Chapter V: Part 5

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.

What sort of people do you suppose were those fellows of the Morbihan 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.

They had put it up for a trophy. Never was a war with trophies so promiscuous! Never was a war with trophies so much of an anti-climax! The nearest thing to a real trophy which they have had since this war ended was the great pyramid of guns in the middle of the Champs Elysées, all heaped together pell-mell with the cock crowing on the top of them. But I never see a Bavarian or a Prussian gun stuck up mournfully in a little English town without thinking of the English and French guns which are knocking about somewhere among the German states. And what is more, I never see one without thinking how poor a trophy the modern gun makes; especially the German gun, the carriage of which always reminds me of rather heavy and bad agricultural machinery. I think of the trophies of old, of the fine bronze guns taken in the wars against the French, and of the flags in the churches, and especially that amazing ragged dusty double line of them in the Invalides in Paris, which looks down slantwise through a yellow window and sees, in its solemn gulf below, the huge marble sarcophagus of Napoleon.

However, there was the gun. And as the time of waiting for a train is the most empty time in the world (because you cannot limit it and you do not know whether it is long enough to start a geometrical problem or some other entertaining pastime), I filled it up by walking round that gun.

I guessed it to be a 150, say six inch, but I judge these things badly. At any rate it was a heavy piece, not a howitzer.