Chapter VIII: Part 8

The modern great havens, which we can artificially make, spoil us for the harbours of antiquity, and make them small in our eyes, but Lyme Regis was a port of entry all through history, and did not lose its position until almost within the memory of men now alive. How characteristic it is of the growth of our towns inland, and of the change in English life through that growth, that, when men and women hear of Lyme Regis to-day, they think not of the English seas, nor of armed men landing here, but of works of fiction by Miss Austen! Tennyson wrote admirably of the Revenge, and believed himself a seer in the matter of the English waters and their command, but his interest in Lyme Regis was from Miss Austen. For my part, I am not ashamed to say that in my nineteenth year, when I capsized all by myself in a little open boat under Golden Cap, and with difficulty saved myself, though I was quite close to shore (it was in the month of December, dear friends, and poor weather for such gambols), I had not so much as heard of Jane Austen; nevertheless from that moment Lyme Regis was vivid enough to me without her aid, and so it was when, three years ago, touching Lyme Regis again for the tenth or twentieth time, the Nona herself capsized.

’Twas a dark and stormy night, _camarades_, and the wind blew from the southwest, which is the stance it likes to take up when it proposes to drive at doing a devilry. I knew well that the tide running out during the darkness would leave us high and dry, and by lantern-light I made every kind of contraption and fastening from the mast to the quay, so that she should lie even when she took the ground. But at four in the morning, with a noise like thunder, she fell over enormously to starboard upon the then dry bottom of the harbour and threw us all one on top of the other—we were three. That night we slept no more.

The English do well to build their boats deep, for only such boats can hold the sea, or rather I should say, they _did_ well to build their boats deep in the days when they did so build them, before lines were ruined by racing. But there is this disadvantage about your deep boat: that it will not sit, but lies over. So did the Nona on that stormy night; and damnably. You will tell me that when the tide rose she floated. Yes; but not until very much water had trickled in through the dry seams, so that the pale and stormy dawn from over Dorset, and the distant grey of Chesil and the Bill saw us still bailing. And so much for Lyme Regis.

Thence eastward, coasting back home, any man who belongs to my county and to its harbours must face the passage of Portland Race and the difficult rounding of the Bill. So had I always done, whether coming or going, whether easting or westing, leaving aside all that long coast of Dorset hither of the Isle of Portland, and watching afar off the endless unbroken patch called the Chesil Beach quite empty of men.

What a gift of compensation it is that the horror of our great towns and the ease of our new communications has produced deserts between!

No one knows those deserts as well as the man who sails along the sea, following the coasts of England. The foulness of the great towns is discharged by the trainload upon beaches of sand; but all in between, or nearly all, is left more lonely than ever it was before in our history. Those cliffs of Dorset coming down on to the sea are less known to travelling Englishmen than much of foreign land. That Chesil Beach along which I have so often run is utterly bare and silent except for the noise of the sea.

There never was such loneliness! One big house, built there I suppose for the sake of the isolation, inland, under the cliff, where some old landslide has oddly disfigured the face of the earth: then, for miles and miles, nothing. At the eastern end salt waste lagoons forbid human habitation, and between them and the sea comes the strange formation of huge rounded stones, falling very steep down into the water, so that you have many fathom deep within a stone’s throw of the beach; and at last, that forbidding Chesil Cove where a few houses of fishermen, huddled together, look out upon the most inhospitable mass of threatening waters I know.

There are few corners of the English seas which give the effect of a curse; but this is one of them. The terrible Race of Portland lies three miles out, at the end of the Bill. The prison with its abominable memories stands above. The main traffic of the Channel lies far out. The gaunt and bare rocks of the Bill come down stark upon a lonely water, and that water heaves and turns unnaturally, even when there is little wind. For the roaring and the movement of that huge turmoil, the Race, send on their effect to the false shelter of Chesil Cove.

And it is a treacherous anchorage. Eastward, well inshore, there is good holding-ground, but it is only a patch, and one must be careful not to disturb the fishermen’s snares. Just outside this, in deep water, there is nothing but the rough and tumble shingle of great stones, and the anchor drags on any burst of wind, even from offshore: with a strong wind on shore you are done: and if such arise there is nothing for it but to up-anchor and beat out into the teeth of it: for that lee shore is deadly.

I have never been caught by the rising of the southwest wind in this desolate place of peril, but I have read the sailing directions about it, and I have often talked to men who have been so caught. There is nothing for it, I say, but to beat right out, unless it has come from a quarter far enough round south to enable one to scud down along the coast towards Devon, with enough sea room to spare. Chesil Cove is in the very eye of the great gales, and if a man should have taken up his insecure anchorage too near the shore, he is on it before he has got the first wind into his sails. An abominable spot!

The evil is recent. It is the work of the historic centuries. Portland Bill was once an island: and those strange tides which are now baulked and therefore twist and boil round its point, once ran normally through the strait between it and the mainland. But it has been joined to the mainland these hundreds of years by a very narrow belt, high piled, of these great rounded stones, which the sea and the wind shovelled up westward until they closed the entrance.

It is a strange feeling to leave one’s little ship at anchor in the dreadful cove, to land as best one can on that steep shore, risking the dinghy under the pounding of the sea, pulling it up over the screeching stones beyond the mark of the tide and then, in a few minutes’ walk, to be on the great placid expanse of the new Portland Harbour on the other side. It is like coming indoors out of evil weather, into firelight out of the dark; for it is only this minute or two on foot from the outer beach to the inner water; but to sail it, you must run down the millrace of the tide along the Bill and risk the buffeting of the Race. If you fail to hit the narrow belt of smooth water at the end of the Bill you are swept into the Race, and even if you just hit that smooth patch, you must calculate exactly, so as to catch the other tide up the eastern face under the old prison, and at last make Portland Harbour after ten long miles—and as many hours, and as much peril as God sees fit to send you.

Portland Harbour is one of the very, very rare successes of man in his coaxing of the sea.

I will not be sure, for I have not the knowledge, but, at any rate, I know of no other in my narrow experience except Cherbourg; and Cherbourg is not thoroughly closed. Dover is a failure—they say it ought never to have been built. Newlyn in part dries out. Fishguard and Holyhead are open to certain winds. Boulogne is not finished, and, perhaps, never will be (I have been told, I do not know with how much truth, that the Germans were paying for the building of it to receive their great liners and that the War checked the effort). Casablanca is not finished yet, so we cannot judge it—and how many more are there? I can recall no others of the great artificial harbours, unless we admit Genoa, with its noble mole, but, if I mistake not, it is not quite upon this scale. Of the artificial harbours which man has attempted in imitation of the few great natural harbours, how few have succeeded!

It would seem to be like man’s attempt to resist time in the case of his own body, of which the poet has written:

‘There is no fortress of man’s flesh so made
But subtle, treacherous Time comes creeping in.
Oh, long before his last assaults begin
The enemy’s on; the stronghold is betrayed;
And the one lonely watchman, half-dismayed,
Beyond the covering dark he hears them come:
The distant hosts of Death that march with muffled drum.’

And, indeed, it is very ridiculous the way in which men try to withstand this influence of their enemy, Time. They had far better accept the condition of mortality and remember a truth which was plainly painted in large black letters upon a large white placard in Eden, which was restated by Dante, and then repeated by Malherbe, that our only peace lies in the doing of God’s will; which includes going to pieces in the fifties, or sixties, or seventies, like an old disreputable, sodden, broken-down hulk too long adventured upon the sea. Shakespeare (another of those poets) also said that we ripe and ripe, and then we rot and rot. It is all in the Providence of God. Yet will men talk like women ‘of keeping their figure,’ and they will wear stays, or hypocritically compromise by putting whalebone into their clothes, or they will tie themselves up with bands like the infants of Italy, or paint their faces after the fashion of the warlike Germans. But here it must be admitted in fairness to the fierce Nordic stock of Mecklenburg and Pomerania that since the little trouble of 1918 they have issued an army order forbidding any officer to paint his face until he has attained the rank of major; for they judge (does the present successor of the Great High General Staff) that until a man has become a major, the furrows in his heroic skin are not deep enough to be worthy of filling in with white lead or delicately disguising with cosmetics.

To return to harbours.

When Man became the master of Earth and supplanted Heaven—which was round about the middle of the last century—he bethought him of making great harbours where no harbour had been before, and of supplementing the few secure inlets of the sea. Cherbourg was the first of them, the French being here, as usual, in the vanguard of challenge. It was attempted even in the century before. There were rocks and islands to afford a foundation, then the great breakwater was flung like a bridge across them with a pass to the left and to the right. But though Cherbourg is secure enough, there can be a memorable swell when the wind is in a northerly point.

Plymouth was, I think, the next and serves its purpose, but it does not wholly check the violence of a southerly wind.

Did not this same harbour of Portland come third? At any rate, it is the one complete success. It has caught an angle and the defences have been made sure. It is deep, yet not too deep, and no gale alarms it. What Nature built up in the Chesil Beach protects it from the main gale, and the land so curls round that no weight of wind and sea can strike it from the northeastern side; and even from the southeast the Shambles are a sort of protection. Moreover, the entrances are not endangered by the make of the tide, nor, I believe, do they silt. The southern one was blocked during the war by the sinking of a ship; but even so, the great harbour is an easy refuge and a wonderful good gift for sailing-men. But when people thought that, on the model of this, they could continue indefinitely, they were disappointed: yes, even in the tideless Mediterranean. We shall see whether Tangier’s, standing outside and subject to the ceaseless strength of ocean, will succeed or no. But for the rest, the natural harbour still holds the field, and any one would rather have the roads of Corfu, or the inland water behind the Wight than anything man ever made.

I wonder sometimes whether the Roman Empire did not attempt the same sort of thing. If it did, all the traces have gone. There are great Roman roads which come down now right on to open shores: that one, for instance, which I spoke of running through Pembrokeshire and striking the sea just above that narrow torrent of a tideway between Ramsey Island and the mainland. I thought when I first came across this strange ending of a great road, I thought, fantastically enough, what a fine harbor this narrow passage would have made had men of old blocked it on its northern entry. Then you would have had a good quiet inlet, many fathom deep, looking into the sheltered water of Saint Bride’s Bay and quite secure. I half persuaded myself that the lords of the world, from whom we inherit all that we have and are, did so block that northern entry, and did so create a harbour. But it was a nightmare guess not fit for the waking brain, for if they had built a wall between the Welsh mainland and the island, surely some traces would have remained, and there is nothing whatsoever. Yet why does that great road end so astonishingly to-day (and so many centuries past), upon an impossible coast, whence nothing could be shipped? The Pedlar’s Way through Norfolk, ending as abruptly on a coast some way from the harbour of Brancaster (itself now eaten away), may be explained by the disappearance of some former shelter engulfed by the sea, as Dunwich has been engulfed; or worn down as the natural breakwaters of Hastings were worn down under the influence of the waves. But I must confess that Saint David’s Road, ending sharply on that wild shore, puzzles me. The Lead Road of the Mendips comes down to where there is no harbour to-day. All the other Roman roads which I can call to mind in the island, and which reach the sea, reach it at a port, or at a ferry, or what was once a port or a ferry. But this Saint David’s road remains inexplicable.

It is a strange thing, beyond the average of chance, that so very few deep landlocked harbours should be of service to mankind. One hears it said sometimes that the number is small in any case. This is not so. The number is not small, though ill-distributed: it is exceedingly large. The whole Dalmatian coast is made up of a mass of such shelters. The Fjords of Scandinavia are a wealth of the same, and the Arctic abounds in them. But there seems a perverse arrangement whereby the deep harbours and secure have nothing inland to serve, while endless stretches of coastline are to be found all over the world, with much for export, but to which, in the same most exasperating manner, harbours have been refused.

Africa is quite astonishing in this. There are not four natural landlocked harbours, I believe, in the whole line of coast from Alexandria round by Barbary and the West and up from the Cape to the head of the Red Sea. The most that man can do is to use the shelter of islands, or the curl of a headland, or here and there a small and insufficient recess, or the mouth of a river. The French have made their small harbours in Northern Africa artificially, and Alexandria is artificial. The few openings which serve Morocco are very ill-provided, Rabat almost dries out at low tide, so does Laraiche, that charming little cleanly Spanish port, which I hope the coming perils will spare.

All down the Adriatic coast of Italy, there is nothing between the thigh and the heel, since Ravenna dried away. Ancona is only a curl of headland, and Bari means very little. Brindisi is ideal, and Taranto must have been exactly what antiquity needed, shallower than, but as secure as, Cadiz. But for the rest, all the eastern shelf of Italy, and the heel of the boot, is without a base on the sea.

Unwisely, pedantically, but much more hypocritically, the less exhausted countries, who were for the moment the masters of the settlement, refused the Dalmatian coast to Italy after the war. I trust that the force of things and the new vigour of the Italian people and the now increasing embarrassments of what is Puritan and base in Europe will, before I die, repair the error.

And so for rounding the Bill once more—a thing by me always dreaded—for Portland Race is a terrible affair.

Portland Race should, by rights, be the most famous thing in all the seas of the world. I will tell you why. It is a dreadful, unexpected, enormous, unique business, set right upon the highway of all our travel: it is the marvel of our seas. And yet it has no fame. There is not a tired man writing with a pencil at top speed in the middle of the night to the shaking of machinery in Fleet Street who will not use the word ‘Maelstrom’ or ‘Charybdis.’ I have seen Charybdis—piffling little thing; I have not seen the Maelstrom, but I have talked to men who told me they had seen it. But Portland Race could eat either of them and not know it had had breakfast.

I have nearly always been successful in catching the smooth, narrow belt near the point: but I also once found that smooth belt fail me, and so have gone through the tail-end of Portland Race; only the very tail-end. I had seen it from close by half a dozen times before in my life. I had very nearly got into it twice. But this time I did actually make knowledge of the ‘thing in itself’—and there is no mistaking it. It is one of the wonderful works of God.

Portland Bill stands right out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic tide. It is a gatepost, with Alderney and the Hogue for gateposts on the other side. They make the gate of the narrow sea; outside them you are really (in spite of names) in the air of the ocean, and look toward the Americas. Inside them is the domestic pond. Portland Bill thrusts out into the Channel and challenges the Atlantic sea. In my folly, for many years I used to call it ‘William,’ but I will do so no longer. For there is something awful about the snake-like descending point, and dreadful menace in the waters beyond. And here Portland Bill differs from his namesake of the land. It would be familiar to call a William of the land ‘Bill.’ But in the matter of Portland it is familiar to call the Bill ‘William.’ I will never call him William again.

I thought I had well known what the Race was before I first heard it bellowing years ago. I knew after the fashion of our shadowy nominal knowledge. I knew it in printed letters. I knew it on the chart. I knew it in the ‘Channel Pilot.’ Then I came to it in the flesh, and I knew it by the senses, I saw it with my eyes, and I heard it with my ears. I had heard it roaring like a herd, or park, or pride, of lions miles away. I had seen its abominable waste of white water on a calm day: shaving it by a couple of hundred yards. But there is all the difference in the world between that kind of knowledge and knowledge from within!

He that shall go through even the tail-end of Portland Race in a small boat and in calm weather will know what he is talking about, and for so vast an accession of real knowledge, even that pain is worth while.

Portland Race lies in a great oval, sometimes three, sometimes four or five miles out from Portland Bill, like a huge pendant hanging from the tip of a demon’s ear. It is greater or smaller, according to whether the wind be offshore or on, but it is immense always, for it is two miles or more across. It lumps, hops, seethes, and bubbles, just like water boiling over the fire, but the jumps are here in feet, and the drops are tons.

There is no set of the sea in Portland Race: no run and sway: no regular assault. It is a chaos of pyramidical waters leaping up suddenly without calculation, or rule of advance. It is not a charge, but a scrimmage; a wrestling bout; but a wrestling bout of a thousand against one. It purposely raises a clamour to shake its adversary’s soul, wherein it most resembles a gigantic pack of fighting dogs, for it snarls, howls, yells, and all this most terrifically. Its purpose is to kill, and to kill with a savage pride.

And all these things you find out if you get mixed up in it on a very small boat.

Perhaps the reason why Portland Race does not take the beetling place it should in the literature of England is that those who turn out the literature of England by the acre to-day never go through it, save in craft as big as towns—liners and the rest. Even these have been taught respect. During the war Portland Race sank a ship of fourteen thousand tons, loaded with machinery, and if you were to make a list of all the things which Portland Race has swallowed up, it would rival Orcus. Portland Race is the master terror of the world.

And here I can imagine any man who had sailed saying to me that there are many other races abominable in their various degrees. I have not been through Alderney Race since the nineties, but I suppose it is still going strong. The Wild Goose Race you have already heard of—a very considerable thing. The Skerries also—I mean the one off Anglesey—is worthy to be saluted. And even little Saint Alban’s, though it is a toy compared with Portland, is a nuisance in any wind.

But the reason Portland deserves the master name which it has never achieved, the reason I write so strongly of the ignorance of England toward this chief English thing, the reason that Portland Race makes me seriously consider whether literary gents be not, after all, the guardians of greatness, and whether their neglect be not, after all, the doom of the neglected, is that this incredible thing lies to everybody’s hand, and yet has no place in the English mind. The Saxon and Danish pirates of the Dark Ages must have gone through it (and—please God—foundered). Every one making Dorset from France for two thousand years must have risked it. To-day the straight course of innumerable ships out of Southampton, making for the Start and the Lizard to the ocean, leads them right past it—yet I know nothing of it in our Letters, unless it be one allusion of Mr. Hardy’s to the ghosts which wander above it. But there is no ghost so full of beef as to wander above Portland Race!

It is, perhaps, in that word ‘Southampton’ that I have struck the cause. Until Southampton became the port for the Americas the Race lay off the track. No man running down-Channel from the Thames need touch the Race: no man running up. Even beating down or up-Channel you are free to go about before you touch the broken water; running, you need not go near it. And steam need have nothing to do with it—except all that steam which, during the last thirty years, has begun to use again more and more our one inland water of the south inside the Isle of Wight.

There is a great deal more I had intended to write about Portland Race. I had intended to talk about the folly of the Bill challenging the sea, and how it ought to be an island, as it was for centuries. I had intended to say something of that canal between Portland Roads and the West Bay which ought to have been dug long ago, and which some day people will wish they had dug, when it is too late. I had intended to give rules for getting round by the narrow smooth. I had intended to curse the absurd arrangement whereby the tide, instead of behaving like a reasonable human tide, and running six hours either way, runs southerly nine hours out of the twelve from both sides of the Bay, leaving only three for the dodge round. I had intended to add much more.

But I cannot. Let me end with this piece of advice.

Never trust any man unless he has gone round Portland Bill in something under ten tons. Never allow any man to occupy any position of import to the state until he has gone round Portland Bill under his own sail in something under ten tons. But most of all, never believe any man—no, not even if you see it printed on this page—who says that he himself has done the thing.

After Portland Race, as you run down that coast, there comes only one other patch of sea (for you will avoid the Shambles), which is a nuisance, and that is Saint Alban’s Race. When you have just been through Portland you hardly notice Saint Alban’s, but if you are going westward, so that Saint Alban’s comes first, you notice it more than a little. For all the way down England, from the North Sea and the Straits onwards, you will have come across nothing of this kind. Everything to the east is more or less reasonable. If the sea rises, it is because there is a wind. If you are checked, it is through a known tide. But off Saint Alban’s Head you run into a piece of water which has no rules.

You are first suspicious of something odd by an inability to follow the rhythm of the seas. So far you have been going well, say, with a south wind, luffing regularly to every sea and paying off again in the hollows; the regular beat of the successive ridges has become companionable; when all of a sudden a little sea from nowhere jumps up on your beam, and catches you a smack, and immediately you are in a tumble of water without rhyme or reason—nothing perilous, but intolerably inconsequential. You will suddenly find the helm pulling hard for no reason, and then as suddenly losing grip; and with all this, there is no guessing the rate at which your stream will move. I have been half a night passing Saint Alban’s with a leading wind—light, it is true, but sufficient; and that only just after the neaps, when the flood should be running slack. I have watched there in the darkness hour after hour the blacker line of cliffs against the blackness of the sky, and the shore, apparently immovable, refusing to slip by. What is worse, Saint Alban’s Race is a sentient thing. It knows all about you, and whether in its heart it only desires to play, or whether it has a wickeder mind, a mind it certainly has.

Some years ago I was running down this coast with many companions—too many for so small a craft. All was with us: an excellent wind, bright sun, and a clear air. I warned my companions about this mischievous patch (which is also haunted), and I said we would go right outside and cheat it. So we put the bow a point or two off the course we were making, so as to get right out into the open and leave the exasperation of Saint Alban’s inshore in the place to which his bad temper belongs. But not a bit of it. Even as we were looking landward, and laughing to see the tumble of water between us and the cliff, which tumble we thought to have thus escaped, even as we thought we had passed it, _the thing ran at us_.

It came on in a long line of white, just like a lot of dogs running up to play. It was abominably conscious and alive. It had said, ‘Here is a boat which thinks that, because it has gone outside, it can escape me,’ so it galloped up in a rush, and swarmed all around us, and we were in for an hour of it before we got to the regular water beyond.

I know a man who so dislikes this patch of curse upon the sea that he boasts of passing it as of a feat, though, in truth, there is no feat in it at all, but only an annoyance. So much did he pride himself upon the passage of it once that, in coming into harbour, and being asked to write something in the visiting book of the inn, he put down his name, and the date, and this poem:

‘I made my passage through Saint Alban’s Race
And came to anchor in this bloody place.’

The person who owned the inn was very angry on seeing this poem, and asked that it might be rubbed out. This the man of whom I speak very humbly did, and substituted for the offensive couplet a long, long poem in the heroic style, all in rhyming decasyllabic couplets, and iambic at that, which poem is to be read there to this day.

You gentlemen of England—if gentlemen I may still call you—who travel about in mechanical ships as big as a street of houses, know nothing of these things.

But I will tell you one last thing about Saint Alban’s Race. I have said that it is haunted. Well, what do you think of this? As I was passing there once, there came up to me, catching me up, at a pace far faster than the dear Nona could ever sail, such a fine rich little boat, with canvas so new and so tight, and so white, and painted and enamelled, and gear well trammelled, and the brasswork shining like the sun, and the cordage new, and varnish upon all the combings, and on the tiller, and at her helm a man dressed as though for Cowes Week in opéra bouffe. She foamed, and was running past in a streak. The day was bright, well past its noon, and the shores of England stood clear all abeam. There was the Wight, with its brilliant chalk cliffs taking the sunlight, and there, very clear, the Hampshire coast, and right at hand, Purbeck: all as neat as a picture. But the man in the exhibition-shop-window boat hailed me, and shouted through a horn, pointing fiercely eastward, as he stood up and steered with his knee, ‘Are those the Needles?’

Now what could such a portent mean? What was the explanation of that mystery? The sea brings all adventures, but what adventure was this? Whence did this man come? How could any man so lay a course from the Bill eastward without knowing what the Needles were, and without recognising them when he saw them? It is true we were end on; but they are the most conspicuous rocks, by their shape, in all the Channel, and they are as familiar as Piccadilly. Even a man who had never seen them must know by his chart where they lay, and by the obvious, unmistakable, glaring white point of the Island. To ask ‘Are those the Needles?’ was like asking ‘Is that the Eddystone?’ when one had been sailing with a good breeze southward from Plymouth, and perceived a tall tower standing up utterly alone in the midst of the seas, very far from land. This man could not have crossed the Atlantic (though men have done so in boats no larger), for she was spick and span. And even had he crossed the Atlantic, he would have a chart. Was he, perhaps, a Western man, who had lived all his life as in Devon or Cornwall, and had set out thus in middle age to explore the strange Eastern people beyond Portland Bill?

There may be some few such remaining who wisely root themselves in their native place, and such a man might for so short a course take no chart—in which case he would have only himself to blame for running through the Shambles, and drowning if God so willed. At any rate, there he was, asking poignantly whether, indeed, those were the Needles.

For a moment I hesitated whether I should not tell him it was the Old Man of Hoy or the Giant’s Causeway, but the spirit of truth entered into me, and I answered, ‘Yes.’

He remains a problem, and to me, therefore, fascinating; for there is nothing so holds the mind—my mind at least—as a problem connected with reality. I know that many men get an equal pleasure out of problems set them in fiction; that is why a good detective story very properly commands a large sale, especially among the intelligent: that is why a good detective story is bought by men as well as by women, whereas your ordinary best-seller, so full of what they call ‘psychology,’ is fed to the other sex, not mine. Bismarck also, intelligent among the Germans, delighted in the detective stories of fiction; but, for my part, though I take pleasure in them also (especially when they are of first-rate construction and diction, like ‘Trent’s Last Case,’ Mr. Bentley’s book, which is, without a doubt, the best detective story in English to-day), yet it is a pale pursuit compared with problems set in the midst of reality: it is all the difference between dreaming and doing. Moreover, the wretched writing man can never forget that a story written is at the author’s pleasure. That author knew the solution from the beginning—as is proper to a creator—and as we read we know that he can make the evidence fit any way he chose. But when you are dealing with reality, the evidence upon either side of the problem is not made to fit any end. You have to reconcile as best you can two opposite sets of equally certain things, which seem the one set to contradict the other. If the problem as to who that Needles man was, and where he had come from, had involved great issues, racial hatreds, the fate of a fortune, or the destiny of a realm, it would have become an historical problem; and historical problems are the most fascinating of all.

There come first in order those involving human motive, and the known probabilities of human action. Take three of them. The affair of the Diamond Necklace, the Tichborne case, and the Dreyfus case. In each of these the difficulty of finding the solution lies in the discovery of motive, and in the estimate of truth proceeding from a group of witnesses, or sometimes from only one witness, and in each of these there is an opposing set of accounts, and of depositions contradictory the one to the other.

In the affair of the Diamond Necklace, you have either to believe that a man, living in the heart of the court life of Versailles, accepted a ludicrous signature as that of the Queen; or else you have to believe that about twenty people, who had no connection one with the other, and were separated by every conceivable kind of social circumstance, place and time, conspired to tell unshaken the same lie. If you ask whether a man living in the heart of the rich society of London would accept as normal the signature ‘The Hon. Henry Hound, Esq.’ at the end of a letter (he having known for many years the said Henry Hound, let alone the fantastic nature of such a signature) you would certainly say that the thing was morally impossible. But what if you had to decide between such a moral impossibility and the necessity of believing that a railway porter at North Berwick, a small farmer in County Clare, a dilettante friend of the said Henry Hound, and Henry Hound himself, and a chance taxi-man who had once driven him, and a policeman who had noted the taxi go by, and about a dozen others equally separate, did all swear and remain unshaken under examination, and after a long process of time, to testimonies which, combined, made the conclusion inevitable that this man, accustomed to all our social usages, and living in the heart of our rich society, did regard such an absurd signature as normal?

The Tichborne case depends upon contradictions in which I have little reading; but, if I remember right, the main contrast in it lay between two sets of undoubted facts. On the one hand, a man’s mother recognised him; his distinguished advocate preferred ruin to the concealment of his own passionate conviction of the man’s identity—and, after seeing all the evidence, and hearing everything in confidence, deliberately broke the most sacred rules of his lawyers’ trade union, inviting certain disaster in order to leave conviction to posterity. As against a set of things like that you had the unaccountable ignorance of a man of middle age upon habits and words, and the rest, in which his youth must have been steeped, and many other contradictory points as well. There has been formed a comfortable legend upon this particular problem: a legend which affirms the certain justice of the verdict.

Personally, I mistrust such legends. The tendency of men to believe what it makes them happier to believe is so strong that one should lean with all one’s weight against it in public as in personal affairs. But that does not mean that the verdict was not just: it only means that the accepted legend has no authority in itself. During my boyhood the opinion of men amply qualified to judge, men eminent in the legal profession, men of the Tichbornes’ social standing and religion, was as violently divided as were later men of the same capacity for judgment in the matter of the Dreyfus affair.

Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between my elders, especially those which regularly took place in one of the Sussex houses, the squire of which had no doubt at all of the claimant’s right; and my reason for such interest in a matter to me remote is this: that the Tichborne verdict is the first thing I remember. We were living in a house in Westminster, and my nurse, who was excited in the matter, as all folk then were, rich and poor, took me into the press of people at Westminster Hall to hear the result. Of course, very early memories like this (I was but three years old) are falsified by the continual repetition of the subject by one’s elders, but I am as certain as any one can be of such a memory, and I believe it is the earliest thing of which I have any clear memory left.

Upon a similar very early memory depends one of the longest links with history with which I am acquainted. Mademoiselle de Montgolfier, the daughter of the man who made the first balloons, lived as a life-long companion of my Irish grandmother in France, and died well after her ninetieth year, when I was a boy of ten or eleven. That woman as a child of four was present in Paris when the mob poured up the Faubourg of Saint Antoine to the capture of the Bastille in 1789, and I, as a child of seven, eight, and onwards, was brought to her time and again to hear her tell the story. I am now in my fifty-fifth year, and the stretch of time is already remarkable. Were I in extreme old age, and told a child of this incident, that child himself, living to a similar old age, would be able to say that he had spoken to one who had heard of the fall of the Bastille from an eye-witness; and that would be as though some very old person to-day were to tell one that he had spoken to one who had known a page at Charles II’s Court, and had seen as a child the funeral of General Monk; or, again, it is as though some very old person to-day were to remember having met in childhood a person who had talked to one who had seen John Milton.

The Dreyfus case, after all these years, still rouses such passions that I tremble even to mention it. I have myself (so many years after!) been subject to mournful rebuke in public from the excellent pen of Dean Inge, who has reproached me in well-knit prose for being the only man in England who did not take the side of the accused. He is wrong there; for I could cite the names of half a dozen prominent Englishmen who had the right to judge through a knowledge of European affairs, and who remained in doubt of Dreyfus’ innocence, notably Lord Russell of Killowen, the Lord Chief Justice, and Mr. Labouchère—and there were many others.

Here also the difficulty lay in weighing opposing sets of undisputable facts. The nearer men were to a position where they could fully judge all the technical details of that highly technical evidence, and the probable motives of the clashing witnesses, the more were they divided; they remain divided to-day upon the issue after more than thirty years. On the one hand was present an overwhelming motive to secure the conviction of a man against whom there was strong _prima facie_ evidence. That motive was the desire to preserve the Intelligence Department of the French Army intact, though rival powers were bent on its destruction. On the other side was another motive: the overwhelming motive of freeing a man who was believed innocent, and the lesser, but still very strong, motive of defending the immunity of that small immensely wealthy, very powerful clique of international financiers, one member of which—the first and the last in our time—had been challenged by the authority of a modern state. Such men regard themselves, and are, in practice, usually treated, as though they were above the law.

I, for my part, pretend to no certain conclusion in the matter, for I doubt whether any man could do that who was not on the bench in court, and physically confronted with the witnesses, and acquainted with all the documents, and able to weigh them all—even the use of the most technical terms in gunnery. But it is to be remembered that there was division upon that bench itself, and that a minority of the five judges—two out of three—were (I am told) for acquittal.

Of my own intimate acquaintance who were on the spot and competent to judge, most were for the innocence of Dreyfus: but the rest, fully competent also, were, and are, convinced of his guilt.

There are in England to-day two Englishmen whose wide knowledge of Europe and especially of Paris, and the French tongue and society, enable them to judge. They are both close friends of mine. One is for, the other against.

I believe that, when the passions have died down, the Dreyfus case will remain for history very much what the Diamond Necklace has remained, or the Tichborne case; that is, there will be a popular legend, intellectually worth nothing; and, for the historian, the task of criticising that legend, but hardly of solving the problem.

The historian will have one point to make in connection with it, and that a point of capital importance. It is to the Dreyfus case that we owe the four years of war, 1914-18: for it destroyed the French Intelligence Bureau and so permitted the German surprise on Mons and Charleroi.

Perhaps problems depending upon human psychology can never be finally determined. But there are others equally absorbing which involve no such heats, and no such moral doubts: only physical and mathematical oppositions.

It would be a worthy task to draw up a list of such essentially historical problems not involving guesswork upon human motives, but dealing with plain, physical facts; problems which have remained unsolved, and which do not seem to be in the way of being solved either. Your academic writer shirks them nearly always; he writes as though they had been solved, and as though he knew the solution; so that his readers go on imagining they have been given an explanation which as a fact has been carefully avoided.

For instance, when you read of a fleet in antiquity ‘drawn up’ upon a shore, how was it done? The fleets of antiquity preferred to use, but did not depend upon, harbours; they were able to use a beach. Their large armies—for instance, a Carthaginian army of one hundred and fifty thousand men—were landed in this fashion. Cæsar landed at Deal his small but respectable force in this fashion, not through a harbour, but on a beach; and civilian sailing and piracy all used the same method. The ship of antiquity could ride, and also be moored in harbour, but was also beached. It came up to a shelving shore _and was pulled up on to the land_. It was pulled up out of reach of the waves; and it will be remembered how Cæsar got into trouble during his first expedition (and second!) because he had not allowed for an exceptionally high tide accompanied by a storm. He got his ships on shore all right, but he had not pulled them up far enough.

How was it done? You cannot say it was done by capstans, because that could only apply to beaches already prepared. If you say it was done by hauling upon ropes over rollers the answer is not sufficient. How was the boat kept upright while this was going on, and what numbers would not be required to beach thus even a single ship of three or four hundred tons, and, having so beached it, by what means could one rapidly float it again?

The ancients had some method which they took for granted, for they knew the difficulty of it, and which landsmen had seen practised a thousand times, and yet of which no description has come down to us in our fragmentary records of the past. The poets tell us that the ships stand upon the shore, and they leave it at that. They seem to tell us also that the boats were helped up stern foremost, but how on earth the thing could be done with a very large armament rapidly, and upon a beach unprepared, baffles us.

There is another problem I have never seen solved. How did Barbarians organise and commissariat the enormous bodies which came across the Alps for the plunder of Italy, and were as a rule destroyed by the Italian armies in antiquity. How did they get such a force as that of Radagasius across the Alps, or that of Brennus? I choose the Alps in particular because it is an extreme case, but it is almost as difficult to understand how they moved across flat country. In the case of the Alps, you had narrow tracks for much more than a day’s march, often for a week’s march; tracks from which it was impossible to deploy to right and left. There must, therefore, have been a very long column in file, a column of many, many miles. It is easy to calculate, in the case of Radagasius, that he could not possibly have extended over less than thirty miles, and probably his column covered a good deal more. Our academic writers seem to think that a body of this sort moves as a matter of course, like an individual, or like a small body which can easily organise its movements: a dozen people out for a walk. But here you have numbers in respect of which any one with an elementary knowledge of military history, knows that high organisation alone could prevent disaster.

Ask a modern staff with every modern advantage, and even with a good modern road on which the columns could advance on a front of four, to move by a single road a quarter of a million human beings, half of them fighting men, from Augsburg to Milan. Consider the preparation such a march would mean; the exact forethought required, establishing the position of each column at the end of each day’s march; the calculation of provisions, the arrangement for the passing up and down of waggons or of pack animals, the strict discipline necessary to prevent bunching throughout the whole column; the confusion—these and a hundred other points. We all know that very good staff work, taking plenty of time, and with every modern advantage of map and transport, will do it in such and such a fashion. We also know that a few mistakes on the staff might easily so bungle the affair that only a dribble would get across in time, and the bulk would starve and die. Yet these huge barbaric forces, in some undescribed way, so traversed the mountains and debouched upon the plains of Italy, having evidently thought out some form of screen or advance guard—otherwise they would have been blocked on emerging from the pass—having some clearly elaborate system of commissariat, and so on. Not a word of all that has come down to us from antiquity. We do not know how it was done. What is more, we cannot see _how_ it was done by men who had no writing, and only the vaguest notions of topography.

The harbour of Poole, for which we were making during that run along the Dorset coast when we were hailed by the Needle man, has a problem of the sort attaching to it.

You come round the Anvil Point, and there, if you are lucky, you catch another tide. There are many such points on the coast where you can carry the tide with you much longer than the due six hours or so, by coming into the midst of a fresh tide at the very end of the old one. The main stream seems to shoot past Anvil Point, towards the Island. If you come to Anvil Point and the corner of Dorset just at the very top of the flood and have the good fortune to get round and open Swanage Bay, you are out of this main stream just before the ebb begins, and another, younger flood takes you up past Old Harry and towards Poole.

Old Harry is an isolated chimney of chalk rock which still stands, expecting doom. He had a wife standing by him for centuries—a lesser (but no doubt nobler) pillar. She crashed some years ago and now he is alone. He cannot wish to remain so much longer, staring out to sea without companionship. I think he longs for his release.

Beyond Old Harry you come to that odd entry of Poole, the history of which is, I say, inexplicable to me. It was a main harbour for the Romans; and when the Scandinavian pirates came down to destroy this outer province of Christendom, they used it as a known base. It was sailing out of Poole that a great fleet of their ships—ninety I am glad to say—coming to pillage this Roman land, were piled up and destroyed in Swanage Bay; and it was from Poole that they went up water to Wareham, and thence made their foray by land to Exeter.