local knowledge. It is a trap, baited and set. As you look from
overseas, there stands clear before you the entry to a great harbour.
You see plainly a narrow gate, an obvious door into a wide sheet of
sheltered water within. But if you steer for that entry, you strike.
For, running down parallel with the coast for more than a mile, is a
long, high, hidden sandbank, so that you must get into Poole to-day by
making for the shore more than a mile below the entry to the harbour,
and then running up a trench of which you can see nothing from the
surface of the sea, but which you must keep to or wreck your ship.
To-day that strange approach is amply buoyed with a bright light at the
seaward end, and no one can miss it. But what did the ancients do, who
had, it may be presumed, no charts—certainly the pirates had none—and
who could not, save in some very special weather, have determined the
exact point of entry by the lead? The savages from Norway may have
depended upon captured pilots, or upon men who had purchased their
knowledge of the fairway by disasters of their own in earlier pirate
raids. But we hear nothing of all this in the records. We are simply
told they came to Poole continually as though it were as simple a
matter as going up Spithead.
Poole harbour has traps within as well as this grinning trap of
an entry, and the worst of these traps is the patchiness of the
holding-ground. Unless you know where to drop anchor, you may be
dragged in Poole, upwards, upon as fierce a tide as I know, with the
flukes of your anchor dragging as easily through the soft mud almost as
they would through water. But with all that, and although the Nona has
caught fire there (the sea brings all adventures), Poole is a harbour
that will always have good memories for me; and perhaps the Nona will
go there at last to die.
Now that I am upon the home seas steering eastward out of Poole after
rounding that last great buoy of theirs (for I dare not try the
Swatchway), I am concerned to defend the proposition that there is more
exploration to be done in things familiar than in things unfamiliar.
With what hesitation do I not set down those words! For they are
paradox, and paradox is to my personal taste as detestable as
advertisement. I will even confess to a little distaste of too much
metaphor—or, indeed, of any trick or hook for catching the attention
of the reader. Why should I suppose him jaded when I have so many
interesting things to say?
But here paradox is unavoidable; for it is clear that in the plain
sense of the words the exploration of a place unknown must yield more
matter than the exploration of a place familiar. What I mean is that
where one knows a thousand things, each of those thousand leads on to
another thousand, and so quickly makes you a million. Whereas where you
know nothing, you go on from your first discovery to one or two more,
and then to ten or a hundred all in a chain. So that the exploration of
the known is like multiplication, and the exploration of the unknown is
like addition. Or again, the survey of the known is like the sowing of
a field with a manifold harvest; whereas the surveying of the unknown
is but the lengthening out of a trail.
And all this mass of words am I tempted to because I am entering the
home seas, which I count from the Anvil to the South Foreland as being
my garden or back yard; though it is true that my general estate
extends much farther afield. What is more, the home seas themselves
expand a little during these last years of too much sailing along the
coast of our Great Island, and I am not sure that Portland Bill is not
now my gatepost, instead of the Anvil. But all this matters not at all.
The Bay between Poole and the Wight is so domestic and inward a thing
that many would laugh to hear it called the sea at all. But let them be
as I was on that night and they will find it is the sea right enough,
and that it can raise a fine hubbub, and that the salt water of it can
tumble about with the best of them.
I take it that there is no trial more trying in the sailing of a
little craft than taking her through blinding weather at night close
inshore—whether that weather be blinding through feather-white slants
of snow or through violence of sudden rain.
Well outside you make your course and keep to it indifferently, for you
have all the room you need; but when you are running from a coast point
to a coast point with the wind on shore through the darkness it is
another matter.
The wind that night had backed to the east of south; having so far
favoured me, however, that it never backed round enough to make me go
about. I was abominably short-handed, and on that particular occasion
could only count upon myself, for reasons which I will not debate.
My course was for the North Channel under Hurst Castle, where there
is a passage so narrow that even the Nona could hardly beat through
it between the shingle bank and that odd spit of land on which Hurst
Castle itself stands, and where Charles, the last true King of England,
lay a prisoner after having lost his power. That channel has to be made
with skill. You must lie close to the land, but if you lie a thought
too close you touch a hump of gravel which lies off the point. Your
business in shooting at that mark on such a blinding night is to keep
Hurst Light just on your landward bow until you judge that you are
perhaps a mile off. Then you must pass it over your bow just to the
starboard side, and then, when you are close up against it, so that it
seems you might strike almost, you must pay away again, put the light
to port, and skirt the land by half a cable or less, and so you will
round the long spit of Hurst and find yourself inside the sheltered
water of the Solent; all this if you have a leading wind.
At the setting out from Poole you must make a course lying well outside
Hengestbury, not going too close inland, for there are shoals and, I
think, rocks. It is only when you have the mass of Hengestbury Head
standing up like a sort of dull island against the night and a mile or
two north of your beam that you can begin, or a little later, to make
the Hurst Light your mark; and it was there on this stormy night that
my troubles began; for both the Needles far away a-weather and Hurst
itself were continually obscured by the most violent sheets of rain,
which came in gusts driven before the wind.
I would not go about into the open and try the Needles channel itself
for three reasons: first, that it would have meant a long beat to
windward; next, that in the Needles channel I should have had to meet
all the outward and inward shipping, which on a night like this might
have put me in some danger; and, lastly, that I should have missed my
tide and, I think, met the ebb; that is why I made for Hurst and for
the narrow passage between that light and the Shingles Bank: a shifting
mass of gravel that shows its changing back like a whale above the
seas. Now that passage demands skill.
For the first five miles or so beyond Hengestbury Head it was easy
going, for after each heavy gust of rain the light appeared again, and
I had not veered too much in the interval. (Whether there were an inset
to this bay I had forgotten, and I could not leave the tiller to go
below and read my directions. But if there were it had not affected me,
though we were on the flood.)
As we came nearer to the light the difficulty increased, because it
was essential to keep in that direction, and the recurrent blankets of
rain blotted out the mark for five minutes and more at a time. Happily,
however, the wind, though increasing, went a little more southerly,
and left me free to play with the direction. She was a trifle
over-canvassed, and was leaning heavily over, stiff boat though she is,
and the beam-sea over that low freeboard of hers took me on the face
and body time and again with little packets of salt water and spray.
It was important to get through the North Passage with the flood, for
the ebb runs furiously through that trench, and I had known half a
dozen times the necessity of dropping anchor outside in a seaway if
one failed to get through in time, and of waiting through six hours of
darkness, during which the wind could not stem the tide.
That night, however, I had good fortune, for there was no rain during
the last mile of my approach. I took the Nona quite close to the
Shingles, and then round through the racing channel into the calmer
water beyond.
It was as well; for all that ground of big round stones is bad for
holding an anchor. The good holding-ground in this part is round the
back of Hurst Spit, in what they call the Roads; and if with your
anchor on that bottom the wind rises and it drags, then, whether from
the north or from the south, you are done; for you will either come up
against Hampshire or break up at your leisure upon the Shingles, which
shifts with every gale, and has upon it in the least sea a boiling of
white water all around.
In the Solent I carried the flood with me and, at the same time, the
wind diminished and all rain ceased, so that when day broke, which it
did before I had come near Little Yarmouth (the stream was then just
turning), the first dull light appeared in a watery but open grey sky
to the eastward, over the hills of my own county far away.
There was a great number of craft about, for it was the season of the
year, and their riding lights swung and twinkled like a dance of stars.
They were so beautiful that I forgave the rich their spickness and
their spanness, and their great yachts kept like toys. Yet neatness is
a virtue of a kind: though the Nona will have none of it, but keeps as
plain (and dirty) as a fishing-boat, to which sort of ship she is first
cousin, but no relation at all to the R.Y.S.
This character of smartness in certain externals is one of the things
which separates modern nations most sharply one from another. It
is based, of course, upon states of mind, and these in their turn,
ultimately, upon religions; but there are cross categories.
If you dig down to the fundamental, the real difference is not so
much that one mood goes in everywhere for smartness, and the other
allows all things to get dirty and slipshod, as that one mood wants
smartness in one kind of thing, and the other wants it in another kind
of thing; one mood wants accuracy and the satisfaction of proportion in
one set of things, and another wants it in another set of things. The
difference to the eye is very striking. I fancy it is the difference
which the average casual and rapid observer notes most strongly in
travel. Every one has remarked it in the contrast between Belfast and
Dublin, between an English ship and a French one, between a Basque
village or road, and a Castilian or Galician one over the boundary:
between the Swiss-German railway management and the Italian. I am told,
by those familiar with those countries, that there is a similar sharp
change when you pass over the border of Finland from Russia.
It is exceedingly difficult in so subtle a matter of human motive to
ferret out the root, though obviously that root must lie in the mind,
and we have to seek for some mental need which is being satisfied. It
is no good, for instance, saying that the Italian railway looks more
slipshod than the German-Swiss railway because the Italian is lazy and
the German-Swiss is industrious. We all know that both are industrious,
and that of the two the Italian is, on the whole, the harder worker.
It would not be true to say that Englishmen aboard ship were men of
more energy than Frenchmen aboard ship. The whole point of a Frenchman
is the intensity of his energy,—indeed, its excess,—which is what
accounts for most of the achievements of the French, and also for all
their disasters. What one has to do in examining the thing is to find
out what it is which makes the Englishman, say, or the Dutchman or the
Prussian uncomfortable in circumstances which he feels to be dirty and
slipshod, so that he cannot rest until they have been put right, while
the other sort of man is equally uncomfortable in another set of slack
circumstances, and cannot rest until they are put right.
What are the two categories?
I say again it is exceedingly difficult to judge, and still more
difficult to put into words, but they seem to me in my travels
something of this kind. The one set of people feel their whole
community to be dependent upon a _gentry_, a class possessed of more
than the average of wealth in their society. When people take such a
standard, an appetite spreads throughout the whole of the community
to reduce all, as far as possible, to the conditions under which a
wealthy person would live. While in the other set of people you have a
conception that the community must be taken as a whole. Their centre
of gravity is necessarily much lower than a gentry: it is lower even
than a middle-class. It is the standard of the people. Thus, in the
one sort of community certain forms of decoration in a room, such as
having a carpet and curtains, will seem essential. If that standard
cannot be maintained, then one must expect degradation and dirt—as in
our lodging-houses of London. But in the other sort of community they
aim at the cleanliness of a very poor room, of which the floor is bare
boards. They wash and scrub the bare boards, as in every cottage of
Normandy.
Yet that difference in social ideals is not really the heart of the
difference. The heart of the difference lies surely in the relative
values which people put upon different human activities. In the one
community people will take it for granted that a certain smartness of
externals is essential to what they call efficiency: in the other the
actual working of the instrument towards its end is alone considered.
The impression produced upon the citizen of the one type when he sees
untidy accessories, even where these are of no service at all to the
end the instrument has to serve, is that such untidiness connotes
inefficiency throughout. But the other kind of man disassociates those
two ideas, and is contemptuous of any one who confuses such different
things. In Picardy they keep out cows with chance thorns, in England
with a three-pound gate. Both keep out cows.
I have had sharp personal experience of the matter in one definite
instance, and that is a battery of field artillery. In the ideas of
the English service, a French field battery is extremely slack. The
harness is dull, often old, and pieced together, sometimes shamefully
tied up with string. The uniforms are not over-clean. There is nothing
too smart about the pieces themselves, even when they are prepared
for a review. The conclusion is immediately arrived at that these
foreigners ought not to have guns at all, seeing they do not know how
to treat them. It is the same connotation of ideas as makes one think
that a man without a collar is poor, though he may be a millionaire who
has just taken it off to ease his neck. Now the other commentary is
worth remarking, for I have heard it from the lips of many men, and it
shows the difference of mood. The smartness of the English batteries
I have always heard vastly admired by the French gunners, _but never
in connection with gunnery_. They regard it as an adjunct, as a sort
of ornament which a wealthy nation possessed (as England normally is
in peace time) of but a small armed force can afford. They think
it rather like wearing a top hat, or like a woman wearing jewels;
something having no relation whatsoever to the function of a gun and
its gunners, which is to deliver projectiles accurately and rapidly
rather than to look pretty.
In other words, the French gunner looks at an English battery very
much as you or I would look at a good poet who had been something of a
dandy. It would never occur to us that his clothes were a function of
his poetry, and, on the whole, we would more likely connect the idea of
good verse with slackness in clothes than with neatness in clothes.
Still, neatness is a virtue, and an excess of polish, even at sea, must
be forgiven.
What is less forgivable in the rich is their contempt for the usage of
the sea, and their forgetfulness of its brotherhood. I minded me as I
ran down that water under the dawn, of how, when I was still young,
I picked up a buoy in Cowes Roads after a long night outside, and in
desperate fatigue I made fast to it and slept. I had not slept three
hours when I was woken by a man so rich that he must have stolen it. He
came up, rowed in a boat—I had almost written ‘of pure gold,’ anyhow
all glittering with wealth, and rowed by many serfs in white raiment
shining like the sun. He hollered and he swore like Mrs. McKinley in
the song, and his face was purple with passion; all because I had
picked up a buoy which he had bought and paid for. Now this is not the
custom of the sea. One may pick up a buoy at need, though one must let
go when they ask you. As for this man, his monstrous great ship soon
steamed away down westward, and I sincerely hope that he struck that
honest reef, the reef called Calvados, in a fog, making for Deauville,
and was drowned.
But of all the picking up of buoys and moorings, the most astonishing
cast I ever made was in Orford River. There was a tearing wind
upstream, and I was bowling along in front of it with a tall great
noisy comber of foam at the bows, and straining my eyes for something
to round up to, as it was at Orford that I had planned to lie for the
night. There was a crowd of men upon the shore. They shouted to me and
pointed, and I took their cries to be an invitation, for there, sure
enough, was a little buoy of a fine red colour. My companion put up the
helm, but not so abruptly as to lose all way, and, when I came near
to the buoy I picked it up and made sure that she would swing round
head to wind when she felt the strain of the moorings. Far from it:
there was no strain. The little buoy came up as light as a cork, and,
as the poet has it, ‘the waves still broke about the bows and the ship
sailed on.’ The people on the shore were behaving with frenzy, and even
at that distance I gathered that they were threatening us. The more
readily, therefore, did I beg my companion to put her right before it,
and go upstream into the night as fast as we could. And so we hung
until the darkness fell, when we brought up outside Aldborough. Then it
was we learned what we had done; for the buoy was a marking-buoy for a
race, laid down with the most loving precision, and showing to an inch
where the winner should pass. Nor have I since dared to land at Orford.
There is no piece of inland water in the world so crowded, so too
well known, as this three-spoked lake of the Solent, Spithead, and
Southampton Water. There is none upon which so many thousands for a
lifetime past have spent their leisure, and none which is thought
to be more exhausted in all that can be known of it. But those who
think so, neglect the dimension of time. For, though you should know
every entry and every sounding, the first hour in every flood when
your craft can safely go over the banks, the dredged channel under the
Hampshire coast, and Lymington River, and Cowes Roads and Ryde Sands,
and Beaulieu and Buckler’s Hard, where I am told they launched great
men-of-war, and Portsmouth Harbour right up to Fareham, and the Hamble
to its bridge, and all the yard and wharfs of the Test and the Itchen,
yet you do not possess that piece of water unless you see moving upon
it the fulness of its past. You must see the last tragedy of the Civil
Wars: the craft that might have taken Charles away from Southampton to
freedom, and his young son cruising with the loyal fleet (which had
declared for the King against the oligarchy) cruising just outside the
Wight, but unable to save the King at Carisbrooke. You must see that
which I shall always regret that I am twenty years too young to have
seen—the great ships under full sail making out through Spithead in
line for the open water. You must see the pirate boats of a thousand
years ago stranded on the Bramble, because they did not know the water,
and Alfred’s men capturing them so, and taking them off to Chichester
to be hanged: a proper end for all Vikings. And you must see the great
fleet of Roman transports coming in by an August night with a comet in
the sky, for the recovery of Britain seceded and turned into a separate
realm; the German mercenaries landing and pouring up the Winchester
road, and meeting their fellow Germans in battle before London, and
the Emperor Theodosius riding up Ludgate Hill in triumph after the
usurper’s death.
Because of its size and of its security, because of its nearness to
Europe, because of its many harbours, and one great harbour, this patch
of water has been packed with history as no other in Britain, except
London River; and now in our time the great London Dock Strike, more
than thirty years ago, has brought Southhampton Water back to the mass
of modern traffic, and made it the great port of entry from the West.
For it was the great London Dock Strike of ’89 did that, of which you
may say, as of all the industrial battles of our time, that the victors
lost.
Well do I remember the fevers of that struggle! I was but nineteen
years of age; it was my delight to follow the intense passions of the
time; and those passions were real. It was before the socialist creed
had been captured for sham battle at Westminster. The leaders _did_
desire, and _did_ think they could achieve an England in which the poor
should be poor no longer, and in which there should be sustenance and
happiness for all. They _did_ still believe the amazing proposition
that what they called ‘the community’—that is, in practice, the
politicians—could own all we have and handle it with a superhuman
justice. Great God! They believed it!
I well remember that I was myself near to believing it, but I had
the excuse of youth. They had also another excuse: not intellectual,
indeed, but moral; for, intellectually, the socialist has not a leg
to stand on, seeing that his theory is but a piece of arithmetic, and
its application, coincidently with honour and freedom, a contradiction
in terms. Morally I say, those men, those socialists of ’89, were
justified by the imbecility of their opponents.
Nor has that imbecility grown less. The arguments for the capitalist
scheme have to-day, after half a lifetime, the same bewildering
fatuity they had then. In the interval the power of combined capital,
the control exercised over us by a few exceedingly unworthy men,
has multiplied I know not how many fold; but the valueless defence
of such a condition goes on. One might imagine, to hear them, that
the defenders of capitalism honestly believed their ephemeral and
empoisoned chaos to have been present amongst us from the beginning of
time, and to be normal to the human race.
It is no little irony to remember that those who have to state the most
contemptible of such arguments in the press are themselves men commonly
indifferent, or even hostile, to the interests they are paid to serve.
It is not your sudden millionaire out of the gutter who writes in the
paper he owns; he could not write ten lines if he tried. It is not
your monopolist in ships, who, bleeding his country dry during her
life-and-death struggle in the Great War, sets out to prove that his
vile wealth is of divine origin. It is not the great bankers, getting
their usury out of nothingness, who could put forward that apologetic
which is necessary for the continuance of the affair—even for its
doubtful and uncertain continuance to-day. No; it is a scribbling
proletariat, insecure and exigent, which regularly turns out column by
column daily to explain how right and just it is that he should himself
remain insecure and exigent. It is as though the torture were applied
to some poor prisoner to compel him to proclaim the beauty of torture.
That old socialist fervour of the great Dock Strike of ’89 and its
time is dead: I regret it, for there was something very noble in its
folly. A good half of it or more was made up of the love of men, and
of a passionate hunger and thirst for justice. There was also in it
that Apocalyptic, that Messianic, expectation of a new heaven and a
new earth, and of its near approach, which is out of place in men of
European blood, for it is not native to them, but it moves them all
the same with the flame of its enthusiasm. In those days one paper at
least, and that a paper of power in the London press, supported the
revolt of the poor. No one has such enthusiasm to-day.
It was a time when men who have since been caught into the net of
professional politics, and have lost their souls, went down to speak
fiercely at street corners, and to light in the hearts of broken men
the flame of human dignity.