I knew it in printed letters. I knew it on the chart. I
knew it in the ‘Channel Pilot.’ Then I came to it in the flesh, and I
knew it by the senses, I saw it with my eyes, and I heard it with my
ears. I had heard it roaring like a herd, or park, or pride, of lions
miles away. I had seen its abominable waste of white water on a calm
day: shaving it by a couple of hundred yards. But there is all the
difference in the world between that kind of knowledge and knowledge
from within!
He that shall go through even the tail-end of Portland Race in a small
boat and in calm weather will know what he is talking about, and for so
vast an accession of real knowledge, even that pain is worth while.
Portland Race lies in a great oval, sometimes three, sometimes four or
five miles out from Portland Bill, like a huge pendant hanging from the
tip of a demon’s ear. It is greater or smaller, according to whether
the wind be offshore or on, but it is immense always, for it is two
miles or more across. It lumps, hops, seethes, and bubbles, just like
water boiling over the fire, but the jumps are here in feet, and the
drops are tons.
There is no set of the sea in Portland Race: no run and sway: no
regular assault. It is a chaos of pyramidical waters leaping up
suddenly without calculation, or rule of advance. It is not a charge,
but a scrimmage; a wrestling bout; but a wrestling bout of a thousand
against one. It purposely raises a clamour to shake its adversary’s
soul, wherein it most resembles a gigantic pack of fighting dogs, for
it snarls, howls, yells, and all this most terrifically. Its purpose is
to kill, and to kill with a savage pride.
And all these things you find out if you get mixed up in it on a very
small boat.
Perhaps the reason why Portland Race does not take the beetling place
it should in the literature of England is that those who turn out the
literature of England by the acre to-day never go through it, save in
craft as big as towns—liners and the rest. Even these have been taught
respect. During the war Portland Race sank a ship of fourteen thousand
tons, loaded with machinery, and if you were to make a list of all the
things which Portland Race has swallowed up, it would rival Orcus.
Portland Race is the master terror of the world.
And here I can imagine any man who had sailed saying to me that there
are many other races abominable in their various degrees. I have
not been through Alderney Race since the nineties, but I suppose it
is still going strong. The Wild Goose Race you have already heard
of—a very considerable thing. The Skerries also—I mean the one off
Anglesey—is worthy to be saluted. And even little Saint Alban’s,
though it is a toy compared with Portland, is a nuisance in any wind.
But the reason Portland deserves the master name which it has never
achieved, the reason I write so strongly of the ignorance of England
toward this chief English thing, the reason that Portland Race makes
me seriously consider whether literary gents be not, after all, the
guardians of greatness, and whether their neglect be not, after
all, the doom of the neglected, is that this incredible thing lies
to everybody’s hand, and yet has no place in the English mind. The
Saxon and Danish pirates of the Dark Ages must have gone through it
(and—please God—foundered). Every one making Dorset from France for
two thousand years must have risked it. To-day the straight course of
innumerable ships out of Southampton, making for the Start and the
Lizard to the ocean, leads them right past it—yet I know nothing of it
in our Letters, unless it be one allusion of Mr. Hardy’s to the ghosts
which wander above it. But there is no ghost so full of beef as to
wander above Portland Race!
It is, perhaps, in that word ‘Southampton’ that I have struck the
cause. Until Southampton became the port for the Americas the Race lay
off the track. No man running down-Channel from the Thames need touch
the Race: no man running up. Even beating down or up-Channel you are
free to go about before you touch the broken water; running, you need
not go near it. And steam need have nothing to do with it—except all
that steam which, during the last thirty years, has begun to use again
more and more our one inland water of the south inside the Isle of
Wight.
There is a great deal more I had intended to write about Portland
Race. I had intended to talk about the folly of the Bill challenging
the sea, and how it ought to be an island, as it was for centuries.
I had intended to say something of that canal between Portland Roads
and the West Bay which ought to have been dug long ago, and which some
day people will wish they had dug, when it is too late. I had intended
to give rules for getting round by the narrow smooth. I had intended
to curse the absurd arrangement whereby the tide, instead of behaving
like a reasonable human tide, and running six hours either way, runs
southerly nine hours out of the twelve from both sides of the Bay,
leaving only three for the dodge round. I had intended to add much more.
But I cannot. Let me end with this piece of advice.
Never trust any man unless he has gone round Portland Bill in something
under ten tons. Never allow any man to occupy any position of import to
the state until he has gone round Portland Bill under his own sail in
something under ten tons. But most of all, never believe any man—no,
not even if you see it printed on this page—who says that he himself
has done the thing.