I
When we East Anglians be set to do a thing, we be set firm. We come at
what we want by slow thinking, but when we know what we want we hold
fast by it--being born stubborn, and also being born staunch. It is
the same with our hating and with our loving: we fire slowly, but when
at last the fire is kindled it burns so strongly in the very hearts of
us--with a white glow, hotter than any flame--that there is no putting
it out again short of putting out our lives.
Men and women alike, we are born that way; and we fishermen of the
Suffolk and Norfolk coast likewise are bred that way: seeing that
from the time we go afloat as youngsters until the time that we are
drowned, or are grown so old and rusty that there is no more strength
for sea-fighting left in us, our lives for the most part are spent in
fighting the North Sea. That is a fight that needs stubbornness to
carry it through to a finish. Also, it needs knowledge of the ocean's
tricks and turns--because the North Sea can do what we East Anglians
can't do: it can smile at you and lie. A man must have a deal of
training before he can tell by the feel of it in his own insides that
close over beyond a still sea and a sun-bright sky a storm is cooking
up that will kill him if it can. And even when he feels the coming of
it--if he be well to seaward, or if he be tempted by the fish being
plenty and by the bareness of his own pockets to hold on in the face of
it--he must have more in his head than any coast pilot has if he is to
win home to Yarmouth Harbour or to Lowestoft Roads.
For God in his cruelty has set more traps to kill seafarers off this
easterly outjut of England, I do believe, than He has set anywhere else
in all the world: there being from Covehithe Ness northward to the
Winterton Overfalls nothing but a maze of deadly shoals--all cut up by
channels in which there is no sea-room--that fairly makes you queazy to
think about when you are coming shoreward in a northeast gale. And as
if that were not enough to make sure of man-food for the fishes, the
currents that swirl and play among these shoals are up to some fresh
wickedness with every hour of the tide-run and with every half shift of
wind. Whether you make in for Yarmouth by Hemesby Hole to the north, or
by the Hewett Channel to the south, or split the difference by running
through Caister Road, it is all one: twisting about the Overfalls and
the Middle Cross Sand and the South Scroby, there the currents are.
What they will be doing with you, or how they will be doing it, you
can't even make a good guess at; all that you can know for certain
being that they will be doing their worst by you at the half tide.
At least, though, the Lowestoft men and the Yarmouth men have a good
harbour when once they fetch it; and by that much are better off than
we Southwold men, who have no harbour at all. With anything of a sea
running there is no making a landing under Southwold Cliff--though it
is safe enough when once your boat is beached and hauled up there; and
so, if the storm gets ahead of us, there is nothing left but to run for
Lowestoft: and a nice time we often have of it, with an on-shore gale
blowing, working up into the Covehithe Channel under the tail of the
Barnard Bank! As for beating up to seaward of the Barnard and running
in through Pakefield Gat, anybody can try for it who has a mind to--and
who has a boat that can eat the very heart out of the wind. Sometimes
you do fetch it. But what happens to you most times is best known to
the Newcome Shoal. When you have cleared the Barnard--if so be you do
clear it--the Newcome lies close under your lee for all the rest of
the run. What it has done for us fishermen you can see when the spring
tides bare it and show black scraps of old boats wrecked there, and
sometimes a gleam of sand-whitened bones.
For a good many years we had another chance, though a poor one, and
that was to make a longish leg off shore and then run in before the
wind and cross the Barnard into Covehithe Channel through what we
called the Wreck Gat--a cut in the bank that the currents made striking
against a wrecked ship buried there. The Wreck Gat is gone now--closed
by the same storm that nearly closed my life for me--and you will not
find it marked nowadays on the charts. Its going was a good riddance.
At the best it was a desperate bad place to get through; and at its
worst it was about the same as a sea pitfall: and that nobody knows
better than I do, seeing that I was the last man to get through it
alive. But when you happened to be to windward of it, if it served at
all, it served better than running down a half mile farther and trying
to round the tail of the bank.
Very many craft beside our own fisher-boats find their death-harbour
on our East Anglian sands. Our coast, as it has a right to be, is the
dread of every sailor man who sails the narrow seas. Great ships,
storm-swept on our sands, are sucked down into the depths of them,
or are hammered to pieces on the top of them, as light-heartedly as
though they were no more than cock-boats. And the supply of ships to be
wrecked there is unending--since the half of the trade of the world,
they say, sails past our shores. From every land they come: and many
and many a one of them comes but never goes. Down on them bangs the
northeast wind with a roar and a rattle--and presently our sands have
hold of them with a grip that is to keep them fast there till the last
day! Sometimes the dead men who were living sailors aboard those ships
come ashore to us, though they are more like to find graves in the
sands that murdered them or to be swept out to sea; sometimes, by a
twist of chance that you may call a miracle, the sea has a fancy for
casting one or two of them ashore alive. Dazed and half mad creatures
those live ones are, usually: their wits all jangled and shaken by the
great horror that has been upon them while they tossed among the waves.
And so, as you may see, we men of the Suffolk and Norfolk coast need
the stiff backbone that we have as our birthright for the sea-fighting
that is our life-work; and it is not to be wondered at that our life of
sea-fighting makes us still more set and stubborn in our ways.