Friends of mine, friends all, and you also, publishers, colonials and
critics, do you know that particular experience for which I am trying to
find words? Do you know that glamour in the mind which arises and
transforms our thought when we see the things that the men who made us
saw--the things of a long time ago, the origins? I think everybody knows
that glamour, but very few people know where to find it.
Every man knows that he has in him the power for such revelations, and
every man wonders in what strange place he may come upon them. There are
men also (very rich) who have considered all the world and wandered over
it, seeking those first experiences and trying to feel as felt the
earlier men in a happier time--yet these few rich men have not felt and
have not so found the things which they desire. I have known men who
have thought to find them in the mountains, but would not climb them
simply enough and refused to leave their luxuries behind, and so lost
everything, and might as well have been walking in a dirty town at home
for all the little good that the mountains did to them. And I know men
who have thought to find this memory and desire in foreign countries, in
Africa, hunting great beasts such as our fathers hunted; yet even these
have not relit those old embers, which if they lie dead and dark in a
man make his whole soul dusty and useless, but which if they be once
rekindled can make him part of all the centuries.
Yet there is a simple and an easy way to find what the men who made us
found, and to see the world as they saw it, and to take a bath, as it
were, in the freshness of beginnings; and that is to go to work as
cheaply and as hardly as you can, and only as much away from men as they
were away from men, and not to read or to write or to think, but to eat
and drink and use the body in many immediate ways, which are at the feet
of every man. Every man who will walk for some days carelessly,
sleeping, rough when he must, or in poor inns, and making for some one
place direct because he desires to see it, will know the thing I mean.
And there is a better way still of which I shall now speak: I mean, to
try the seas in a little boat not more than twenty-five feet long,
preferably decked, of shallow draught, such as can enter into all creeks
and havens, and so simply rigged that by oneself, or with a friend at
most, one can wander all over the world.
Certainly every man that goes to sea in a little boat of this kind
learns terror and salvation, happy living, air, danger, exultation,
glory, and repose at the end; and they are not words to him, but, on the
contrary, realities which will afterwards throughout his life give the
mere words a full meaning. And for this experiment there lies at our
feet, I say, the Channel.
It is the most marvellous sea in the world--the most suited for these
little adventures; it is crammed with strange towns, differing one from
the other; it has two opposite people upon either side, and hills and
varying climates, and the hundred shapes and colours of the earth, here
rocks, there sand, there cliffs, and there marshy shores. It is a little
world. And what is more, it is a kind of inland sea.
People will not understand how narrow it is, crossing it hurriedly in
great steamships; nor will they make it a home for pleasure unless they
are rich and can have great boats; yet they should, for on its water
lies the best stage for playing out the old drama by which the soul of a
healthy man is kept alive. For instance, listen to this story:--
The sea being calm, and the wind hot, uncertain, and light from the
east, leaving oily gaps on the water, and continually dying down, I
drifted one morning in the strong ebb to the South Goodwin Lightship,
wondering what to do. There was a haze over the land and over the sea,
and through the haze great ships a long way off showed, one or two of
them, like oblong targets which one fires at with guns. They hardly
moved in spite of all their canvas set, there was so little breeze. So I
drifted in the slow ebb past the South Goodwin, and I thought: "What is
all this drifting and doing nothing? Let us play the fool, and see if
there are no adventures left."
So I put my little boat about until the wind took her from forward, such
as it was, and she crawled out to sea.
It was a dull, uneasy morning, hot and silent, and the wind, I say, was
hardly a wind, and most of the time the sails flapped uselessly.
But after eleven o'clock the wind first rose, and then shifted a little,
and then blew light but steady; and then at last she heeled and the
water spoke under her bows, and still she heeled and ran, until in the
haze I could see no more land; but ever so far out there were no seas,
for the light full breeze was with the tide, the tide ebbing out as a
strong, and silent as a man in anger, down the hidden parallel valleys
of the narrow sea. And I held this little wind till about two o'clock,
when I drank wine and ate bread and meat at the tiller, for I had them
by me, and just afterwards, still through a thick haze of heat, I saw
Gris-nez, a huge ghost, right up against and above me; and I wondered,
for I had crossed the Channel, now for the first time, and knew now what
it felt like to see new land.
Though I knew nothing of the place, I had this much sense, that I said
to myself: "The tide is right-down Channel, racing through the hidden
valleys under the narrow sea, so it will all go down together and all
come up together, and the flood will come on this foreign side much at
the same hour that it does on the home side." My boat lay to the east
and the ebb tide held her down, and I lit a pipe and looked at the
French hills and thought about them and the people in them, and England
which I had left behind, and I was delighted with the loneliness of the
sea; and still I waited for the flood.
But in a little while the chain made a rattling noise, and she lay
quite slack and swung oddly; and then there were little boiling and
eddying places in the water, and the water seemed to come up from
underneath sometimes, and altogether it behaved very strangely, and this
was the turn of the tide. Then the wind dropped also, and for a moment
she lollopped about, till at last, after I had gone below and
straightened things, I came on deck to see that she had turned
completely round, and that the tide at last was making up my way,
towards Calais, and her chain was taut and her nose pointed down
Channel, and a little westerly breeze, a little draught of air, came up
cool along the tide.
When this came I was very glad, for I saw that I could end my adventure
before night. So I pulled up the anchor and fished it, and then turned
with the tide under me, and the slight half-felt breeze just barely
filling the mainsail (the sheet was slack, so powerless was the wind),
and I ran up along that high coast, watching eagerly every new thing;
but I kept some way out for fear of shoals, till after three good hours
under the reclining sun of afternoon, which glorified the mist, I saw,
far off, the roofs and spires of a town, and a low pier running well out
to sea, and I knew that it must be Calais. And I ran for these piers,
careless of how I went, for it was already half of the spring flood
tide, and everything was surely well covered for so small a boat, and I
ran up the fairway in between the piers, and saw Frenchmen walking about
and a great gun peeping up over its earthwork, and plenty of clean new
masonry. And a man came along and showed me where I could lie; but I was
so strange to the place that I would not take a berth, but lay that
night moored to an English ship.
And when I had eaten and drunk and everything was stowed away and
darkness had fallen, I went on deck, and for a long time sat silent,
smoking a pipe and watching the enormous lighthouse of Calais, which is
built right in the town, and which turns round and round above one all
night long.
And I thought: "Here is a wonderful thing! I have crossed the Channel in
this little boat, and I know now what the sea means that separates
France from England. I have strained my eyes for shore through a haze. I
have seen new lands, and I feel as men do who have dreamt dreams."
But in reality I had had very great luck indeed, and had had no right to
cross, for my coming back was to be far more difficult and dreadful, and
I was to suffer many things before again I could see tall England, close
by me, out of the sea.
But how I came back, and of the storm, and of its majesty, and of how
the boat and I survived, I will tell you another time, only imploring
you to do the same; not to tell of it, I mean, but to sail it in a
little boat.