who produced vast ships rigged with iron chains, and boasting leathern
sails, yet having nowhere, you would say, whither they could trade? The
indomitable Romans defeated them at last in their own waters a little
north of St. Nazaire, under Quiberon; but what a fight they put up! I
think they must have gone to sea for the mere love of it, these men of
the Morbihan, as do their descendants to this day. For they are all
poor men and get little from their occupation beyond dreams and death.
I know a town also with which the name of Columbus is associated, and
some even say (falsely) that his family came from there. It is a town
about a day's march north of Vigo, on the Galician coast, and is called
"The Green Port," lying at the head of a land-locked bay. One would
have thought that Vigo close by, with its incomparable harbour, would
have killed it. But, on the contrary, it flourishes because it is in
love with the sea. It is the neatest, whitest little town in the world.
But when it comes to daring, there is nothing we can show, with our
modern ease of appliance, like the things that those men did, and not
only they, but all the early unrecorded heroes of our race. When the
Roman poet wondered at the courage of those who first set out to sea
at all, he was right. But what must have been the courage of those who
went out until they had long lost sight of land in an adventure as
enormous as that of death and who chanced a land-fall after a day or
twenty days? If you go across the Atlantic now, for instance, in any
one of our ships that are like towns, and look at the size of the seas
in a storm, you may ask yourself how men must have felt in that same
water upon a craft of, say, three hundred tons, and with no knowledge
at all of what lay beyond or whether they should ever see land again.
It is curious that those same historians who belittle the past (and
most modern historians do that) will not admit at least that our
fathers could build good ships. I have said "three hundred tons"
modestly, but your modern historian will, as a rule, reduce the tonnage
of the past to the most ridiculous cockle-shells. He wants to believe
that nothing big in the way of a ship was made until the time of people
who thought like himself--that is, who had his own religion. Yet in
spreading this falsehood our modern historians do but increase our
admiration of our fathers' courage. They do not diminish the great past
by this particular lie. It is clear that both antiquity and the Middle
Ages had large ships: not large compared with the monsters of to-day,
but much larger than modern history allows. I have had arguments on
this both in print and by word of mouth. For by some fatality the
modern historian, who is ignorant of most things (such as ploughing
or riding on horses or the length of a day's march), is particularly
ignorant of the sea.
When such people tell you, for instance, that the fleet of William
the Conqueror was made up of ships like fishing-smacks, ask him how
that invader carried his horses; and carry their horses they certainly
did, because within a day or two of landing they were there armed and
mounted in great numbers. Or ask him, also, for that matter, how they
carried their provisions and all the accompaniment of an army.
I seem to remember making a note somewhere of a ship that was built
in Bayonne in the Middle Ages, the keel of which, apart from the
overhang, was well over 100 ft. long. I was going to say 190, but as
it is only a memory, and I have not the notes by me, I may be wrong if
I say that. It was certainly well over 100, and the record was exact.
After all, there is no reason why men who could build a wooden ship
at all--I mean a ship to hold the sea--could not build one up to a
thousand tons or more. The limit is rather a limit of handling sails
than of building. For what made our sudden modern increase in the size
of ships was the use of a new motive power.
But one thing was certainly true of all those old ships, and remained
true until quite modern times, and that was their light draught. They
were all flat; and this is the more remarkable when one considers their
high free-board. I have no doubt that those who study these things,
which I do not, and who are experts in them, can explain the affair:
it has always puzzled me badly. In very old pictures, miniatures,
sculptures, or later engravings and drawings and paintings, the first
thing that strikes me is this excess of free-board. I think it must
strike the most casual observer who goes down to Portsmouth and looks
at the modern low lines of the great men-of-war and contrasts them with
the huge wall of the "Victory" size for size. One would think that so
much free-board would have made the old craft top-heavy.
In the earlier ships we note regularly great structures forward and
astern, poops and forecastles, which look as though they would give a
most dangerous purchase to a beam wind, let alone lifting the centre of
gravity of the boat too high. Yet they carried these easily, for all
their light draught. How very light that draught was until quite modern
times, we know by the nature of the harbours they entered, and we also
know it from their habit of beaching boats. You read often enough of
shipwreck, but very rarely indeed of shipwreck through capsizing. That
may be because in earlier times they did not take the wind abeam. But I
doubt it.
I imagine the common judgment that sailing into the wind is a recent
art to be false. The old ships may not have sailed close to the wind;
they certainly did not sail as close to the wind as we do; but that
they could sail with the wind a little forward of the beam seems to
me common sense. No one can sail a boat of the simplest rig--a boat
with a mere balance sail or catrig--without finding that she can go
into the wind. And a boat that could not go into the wind at all could
never be certain of harbour. It is true they waited for a fair wind, as
for that matter would most sailing-boats to-day if they had the time,
and as do all sailing-boats when the wind is too much against them.
No man, for instance, could beat out of Rye. There is no room. And in
any modern week you may see sailing craft anchored in the Downs, or
west of Dungeness, or in any one of the Roads of the Channel, waiting
for a favourable wind to take them up or down. But that the ships
our forefathers used could not sail into the wind at all seems to me
nonsense. Being flat, however, they must have made a lot of leeway, and
that is perhaps why it was not worth their while to try and beat for
any distance against a strong breeze.
"Leeway!" Why did the devices for overcoming that drawback arrive so
late in history? They are deep keels--which is a waste of space and
a forbidding of harbours, so that antiquity apparently never adopted
them--lee boards and centre boards.
Now lee boards I take to be an invention of the Dutch, who also gave
us, if I am not mistaken, the origin of that admirable rig, perfected
in the Thames, the London barge. But why did people take such a very
long time to think of lee boards? I cannot pretend to the required
scholarship and I may be wrong, but surely there is no example of a
lee board in antiquity, nor even in any picture remaining to us of the
Middle Ages? I take it that the lee board was one of those thousand
things quietly invented, unspoken of, between the Dark Ages and the
Renaissance, and that the people of the Low Countries were its authors.
As for the centre board, we know that it is a thing of yesterday. If
I am not mistaken, the Americans first sailed on it. I can understand
why the centre board should have come so late. It wants great skill in
fitting. It seems to invite a leak. It cannot be fitted upon any very
large craft easily--and so on. But why did it take humanity such a very
long time to think of lee boards, and why, when they came, did they
come in this particular corner of Europe?
There is nothing more fascinating than this guess-work upon the origin
of little human tricks and the observation of the long and great effect
of routine.
To this day the Mediterranean shortens sail along the yard of a
lateen--why, I have never got any one to explain to me. It would seem
the obvious thing to take in a reef from the deck, to put your craft up
into the wind, lower your sail somewhat, and then take your reef along
the foot of it. Indeed, it would be much easier to take in a reef in
this fashion on a lateen sail than it is to take one along the boom in
an ordinary fore-and-aft rig. You need no ear-ring, and the thing could
be done in a moment. Instead of which the swarthy men prefer to lower
away the whole contraption. I do not understand the reason at all.
Perhaps there is no reason--or, again, perhaps I am wrong and therefore
there is no problem at all.
These are the two delightful ways of meeting all the problems which
upset mankind, from that of free will to fascinating discussions on the
currency, now so much in vogue.
And a blessing I wish you all.
OFF EXMOUTH
That strange, that ever novel, that magical thing--the aspect of one's
own land from the sea--is passing out of the literature of the English.
I wonder why? I wondered at it the more last week when I went down
the coast of Dorset and Devon in my boat under a brilliant sky with a
happy north-east following wind and saw the splendid regiment of cliffs
martialled in its vast curve eastward from Strait Point to that faint
and doubtful wedge on the horizon which was Portland Bill.
Of landscape from within the land our modern literature has had far
more than enough, a surfeit and a gorge of it. The theme came tumbling
in with the French Revolution and fairly boiled over. But though our
time has all in its favour for catching once again the marvel, the
unique emotion, which fills a man when he sees his own land from the
sea, for some reason the aspect is forgotten.
For one man that came into England from overseas and saw that sight
in old days there are a hundred now. You may say that pretty well all
the leisured class, which unhappily is the chief fabricator of verse
and prose, has thus seen England. Yet in the verse and prose they
fabricate I recollect but very little mention of the thing--and again I
wonder why?
If a man were to waste himself upon mere description he could get no
better matter for his pen, and none that should more fill his page.
The incessant change; the splendid emphasis, now of this and now of
that, upon the distant shore; the odd particularity, on a clear day,
of details one would never hope to match inland; the vision, equally
removed from common experience, of a vague something not to be seized
when the mist plays with the coastline or when a haze in a hot noon
covers the land; the invitation of harbours; the curious, unexpected,
opening of points; the revelation of new things perpetually--all this
goes nearly unexpressed. Now and then you get it in the way that is
the best way to express any profound emotion in literature--I mean
elliptically. Notably have you it in the splendid:
Sweeping by shores where the names are the name of the victories
of England,
in writing which Newbolt left his country his debtor. But it is very
rare indeed to-day.
There is in this aspect of land from the sea I know not what of
continual discovery and adventure, and therefore of youth, or, if you
prefer a more mystical term, of resurrection. That which you thought
you knew so well is quite transformed, and as you gaze you begin to
think of the people inhabiting the firm earth beyond that line of
sand as some unknown and happy people; or, if you remember their
arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they
seem not tragic but comic to you, thus isolated as you are on the
waters and free from it all. You think of landsmen as on a stage. And,
again, the majesty of the Land itself takes its true place and properly
lessens the mere interest in one's fellows. Nowhere does England take
on personality so strongly as from the sea.
Whether the cause be northern climate or some other thing, even height,
the awfulness of land uplifted, which is so especially stirring to
modern men and has produced the modern worship of mountains, seems
to have a different and a greater quality when you adore it from the
level of the seas. No inland effect of mountains that I have come
across in my life (and I have come across many all over the world)
can match that sight which so few have seen--the solemn amphitheatre
of the Welsh giants standing in rank round the northern corner of
Cardigan Bay. Yet, who has given us a picture of it? There may be such
a picture somewhere, but at any rate it is not famous. The place is
little visited by leisured sails for there is no harbour save Port
Madoc, with a very difficult fairway, and shoal. The outer sea also
is shoal, and there runs across it for miles, like a barrier, the
causeway of St. Patrick, almost out of water, and having at its end
the mournful tolling of a great bell. None have occasion, I suppose, to
visit that triangle of our seas except those who trade for slate into
the little haven. It is upon no track, the great steamers never visit
it. You lie there in some summer calm, and those hills which are (by
mere measurement) so small compared with the great ranges of Europe,
not a third of the Alps or the Pyrenees, stand out as tremendously,
or more tremendously, than the awful cliffs of Araxas or than that
dreadful Gulf of Air beyond which, from the Jura, loom the peaks beyond
Lake Leman. You seem, as you look on that embayed rank of mightiness
and gloom, to lie there at anchor in the presence of great individual
and lasting powers, of sentient and watching, though eternally silent,
things.
And there is another landscape of the sea, which is that where two
countries stand upon either side from the midway of a passage; it is a
sight which explains history for one better than most things of travel.
Often enough one is told, for instance, how the Irish hills of Wicklow
can be caught from the Snowdon range or those of Wexford from the
lesser heights of the south, the line of Pembrokeshire near Fishguard
and St. David's. But I remember something which makes one realise the
separation and the neighbourhood of the two islands far better than
such an inland view: I remember how on a certain November day, very
clear and frosty, with a touch of snow upon the hillsides, the Wexford
heights and the Welsh stood equidistant from the deck; each plain and
neighbourly, yet with all that sea between. Nor shall I ever forget a
certain late evening in summer, twenty years ago, when the sun set upon
an even sea line, flooding the dark water with crimson, and how Grisnez
and the Kentish cliffs to the left and to the right gave to the narrows
of the Channel the aspect of a great river mouth, so that one thought,
as one gazed, of those wide mountain estuaries of the West, along the
coast of the Pacific, where such a river as the Columbia swells down
into the sea.
But of all those sacramental sights the chief is the landfall from very
far away. When a man after days at sea first hesitates whether some
tenuous outline or level patch barely perceived, a vast way off, is
land or cloud and then comes to the moment of certitude and knows it
for land, all his mind changes; the ship becomes a different thing; the
world, which has been formless and simple, takes on at once name and
character. He is back among human things.
ON A PIECE OF ROPE
The other day as I was sailing down channel at dawn I contemplated a
piece of rope (which was my only companion) and considered how many
things attached to it, and of what sort these were.
I considered in the first place (as it has become my unhappy custom
to do about most things) how mighty a theme this piece of rope would
be for the modern rubbish, for the modern abandonment of common
sense. I considered how many thousand people would, in connexion with
that bit of rope, write that man had developed it through countless
ages of upward striving from the first dim savage regions where some
half-apelike creature first twisted grass, to the modern factory of
Lord Ropemaker-in-chief, which adorns some Midland Hell to-day. I
considered how people made up history of that kind entirely out of
their heads and how it sold by the waggon-load. I considered how the
other inventions which I had seen arise with my own eyes had always
come suddenly, with a burst, unexpectedly, from the oddest quarters. I
considered how not even this glaring experience was of the least use in
preventing fools from talking folly.
Next I considered, as I watched that bit of rope, the curious
historical fact of anonymity. Some one first thought out the bowline
knot. Who was it? He never left a record. It seems that he desired to
leave none. There would appear to be only two kinds of men who care
about leaving a record of themselves: artists and soldiers. Innumerable
other creators since the world began are content, it would seem,
with creation and despise fame. I have often wondered, for instance,
who invented forming fours. I very much doubt his being a soldier.
Certainly he was not a poet. If he had been a soldier he would not have
let you forget him in a hurry--and as for poets, they are good for
nothing and could no more invent a useful thing than fly.
Note you, that forming fours is something which must have been invented
at one go. There is no "Development" about it. It is a simple,
immediate and revolutionary trick. It was not--and then it was. Note
you also that until the trick of forming fours was discovered, no
conversion from line into column was possible, and therefore no quick
handling of men. So with knots and so with splicing. There are, indeed,
one or two knots that have names of men attached to them. There is
Walker's knot, for instance. But Walker (if Walker it was who invented
it) made no great effort to perpetuate his fame, and all the common
useful knots without which civilisation could not go on, and on which
the State depends, were modestly given to mankind as a Christian man,
now dead, used to give his charity! without advertisement.
And this consideration of knots led me to another, which was of those
things which had been done with ropes and which without ropes would
never have happened. The sailing of the sea, the execution of countless
innocent men, and now and then, by accident, of somebody who really
deserved death: The tying up of bundles, which is the solid foundation
of all trade: The lasso for the catching of beasts: The hobbling of
horses: The strengthening of man through pulleys: The casting of
bridges over chasms: The sending of great messages to beleaguered
cities: The escapes of kings and heroes. All these would not have been
but for ropes.
As I looked at the rope I further considered how strange it was that
ropes had never been worshipped. Men have worshipped the wall, and the
post, and the sun, and the house. They have worshipped their food and
their drink. They have, you may say, ceremonially worshipped their
clothes; they have worshipped their headgear especially, crowns,
mitres, ta-ra-ras; and they have worshipped the music which they have
created. But I never heard of any one worshipping a rope. Nor have I
ever heard of a rope being made a symbol. I can recollect but one case
in which it appears in a coat-of-arms, and that is, I think, in the
case of the County or City of Chester, where, as I seem to remember,
the Chester knot is emblazoned. But no one used it that I can remember
in the Crusades, when all coats-of-arms were developing. And this is
odd, for they used every other conceivable thing--windmills, spurs,
boots, roses, staffs, waves of the sea, the crescent moon, lions and
leopards and even the elephant, and black men's heads, birds, horses,
unicorns, griffons, jolly little dogs, chess boards, eagles--every
conceivable thing human or imaginary they pressed into service; but no
ropes.
One would have thought that the rope would have been a basis of
measurement, but there are only two ways in which it comes in for so
obvious a purpose, and one of these is lost. There was the old Norman
_hrap_, which was vague enough, and there is the cable, the tenth of
a sea mile. But the rope does not come into any other measurement;
for you cannot count the knots on a log line as a form of measurement
with ropes. The measurement itself is not drawn from the rope but from
geographical degrees.
Further, I considered the rope (as it lay there) on its literary side.
No one has written verses to ropes. There is one verse about ropes, or
mainly about ropes in a chaunty, but I do not think there is any poem
dedicated to ropes and dealing mainly with ropes. They are about the
only thing upon which verse has not been accumulated--bad verse--for
centuries.
Yet the rope has one very important place in literature which is not
recognised. It is this: that ropes more than any other subject are,
I think, a test of a man's power of exposition in prose. If you can
describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this
or that knot, then you are a master of the English tongue. You are
not only a master--you are a sign, a portent, a new discoverer, an
exception among your fellow men, a unique fellow. For no one yet in
this world surely has attained to lucidity in this most difficult
branch of all expression. I find over and over again in the passages
of those special books which talk of ropes, such language as--"This is
a very useful knot and is made as follows:--a bight is taken in the
standing apart and is then run over right handedly, that is with the
sun or, again, the hands of a watch (only backward), and then under the
running part and so through both times and hauled tight by the free
end." But if any man should seek to save his life on a dark night in a
sudden gust of wind by this description he would fail: he would drown.
Take the simplest of them. Take the Clove Hitch. Write a sentence in
English which will explain (without a picture) how to cast a Clove
Hitch. I do not think you will succeed.
Talking of this literary side of ropes, see how the rope has
accumulated, like everything else, a vast army of technical terms, a
whole regiment of words which are its family and of which it is very
jealous. People who write of ropes are hardly able to keep off these
words although they mean nothing to the reader and are but a darkening
and a confusion. There is stranding and half-stranding and there is
parcelling, serving and whipping, and crowning and all the rest of
it. How came such words there? Who thought them to the point? On what
possible metaphors were they founded? In nearly all other groups of
technical words you can trace the origin, but here you cannot. Nor can
you find the origin of the names for all the hundred things that are
made of ropes. Why is a gasket called a gasket? Why is a grommet called
a grommet? Why is a true lover's-knot called a true lover's-knot? or a
tack a tack? Now and then there is a glimmering of sense. Halyard is
obvious and sheet is explicable. Outhaul and downhaul might be Greek
or German so plainly do they reveal their make-up. But what are you to
make of bobstay, parrel, runner and shroud? Why are ratlines ratlines?
What possible use could they be to a rat? They are no good for
_leaving_ a sinking ship, though excellent for running up out of the
rising water. "Springs" I half understand, but whence in the name of
Chelsea came "painter"? Reef points might pass. That is if you admit
reef--which, I suppose, is the same as "reave" and "rove"--but, great
heavens, where did they get "earrings"--and why do you "mouse" hooks,
and what have cats to do with anchors?
A ship is a little world, a little universe, and it has a language of
its own, which disdains the land and its reasons.
"ULTIMA RATIO"
I came out of the sea the other day into a little English harbour and
landed there. After I had put away everything on board and left my boat
in charge of the old man who looks after her in the tidal lock, I stood
waiting outside the railway station till my train should come and take
me home. And there it was that I saw a German gun.