or years, confine myself to the publications of the Admiralty in the
"Channel Pilot" I and II, in "The West Coast Pilot" and the rest. Their
pictures of the British coast are the best I know. The information
of the Admiralty is exact, and its motives (alone of the motives now
governing our chaotic world) are pure.
A SHORT ADVENTURE
It was in Morocco: it was not yet day; and there was a little drizzling
rain of that tiresome, feverish sort which you get in those outlandish
countries south of Europe and cousin to the desert, only saved from
being desert by this same evil rain which does sometimes fall on them.
I woke and rose before my companions, and to their annoyance made them
rise also, telling them that we needed every hour if we were to reach
the sea before the next night.
There was no road, not even such a track as one may see in the American
West. Only here and there the sign that wheels had passed over the
interminable dusty mud of the plain. We started the unfortunate
motor-car and jerked off northwards just as the sad, wet darkness was
turning into a sad, wet day. Already the glimmering light showed us
the forms of the land, but not yet any direction, and in that first
half-hour, as the light grew, we twice urged back, at the peril of
our gears, from thick boggy land to harder soil. Then, when it was
full daylight, we could better determine our way. There was not a tree
anywhere, not even on the distant mountains to the right. There was not
a blade of grass. It was a wilderness, where I could see barren slopes
and peaks as much as fifty miles away.
I have often wondered what the original Hebrew was for the term
"howling," which so admirably describes a wilderness in the Bible.
Some day I will look it up; for whoever got that metaphor knew how to
write. Also these damnable empty spaces are not good for the soul: they
isolate it beyond due measure.
And so we went North. At nearly every dry stream bed (they came at
intervals of some five miles) we had to cast about for the passage. In
each we feared to remain. But each was at last successfully passed,
though I wondered how long the old machine would stand it. The car was,
like most of these models of earlier years, very strongly built, and it
was patient and willing; but we were asking too much of it.
It was about nine o'clock in the morning that we came at last to a
true river, flowing between steep banks, perhaps thirty feet high or
more; banks of crumbling earth, and even there not a shrub--mere water,
coloured as tawny as the waste itself, and cutting through the waste
without result. Here it was that the car gave up the ghost. Crawling
down the mass of mud upon the zigzag it reached, with many groans and
grindings, the river bed. It crossed the ford, making a noise like a
saw; but when it was asked to breast the further bank, in one last
gallant effort it sobbed out its life and died.
Upon the height of the bank against the sky there stood a Spaniard,
to whom, as is natural in that country, we spoke in French. He told
us that near by we should find a small town. We begged him in the
meanwhile to fetch us many labourers and a stout rope. This he did. We
tied the rope to the front axle in two places, leaving its ends free in
the shape of two traces, which traces were taken each by a dozen men,
and so, cumbrously, were we hauled to the plateau above. There, sure
enough, we saw as filthy a little town as ever was permitted by demons
to survive; but the sea was still very far away.
What has always astonished me about these little towns of Islam is
the apparent importance of their history compared with their present
appearance. I know that it is the fashion to accept, literally enough,
the stories of their past doings, and I know that I am going against
the fashion in flatly refusing to accept those stories. I do not
believe them. I do not believe them of Cordova, and I am fully prepared
to disbelieve them of Granada itself. Certainly I disbelieve them of
this little town which, as I have so abused it and as, after all,
it gave me hospitality, I will not dishonour by name. Its wretched
crumbling plaster, its low hovels, the lump of mud which it called a
Mosque, the incredible accumulation of filth upon all sides, the air
of stagnation and disease, the mere scale of the place, belied the
exaggerations of the chronicles. And as I considered that I might
have to spend there Heaven knows how many days while messengers were
fetching what might or might not bring to life the poor dead car, I
could not bear the prospect.
I therefore did something which I could not afford. I took aside the
chief of my hauling gang of twenty-four and struck a bargain with him.
I said to him: "I cannot possibly reach the port which I intended to
reach over this illimitable wet mass of dusty earth; it is a day's
journey away, even if the car were in working order. Is there no other
place on the sea coast nearer by where I could get some sort of vessel
to take me to a human land? I care not what vessel it is, even though
it be one of those vessels which they beach, which are open without
deck and run under one lateen sail," for I was not (at the nearest
point) much more than a full hundred miles from Cadiz and the Ports of
Spain.
He told me that there was one little third-rate port, if you could
call it a port, and it was one day's walk away, or, say, five or six
hours of marching. Then, at an enormous price, was it arranged with
a new team that the car should be hauled by ropes, and hauled it was
through the most incredible places, I sitting at the steering-wheel and
good Moors hauling in two teams over sandy hillock and across awkward
ghylls, until, from a height, we saw suddenly a new road properly
modelled, European, Christian, civilised; and beyond it the mixed roofs
of Christendom and of Islam; beyond these again the sea: that sea to
which the Mohammedan Conqueror came more than a thousand years ago, and
into which he rode his horse, saying: "Lord, God! Were I not stopped by
this your sea I would ride farther and farther to the West, conquering
all lands for your honour and that of your Prophet."
Once on this road things grew easier. There were vehicles and there
was life. I paid off my team with a heavy heart, adding (as courtesy,
custom, and necessity demanded) a great deal to the agreed sum. Then I
went down into the little town.
It was a delightful surprise to find as pleasant a little town as ever
the evil powers permitted to survive upon this earth. It was clean, it
was even coquettish. It was neat; it climbed down the side of a steep
hill and below it a charming little harbour held a brig of sorts, very
old, many native boats--large open boats, used for fishing--and, to my
great joy, a steamer!
It was a tramp steamer, and that of the smaller sort. It was the least
of steamers; it was a Benjamin; but when I heard that it would try
to start next day for Cadiz I thought it as great a piece of luck as
a reprieve, or a fortune, or the sudden power to write a piece of
verse which one has been in travail of for years. The next day I paid
my money and I went on board, and at noon, which was high tide, that
steamer got across the Bar.
Not all steamers can cross the Bar of this little port. Even as we went
out we saw the rusty skeleton of a French ship which had gone to pieces
in that same attempt a year before.
It was a dreadful Bar. I can only compare it to Appledore in Devon,
and I doubt if there was any more water than there is over Appledore;
perhaps less; but, as I have said, this steamer was the least of
steamers and drew as little as a steamer can if it is to take the high
seas at all.
There was little wind upon the Atlantic, but huge rollers coming in
unbroken, one over the other, monotonously enormous, unceasing. And I
said to myself, as she pointed her nose northward: "It will be slow; it
must be endured; but we are making for Christian land, and this night
perhaps (for what is a hundred miles?) I shall sleep in Paradise, or,
at any rate, in Cadiz." But not at all. There happened a very strange
thing indeed. Hardly had her nose been pointed North and the Bar
perhaps half a mile behind us, and Africa the horrible, the sterile,
the bare, now no longer a place of weariness but a coastline to be
observed at my ease, when the man commanding this little ship dropped
anchor and lit a pipe.
I have always made it a rule in all my travels not to speak to any
one in command, though it is a rule I have found it very difficult to
keep. The reason of this rule is that if you speak to any human being
you may agree with him or you may quarrel with him. Now, quarrelling
with an equal is entertaining or fatiguing according to one's mood,
but quarrelling with one in command is always disastrous unless one has
great ambition. Therefore, I did not ask the Captain why he did this
thing; but I sat there on the little iron bridge and myself lit a pipe,
and indulged in that infantile trick for disappointing fate, which is
to imagine things worse than they are.
I said to myself: "We will probably remain anchored here for a day, or
perhaps for two days, but within the week I shall see Christian land."
And I wondered whether the food in my bag (which was bread and a little
cold pork and a bottle of wine) would last out, or whether I should
have to depend upon their food, and, if so, what their food was like.
So we lay under the hot sun, rising and falling with the enormous
rolls, now in the trough and now on the crest, as regular as the swing
of the great silver lamp in front of the Tomb of St. James in Galicia,
but on a much bigger scale of rise and fall.
There came out of the North a little point of light, which was foam
upon the bows of a boat. She came nearer; in an hour one could make out
what she was; another tiny steamer; and in another hour she was fairly
close at hand. I said to myself: "This is what we are waiting for."
But not at all: the little steamer passed us, the Captain at my side
muttered her name; she was off to some Southern port: perhaps Mogador.
And so the hours went by. But at last, not too late in the afternoon,
the true cause of our delay appeared. A boat set out from the harbour
upon the ebb, rode over the great swell with ease and dexterity; just
caught the moment to toss on board of us, as the sea lifted it, a
gentleman extremely well dressed, lean, courteous, and silent. He had
preferred to take a comfortable luncheon on shore: had I known that
such a thing was possible I would have done so too. His appearance was,
for some reason, the signal.
The moment he got on board the ship woke up again, the anchor chain
rattled, and she began her way. She made five knots but not seven
(at least, that was my guess), and so all day long we wallowed, past
Africa, and I saw upon my beam a little pirate town and after that a
great mountain. At sunset there opened before me for the first time in
my life the Gates of Hercules, and marvellous they were to see thus
from the West under the reddening light. They were very far away, the
narrowest part of the Straits one could barely see, tiny points upon
the horizon, and the Rock of Gibraltar one could not see at all, either
because it was too far away or because it was hidden round a point of
land.
There are sights which if one sees them for the first time in boyhood,
when one can still feel, are like memories of Heaven; great revelations
which build up the mind for the rest of one's life. These sights seen
in the decline of life still stir one, though there is a mournful
contrast between their power now and their power then. I had not
thought that any novel sight could move me as this, my first sight of
the Straits, moved me in the fall of that glaring African day.
"Here," said I to myself, "is the entry to the antique world. This
is the place out of which the first galleys came and knew the tide.
Perhaps through this also (who knows?) long ships from Atlantis once
hauled in with oars bringing arts and letters to those from whom
we spring." Through these Straits at this hour was running that
convergence of European life which is their modern mark. There were
six steamers in sight and the light of others appeared as the darkness
fell. After the emptiness of the Atlantic I felt as though the Straits
of Gibraltar were a highway, and I amused myself during all the first
hours of the night in calculating the courses of the ships by the red
and the green lights and their eclipse.
There was no moon; the stars came out in the warm air, very brilliant
and single, and we were nearly nose on for the pointers of the Bear.
But, Lord, how slow was that ship! The last light declined as we put
Trafalgar on the beam; it was nearly calm, and I, with a vague memory
of Trafalgar and Cadiz being quite close together on the map, thought
myself already in harbour. But not at all! It was hour after hour,
after hour. At last, long past midnight, and when I had hoped that
first one light and then another might be the light of Cadiz (and
had indeed long watched the light of Cadiz itself, which is white
and flashing) and was still trying to make out far off to the West
the glint of Spartel, I saw a sight which overjoyed me--a buoy with
changing coloured lights, such a thing as marks the entrance to a
fairway; and along that fairway we went, going the way that the ships
of Tyre had gone before us into the great landlocked harbour; the
ships of Tyre at which the Hebrew prophet railed so ineffectually. For
he said that Tyre would come to nothing. So it did. But it took much
longer than he thought.
We steered carefully between ships moored and took up a berth of which
they knew, and dropped anchor, and the journey was done.
But I could not land till morning, and all the remaining hours of the
night after so strange a passage I watched the Bear going about his
monotonous round, and failing to take part in the baths of ocean, until
at last it grew bright quickly over the Eastern hills and Cadiz turned
white and the sea took on its colour. Then did I land in Christendom
and I was greeted by the rising of the sun.
ON SAILING THE SEAS
I never sail the sea but I wonder what makes a people take to it and
then leave it again. Nor have I ever seen an explanation of this;
therefore it is that the speculation is of value, for it is one of
those which go round and round upon themselves and never come to an
end, and so give entertainment to the mind.
When you read in books that such-and-such a nation took to the sea
you are usually given a very pretty little explanation of a material
kind, as is the modern fashion. They took to the sea because they were
situated at such-and-such a point, because the sea they lived on was
sheltered, or because they had very good harbours.
It is all nonsense. Those who write like that cannot themselves have
sailed the sea. To sail the sea is an occupation at once repulsive
and attractive. It is repulsive because it is dangerous, horribly
uncomfortable, cramped and unnatural: for man is a land animal. It is
attractive because it brings adventure and novelty at every moment,
and because, looking back upon it, a man feels a certain pride both
in danger overcome and in experience. But it is also attractive in
another and much more powerful fashion. It is attractive by a sort of
appetite. A man having sailed the sea and the habit having bitten into
him, he will always return to it: why, he cannot tell you. It is what
modern people call a "lure" or a "call." He has got it in him and it
will not let him rest.
That, I think, is the best answer in the long run to the question I put
myself whenever I come back from sailing the sea.
The question, why did such-and-such nations take to the sea and why for
so long a time, and then again abandon it for so long a time, I can
answer in no other way.
It is a beckoning from powers outside mankind.
It is not even the establishment of commerce by sea which takes a
people to sea. Nothing more likely than for a nation to become a nation
of transport and yet to see its crews gradually becoming foreign, as
its own people grew to dislike the nasty but mysteriously summoning
business of wet decks and thumping. It certainly is not proximity to
the sea that does the trick. You have all over the world great lumps of
population, millions and millions, right on to the sea, who never take
to it, but leave a fringe of foreigners to do their sailing. Witness
the Slavs. And though, of course, it is true that inland nations are
not seafaring nations, the real reason is much more that they choose to
be inland than that they happen to be inland.
I have asked myself often enough why the old Egyptians did not take
to the sea. Perhaps they did very long ago, but at any rate the memory
of it has died out. The other people who traded with them from the
North have not even legends of Egyptians coming to them. We have no
stories or inscriptions of Egyptians common in the harbours of the
Mediterranean. And yet they had a great river going straight out to
sea and a coast that for thousands of years, in the height of their
power, invited them. They had ships, no doubt, which were sea-going. We
know of fleets, but we are not always certain that they were Egyptian
fleets, even when they were fleets under the command of the Egyptian
king. What we have not got is an Egyptian maritime legend or tradition.
On the other hand, you find an enormous, volcanic, seafaring energy
just where it should not be--on the harbourless coast of the Levant.
And it seems certain, to me reading, that those seafarers who kept
it up for centuries, the people of Tyre and Sidon, were driven by
masterful instinct. It seems possible or even probable that they
started from some little islands in the Persian Gulf, and that, for
some reason, they came all this way across desert land and began again
from other little islands hundreds of miles away upon another sea. Once
they had started from the Levantine coast they did everything that the
sea makes one do. They explored, and they named. They must have felt
the fun of the thing. Commerce can only have been their second motive,
though naturally it is the motive _we_ put first to-day.
A learned member of the University of Paris has shown that most of the
inexplicable Greek names of the Mediterranean were but Phœnician names
transformed, and they even went out of the tideless sea into the huge
unknown swell of the ocean. And they reached, according to one story,
those tin-mines which were either off the Spanish coast or in some part
of Britain--perhaps Cornwall.
But remark that these people had everything against them. It is silly
to say that they were driven to commerce by their geographical position
between East and West. It was just the other way. Their geographical
position was the worst possible. The splendid harbours which lay some
days' sail to the west of them they knew nothing of. They were on a
coast less suited for the shelter of vessels than any in the whole
Mediterranean, unless it be the eastern coast of Barbary. They went to
sea because a passion seized them for it, because it was in their blood.
I notice again that this passion for the sea does not go, as one would
think it ought to, with a particular physical type, nor even with a
particular mental type. It certainly goes with a love of adventure, but
not with mere vigour, nor even with mere imagination. And the same race
will appear, for generations, inhabited by this haunting of the sea,
and then will suddenly drop it again.
This island is an example. It was seafaring all during the Roman
centuries. Then after the robber raids of the Saxons, Angles, Irish,
Frisians, Franks, and the rest, it lost all idea of the sea. When
England had become a welter of little districts Pagan and Christian
all fighting each other in the sixth and seventh centuries, England no
longer went to sea. It got cut off; and when, a little later, seafaring
men from Scandinavia attacked it, it could not defend itself. It lay
passive. It was not till Alfred's time, more than four hundred years
after the catastrophe of the first pirate raids in Britain, that there
was something of a reluctant seafaring again; and even then it was for
more than a hundred years easier to hire Scandinavian crews than to get
Englishmen aboard.
But all this while the Irish and the people of the Far West, the Welsh,
Southern and Northern, and the Cornish, were filling their legends with
the sea.
Then, after a few centuries, the English woke up again to the sea most
furiously, in the turn of the Middle Ages. The sea moves them less
and less later on. They half forget it. And again, 350 years ago,
it catches them again, and they became great captains and have so
remained, the English.
This makes me think of another thing, which is the difference in the
way the sea has affected the literature of one seafaring nation and
another. And there again I can find no explanation. The poems of Homer
(which were not, if I may humbly suggest it, written by a committee,
but by one man, for it is a rare and individual thing to write a good
poem, and these poems are good) are not so much influenced by the sea
as are themselves the sea. The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics of the
sea--yes, not only the Odyssey, but the Iliad too. The sea comes in all
the time and mixes up with the story in a way it does with no other
story, not even with the story of Tristan. The moment a word or two
on the sea comes into the Iliad the phrase wakes up and moves, and,
what is more, _there_ you get exact physical description, physical
description by a man who has sailed. In most of Homer what is vivid is
either a knowledge of what was in men's minds, or a thing told to the
writer by others, or the gentle contemplation of some art of which he
was himself ignorant and which seemed to him marvellous. But in the
matter of the sea it is quite another thing. The names of the Nereids,
of the "Nereids as many as there are in the depths of the salt," from
the thirty-eighth to the forty-eighth line, those ten lines of marvel,
are the names of waves, and of waves seen by the eye of a man. They are
not at second hand. They are all the aspects and all the revelations of
the wave.
I am told also that the poet Hesiod gave a complete catalogue of
these same ladies, but did it rather less well. Homer has a heavenly
roll-call of them, and the best of their names, in my unfortunate
judgment, is "Limnoreia," "the wave that runs along the shore." For I
also have seen Her, gently running in easy weather along the half-ebb
glistening sand, a distant shore. But all their names are at once
beautiful and true.
Then also, how exact are his words for the noise of a boat speaking
through the depths of the water! And what an epithet for the sea is
"cloud-shadowed," or, for the matter of that, "wine dark," though it is
true the same word is granted to oxen.
But the thing is not to be argued. You feel it or you do not. I think
that conception of horses running on wave-tops was written by a man who
had often sailed the sea.
I am tempted to go on with the theme. But if I went further I should be
tedious, and perhaps I am so already, for all I know.
To continue, therefore (for if you are being tedious you cannot let go,
any more than a tired horse can stop running lest it fall); there are
cities made for the sea, and yet they allow themselves to be visited,
and do not themselves attempt the sea at all. While there are other
cities which you would think long fate and suffering would cure of
desperate attempts to use the sea, and yet they use it in the teeth of
fate; among which last I count--though they are not cities at all, but
only little towns--my own small harbours of the Channel.
These holes in the land are for the most part quite unsuited to the
business of navigation. But how gallantly they keep it up! I know one
of them where there forms with regularity every few weeks an enormous
island of shingle right in the fairway. It is a harbour out of which
no man can come (without a tug) except once in twelve hours on the top
of the tide. And even so that huge mass of shingle is piled up plumb
in the mouth of it by the south-west wind after every gale, and the
gales come every week in winter. Yet do these hearty people dredge that
shingle away year after year, and they have done so, I suppose, for two
thousand years, rather than forego their occupation of the sea.