The Cruise of the Nona (continued 2)

A man who knows that the earth is round but lives among men who believe it to be flat ought to hammer in his doctrine of the earth’s roundness up to the point of arrest, imprisonment, or even death. Reality will confirm him, and he is not so much testifying to the world as it is—which is worth nothing—as to Him who made the world, and Who is worth more than all things. And, as it seems to me, a man ought to do this even about the truths not so very important, but he should observe some proportion between them and truths of vital importance. For instance, it is a truth of no very apparent immediate importance to-day that any great poem of the past must have been written by a poet, and that those who think a great poem can be written by a committee or pieced together out of traditional ballads, think nonsense. It is also a truth that Great Britain is no longer secured by sea power. It is also a truth that the interests of this country were till lately identical with the interests of international banking and finance—and are so no longer.

All these three truths are true, but the first truth touches no vital matter, while the last two truths are of immediate importance; and a man aware of them should hammer away at them, and not neglect them in order to pursue too constantly that other much less important truth about old poems.

It is not often that one comes across men in a modern lifetime intent upon the proclamation of unaccepted, or of ill-accepted or unknown truths; for such men must suffer. And few will suffer to-day save for some reward. Very few modern men value any reward that is not immediate and material. Huxley, who sacrificed himself entirely, both to false things which he believed to be true and to real things that were true, I never knew. But I knew Déroulède well, and Déroulède hammered away all his life at the expense of ceaseless insult and contempt, paying for the preservation of his honour the heavy price of an unbroken isolation, and dying without seeing any apparent fruit of his effort. It was his mission to proclaim to his French compatriots the elementary truth that, until they had secured the defeat of Prussia in a war, they themselves were doomed to increasing decay, and Europe to increasing ills. I visited his grave just after the Battle of the Marne. It is in a little, somewhat neglected churchyard, some three miles from the house he had inherited: a place windswept and overlooking from beyond its walls a great horizon to the north. The season being late summer, and the war having left the little place untended, the grass was rank and high around the mound and the slab which marked the place where he lay. There, leaning against the wall, some one had put casually, as though by chance, in high dedication to his memory, the first of the frontier posts which the army had pulled up from the summits of the Vosges during the first ill-fated charge into Alsace.

I knew also one other man (whom, for the honour I bear him and because he is still alive, I shall not name), an Englishman; at the outbreak of war in South Africa he said to all who would hear him, and printed in a journal to which he had admission, the simple truth that this adventure would be the beginning of a decline in the financial credit of England. To discover whether he was right or wrong, look at any curve of that credit and mark the dates. He said to all who would hear him that from this adventure onwards we should find ourselves increasingly embarrassed, with increasing taxation, with an increasing uncertainty in our foreign policy, and in our hold upon the markets we desired to control abroad. His action was not that of the prophet, but of the reasoner. His unpopularity was extreme. He was the only public man who talked conscientiously and rationally in this affair of the Boer War, and who did not confuse his conclusions with that disgusting antipathy to their own country which marked the most of those who protested against the war. As for the enemy, the South African Dutch, he knew them and heartily despised them. The Outlanders he also knew, and thought them the scum of the earth. But he acted on no mood of like or dislike. He was concerned with the future of England and he reasoned. He talked a sort of mathematical sense, and all his words were true; but he shall know no reward. Only, this remains true also; that all who heard him or read his writing have secretly returned to those words in their own minds, and have said: ‘He was right and we were wrong.’

There is another form of impressing the truth, and testifying to it, and doing good by it, which is the dogmatic assertion of truth by the old and the experienced and the revered, to the young. It is out of fashion; it is invaluable. I can myself testify to two such experiences which stand out supreme among many hundreds in my own early life. I am afraid they may seem trivial to my readers; I can only say that for myself they were as strong experiences as any great joy or pain could be. One was a sentence which Cardinal Manning said to me when I was but twenty years old. The other was one which the Master of my College, Dr. Jowett, of Balliol, said to me when I was twenty-two years old.

The profound thing which Cardinal Manning said to me was this: All human conflict is ultimately theological.

It was my custom during my first days in London, as a very young man, before I went to Oxford, to call upon the Cardinal as regularly as he would receive me; and during those brief interviews I heard from him many things which I have had later occasion to test by the experience of human life. I was, it may be said, too young to judge things so deep as sanctity and wisdom; but, on the other hand, youth has vision, especially upon elemental things; and Manning did seem to me (and still seems to me) much the greatest Englishman of his time. He was certainly the greatest of all that band, small but immensely significant, who, in the Victorian period, so rose above their fellows, preëminent in will and in intelligence, as not only to perceive, but even to accept the Faith. Not only did his powerful mind discover, but his powerful will also insisted upon all the difficult consequences of such an acceptation. He never admitted the possibility of compromise between Catholic and non-Catholic society. He perceived the necessary conflict, and gloried in it.

This saying of his (which I carried away with me somewhat bewildered) that all human conflict was ultimately theological, that is that all wars and revolutions and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine, was utterly novel to me. To a young man the saying was without meaning: I would have almost said nonsensical, save that I could not attach the idea of folly to Manning. But as I grew older it became a searchlight: with the observation of the world, and with continuous reading of history, it came to possess for me a universal meaning so profound that it reached to the very roots of political action, so extended that it covered the whole.

It is, indeed, a truth which explains and coördinates all one reads of human action in the past, and all one sees of it in the present. Men talk of universal peace: it is only obtainable by one common religion. Men say that all tragedy is the conflict of equal rights. They lie. All tragedy is the conflict of a true right and a false right, or of a greater right and a lesser right, or, at the worst, of two false rights. Still more do men pretend in this time of ours, wherein the habitual use of the human intelligence has sunk to its lowest, that doctrine is but a private, individual affair, creating a mere opinion. Upon the contrary, it is doctrine that drives the state; and every state is stronger in the degree in which the doctrine of its citizens is united. Nor have I met any man in my life, arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle.

The truth Dr. Jowett gave me came thus. He asked me the political question which was always uppermost in his mind, and which he believed all young men should consider. It was, ‘Under what form of government is the state of man at its best?’ I answered as all young men should answer, ‘A republic,’ to which he answered gently in his turn, ‘You cannot have a republic without republicans.’ Now that, for terseness and truth and a certain quality of revelation, was worthy of Aristotle. It is the full answer, historical and moral, to every honest man who desires, as most honest men do, democracy, and who wonders why it is so hard to attain. But I had never considered that answer; and I think if I had not heard these half-dozen words I might never have considered it.

Democracy—that is, the government of the community by the community: a state wherein a man stands equal with his fellows, and has to suffer neither subservience nor the corruption of flattery and power: a state in which office alone commands, and not the being clothed with office—that is the ideal at the back of every man’s mind who cares for right in public affairs, and who has within himself anything left of private honour. It is simplest put by saying that democracy is the noblest form of government. But the moment you begin to deal with men, you find in varying degree, according to the human material handled, a difficulty in the direction of such an affair. You have experience of the wickedness and folly of men, and if you add to such growing experience the vast experience of history, you will find that, save in some few, and those small, communities, the ideal of democracy must break down in practice; and that so far from enjoying the noblest of social conditions, men attempting democracy in great states are soon suffering the basest forms of control by the rich. That is because most men, though intimately desiring a republic, are not republicans: when you have great numbers, those worthy of democracy are few. In the same way most men, though individually desiring peace within, have not the control of themselves which makes such peace possible.

So much for the Master’s excellent platitude.

It is strange that things worth saying and hearing, guiding things, should always have that quality of turning into platitudes, once they are familiar; for they were sudden revelations when first they came. To me now the impracticability of democracy among men indifferent to honour and justice is so clear that I never pause to consider it, well knowing that you cannot have the thing in any modern plutocratic state; that even in small states it needs a peculiarly admirable and rare temper in the human material of them. But this conviction came slowly, and all started from those few words.

And what has all this to do with the sailing of the sea? Nothing, save that it is during the sailing of the lonely sea that men most consider the nature of things.

The day broke long before we were anywhere near Fishguard breakwater. We must have done, I suppose, ten or twelve miles by the time it was broad light. Strumble Head kept on flashing, white and inept, under the daylight, and then went out. When it ceased there was no sign of land where it had been. Also the wind had fallen sluggish and we were not making three knots. But such as it was, it was steady; and by mid-morning we saw all the coast quite plain, and, shortly after, the low black line of the breakwater which they have built out here to make their great artificial harbour of Fishguard.

With the wind still falling we drifted rather than ran for the point of it and crawled in out of the wide sea. Even in that last hour, as we came in, we began to note a long heave gradually sweeping up out of the Atlantic through Saint George’s Channel, as though it had wind behind it; but since it set northeastward it did not affect the calm of the broad roads within the breakwater. We very slowly crawled to that inner southern part where boats of our sort could lie without interfering with the steam monsters, and there, after just twenty-four hours of the passage across Cardigan Bay, a run of seventy-odd miles, we let go the anchor, and, tying up our canvas in a very slovenly fashion, we hailed the shore and got a boat to come out, seeing that I had lost my own dinghy during the tempest in Bardsey Sound.

The man who came out to us in the boat hailed us as he approached in the most beautiful English, either because we were now in that so-called ‘Little England beyond Wales,’ or else because he was indeed an Englishman, exiled to these parts; or perhaps again he was bilingual and had acquired this perfect English as a classical and foreign tongue. It was a privilege and an honour to be rowed ashore by such a man, for he was free of his conversation and all that he said was interesting, true, and well put. He warned us against the people of the place—why I do not know. He told us that where we lay was good holding-ground, and he gave us in that little trip quite a lot of useful information about the difficult passages between the islands and the mainland on the Points of Pembroke which we had to pass on our way southward. He asked us as we landed an astonishingly small payment for his services and then he promised to meet us again at a fixed hour to take us aboard. In all things this man was worthy and a friend, for I could see in his eyes that he suffered exile.

We came back to him after we had provisioned, clambered aboard, and made ready for one of those empty days which pass so quickly on board a boat: hours and hours during which nothing is done, hours which on shore would exasperate every nerve, but which here, on the soft movement of the sea, go past as easily as sleep. For time on the water is quite different from time on land. It is more continuous; it is more part of the breathing of the world; less mechanical and divided. There was not a breath of air, so there was no question of starting again during all those hours. The great rollers outside were now at last beginning to affect the harbour a little, and the Nona, with her too high topmast, swung rather heavily to the slight movement; but of wind not a stir. The falling of the gradual darkness brought on a night brilliant with stars and no moon. There we lay, sleeping and waking, smoking, talking a little, vacuous, ready to put up sail with the first hint of a wind and to get outside. But all that night until morning again, the calm continued.

How vast was that haven in the stillness: a mile of ebony water holding the stars and cut off like a lake from the deep by man! How admirable are the great works of man! But greater is God.

In the profound night and the silence I considered that wide space of shelter and the dyke man had made against the Atlantic Power.

For two hours I so pondered upon our strength and our nothingness, worshipping also the night until the stars had changed. Then I went down below and slept. But even with the dawn there came no breeze.

It was about half-past nine in the morning when there did come a draught from the northwards. There was very little of it; it hardly crisped the oily, lumping water of the great haven, but such as it was, we, weary of all this indolence, determined to take advantage of it and to set sail. So we took up the anchor and very slowly lay close to that breath of wind until we came to the breakwater ahead, and there we found the rollers outside large as though they were in the main ocean: so large that when we sank into their troughs there was no headway on the boat and the light air only caught her insufficiently upon the crests. Even as we thus attempted to make some way—lifted hugely up and down in a solemn sport of the sea, now seeing nothing but water astern and ahead and then, immediately after, the whole coast and its heights, and then down into the trough again—the little wind there was entirely failed us. We drifted aimlessly and in all the futility of such motion, up and down over the great swells and there even seemed to be a sort of slight drift. It was, perhaps, only the set of the swell taking us against our course back eastward and northward.

We took council together and determined that with the very first breath of air we could find we would run back to anchor and wait for a wind worth having. So we did, and a second day passed in Fishguard harbour, as empty as the first, and a second night; and then it was I completed the tune and first verse of a song called the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’ The whole of that time the calm was broken by but few hints of very uncertain airs.

But just as dawn was beginning upon the third day, when it was already so light that the sea looked white against the black land, and before the first touch of colour had made living the edges of the inland hills, a heartening wind from those hills, cool with morning, fresh and heavy, not too strong, a friendly wind, a wind just suited to our course—for it was a point or two north of east—blew down from old Wales upon the sea.

Of this we took an immediate advantage and were out at once, my companion steering for the breakwater head at a good pace, while I made the anchor secure forward and then came back and joined him. We rounded the breakwater, took her well out and then gybed over with something of a clatter and a shock and ran down for Strumble, under the growing day. The great light was still flashing from its tower, standing on an island off the head, and the name of that island is Michael. Once we were round that headland, the wind was fairly on our port quarter and it was a merry race with a happy offshore wind all the way down to Saint David’s, so that not only the day but also the old land and the much older sea and the old boat, that was launched so long ago, and we ourselves, were for the moment young. So ran we down for Saint David’s and there, putting her nose due south, I, holding the tiller, headed her for that exceedingly dangerous millrace of a strait between Ramsey Island and the mainland, called Ramsey Sound.

It was full ebb. The water roared and thundered over the rocks inshore for all the world as though we were not upon the sea at all but upon the lower reaches of a tidal river. Though we were running under the lee of the land we were not too much blanketed, and it was a comfort to feel the strength of the wind on the boat and to know that one had full way in such a pass, for these narrow sounds of the Pembrokeshire coast are perilous to ships and men. Here, in this very passage, lay two sets of rocks to the right and to the left, called by the name of the two perils attendant upon the wealthy young. For the first set of rocks is called ‘The Horses’ and the other ‘The Bitches.’ These are rocks over which, I say, the rush of the ebb made a noise like a weir. We were through it in no time, at a pace which, had she touched anything, would have been the end of herself and of all aboard; but there was no danger of that because, as I have said, she had full way upon her and was lively to the helm. Nevertheless was it a relief to come tearing out of this perilous corridor into the wholesome width of Saint Bride’s Bay beyond.

Now, as I was coming through this ticklish management of Ramsey Sound, I was too much taken up with creening below the boom to make out the water at the rush of the bows and to steer with precision, I was too much taken up with the business of exactitude under the strain, to turn to a thing which, from the land long ago, had puzzled me. That is the way in which one of the most ancient roads in Britain comes down here to an open beach just above the rush and the roar of Ramsey Sound and stops dead upon the sands. That open beach is to this day called Porth Mawr—‘The Great Port.’ The ancient road here comes along the southern coast of Wales as far as Carmarthen and then branches, one branch coming up Cardigan Bay, which is called, I think, after Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine, and the other coming straight along by Saint David’s. They call these old roads ‘Roman roads,’ and so I suppose they were, but still many of them were there in some form before this island entered the comity of Europe, before the Roman unity and order were finally imposed so that England became England.

Anyhow, there was a very old road of the first importance running down that way, and near it stands the see of Saint David. Now the interest is this: it comes down to that beach above the narrow roaring river of Ramsey Sound. Why on earth does it strike the sea there? It is true that antiquity pulled up boats on to the shore and might use the beach as we to-day use a harbour—though in our tidal seas a harbour was always better, I should have thought. But even if they thought the beach better than a harbour (which it manifestly could not be for commerce), why should they call it ‘The Great Port’? There it lies on a most impossible bit of coast, leading nowhere and as valueless a landing-place as you could get—granted a beach—anywhere in the island. Did the ancients throw out great breakwaters and thus form a harbour? That could not be, for surely, had that been done, there would be remains of such mighty work.

I leave it unsolved, as I and all other men must do this and all other problems, with the possible exception of the trisection of the plane angle, which I once all but caught hold of by the tips of my fingers during a long crossing of the Atlantic in a miserable lame steamer, too old for her job, in the year 1897, before the gods had left this broken world.

The Nona came therefore grandly out of Ramsey Sound with a sweep and dignified nod into the calm of Saint Bride’s Bay, but I knew very well that there was before me another trial, more difficult still, called Jack Sound, between Skomer and the mainland, seven miles to the south.

Lord, what a tangle of dangers are here for the wretched mariner! Rocks and eddies and overfalls and shooting tides; currents and (as you shall shortly hear) horrible great mists, fogs, vapours, malignant humours of the deep, mirages, false ground, where the anchor will not hold, and foul ground, where the anchor holds for ever, spills of wind off the irregular coast and monstrous gales coming out of the main west sea; and, most terrible of all, Wild Goose Race.

I will maintain with the ancients that there are some parts of the sea upon which a god has determined that there shall be peril: that these parts are of their inward nature perilous and that their various particular perils are but portions of one general evil character imposed by the Powers. For you will notice that wherever there is one danger of the seas there are many. If it is an overfall or a race, then in that neighbourhood you will also have reefs, unaccountable thick weather, shifting soundings, bad holding, and all the rest of it. Witness the western approach to the Isle of Portland, or the Bight of Saint Malo, with the Channel Islands and their innumerable teeth; the entry to the Straits of Messina and other places recorded in histories and in pilot books. Our moderns will have it that such things are chance and an accumulation of them a blind accident, but I hold with those greater men, our fathers. Some one here in these places, some early captain, first sailing offended the gods of the sea. Hence all the tangle of the southern corner of Wales, Jack Sound and Ramsey Sound and the Bishop and his clerks, and, worst of all, Wild Goose Race.

I write without knowledge of the Wild Goose Race. I have never been through it; neither have you been through death, you who read this. Yet, as we all know that death is a perilous passage and in accordance dread it, so I with the Wild Goose Race, well so named. My book told me that little ships like mine getting into that water were often dismasted and ‘even foundered.’ I like that word ‘even.’

It seems that in Wild Goose Race a boat is taken up and pitched to heaven and let drop again, twirled round like a teetotum, thrown over on her side, banged off sideways with great stunning blows upon the cheek-bone, and blinded all the time with cataracts of spray, the while the air is filled with a huge mocking laughter. Many races do I know, Portland Race and Alderney Race and Little Saint Alban’s Race, of which you shall later hear, and the Race round the Skerries of Anglesey, if you may call that a race, and the Race in Bardsey Sound. But there are many races, which, thank heaven, I do not know and which I do not propose to know, such as the Race of Ushant, and the very damnable races of the northern headlands, including that Great Maelstrom of which we hear so much and see so little, and which puts on great airs: but none of these, I am told, is comparable to Wild Goose Race, therefore did I let it alone upon this passage. Do not believe it when you read it in books that a race is made by anything so simple as a tide against a wind or a sudden precipice in the depths of the sea. It is made by the anger of those that rule the sea. And yet of races there is one that has always treated me kindly, and that is the race off the Start. I have been through it I know not how many times and always was the sea there either quite smooth, gentle, purring, and domestic; or an honest running sea, parallel and ordered. But, perhaps, whatever governs the Start Race had received from me without my knowing it, some courtesy. I take this opportunity to thank whatever Powers govern that little corner of the watery world for their kindness.

I have often seen pictures of these Powers, horses and men and women with fishes’ tails and scales, and gods without scales that ride in chariots over the sea. I suppose in that world, or in those circles, the scales are a badge of service, making the link between the immortals and the dumb fishes of the sea; just as our highbrows make a link between the rich masters who rob the modern world and the millions who work. Only there is this difference, that our highbrows have no scales; they have nothing in common with the dumb millions who work. But I will not pursue this metaphor lest I should offend Mr. and Mrs. Able, who themselves indeed live in western suburbs but, upon the other hand, are perpetually in the houses of the great.

Where then was I? Why, coming into the quiet and amplitude of Saint Bride’s Bay, but having before me the terrors of Jack Sound. For it is true of the sea here as everywhere, that it is the symbol of life, and of our ceaseless duties, and of death. We must never expect long quiet in the business of our living, nor any long security in any passage of the sea. But I must say that this run across Saint Bride’s Bay was very genial upon that summer noon, only there came with the early afternoon those ominous patches of an oily look to windward, the falling of the breeze, the sea still running, and yet the canvas not always over well filled: briefly, the renewed menace of a deadly calm. That calm fell upon us suddenly enough, just at the moment when we might, with the last of the ebb, have run through Jack Sound. It came upon us at the mouth of that forbidden passage, and left us idle and foolish, pointing anyhow and seeing, to our despair, the marks upon the distant shore slowly moving backward as (alas!) we drifted north.

Truly, indeed, did the immortal trio—Swift, Arbuthnot, and Pope—exclaim in chorus: ‘What is mortal man but a broomstick!’ Never are we in half a gale of wind but we pray crapulously for calm. Never are we in a calm but we whine peevishly for wind. What, Dog, would you have the weather cut out for you like a suit of clothes? Is all the universe to arrange itself simply to your convenience, as it does for the very rich—so long as they keep off the sea? Will you not be content with sailing unless just that wind plays which is exactly trimmed for your miserable barque, neither too strong nor too light nor too far forward so that you have to beat, nor so far aft that you fear a gybe, or pooping from a running sea? Will you never repose in the will of your Maker and take things as they come? Why, then, drift round Skomer like a fool!

Which, indeed, was what the Nona did, for as it fell dead calm, the set of the sea took her in the most amusing unaccountable way on a jolly little voyage of exploration. The sea took charge. The tiller was not worth holding, the helm swung idle, and the canvas hung like the flabby muscles on the face of an Opposition leader towards the end of the third hour of a speech from the Front Bench to which he has had to listen, sorely against his will. It hung loose and inept, like the hands of a poor man waiting orders in the presence of a rich man, or like the mind of a sceptic when he considers the ultimate nature of good and evil—let alone beauty. The sea took charge and trolled the little boat along, keeping her just so far from the shore, as who should say, ‘See, my child, how remarkable is the Island of Skomer! Come with me, I will show you every cranny of its outer shore.’ So were we taken off round Skomer by the tide in that calm, further and further from Jack Sound.

When they had played this farce with us long enough, the Powers halted the sea, as is their fashion every six hours, and we found ourselves close aboard a large ketch which lay at anchor off that Skomer shore. There was one man upon the deck, smoking a pipe and keeping his mind empty, as is the duty of all mortals in such few intervals of leisure as heaven affords us. He bade us not knock into him, and we called out to him (but not very loud, for we were at a familiar cast of but few yards) that if we came too close aboard we would shove off and do him no harm. We asked him who he was and where he was going. He did not tell us who he was, but he told us where he was going, which was to Cork, and what he had on board, which was a cargo of coal.

The lazy sun, halfway down the sky, looked indifferently upon us; the quite smooth sea turned again in its perpetual come and go, and took us slowly back in so many hours, till we found ourselves again by evening where we had started, at the mouth of Jack Sound. What this current or tide movement was which had thus taken us nearly round Skomer and back again, I know not, but it was a journey that cost nothing, and, tedious as it was, we had at least learned another few miles of shore. It seemed, however, all of a set purpose, for the wind now blew again lightly but steadily from the northeast. The ebb was well on its way, and we could point through Jack Sound, and hope to be in Milford Haven, round Saint Anne’s Head, before the late darkness of this day in early June.

So did we enter that passage.

Jack Sound in that evening light was a repetition of Ramsey, only more violent, for we were more in the full roar of the ebb. There was the same rush as of a millrace, the same cataracts of falling water over the landward rocks. We came out of it with the setting sun glorious upon our starboard quarter, and ran quickly for the end of Skokholm—another Scandinavian name—sure (in that steady breeze) of rounding Saint Anne’s Head easily before darkness, and dropping anchor in some cove of Milford Haven.

But nothing is ever certain at sea. We were, perhaps, a mile from the Head when there rolled up with astonishing rapidity from out the main ocean a solid bank of cloud, sweeping the level of the sea. I say cloud rather than fog, because it was so solid and so dark. It caught us like a cloak thrown over a man’s head; and, before we knew where we were, we found ourselves steering hopelessly by the card, not daring to keep too much out, lest we should lose the mouth of the haven; not daring to keep too much in, lest we should strike: and nothing to prevent that but listening anxiously to the great fog-blast, which was now hooting regularly in its panic from the height of the headland.

What followed for nearly two hours was such an adventure as only wretched amateurs would indulge in, and amateurs in a craft which did not draw more than six feet of water. The wind, such as it was, had dropped, of course, with the fog. It gave us only enough way to creep eastward before it; and what we proposed to do was so to feel our way in the fading light through that dense mist until we should hear the slight surge of water upon the rocks of the haven mouth to port, that is, on the north side of the haven entry. I had a large plan aboard, and I knew that there was water close up to the shore, and that it was plain enough going, with nothing hidden beneath the surface. So we gingerly put her head slightly round, when we made out the mournful menace of the fog-horn to have come just aft of the beam; my companion took the helm, and I went forward with the lead, and also to call out to him to put the helm up whenever that might be made necessary by our getting too close. We faintly heard already the slight wash of the gently heaving water, and I saw, some few yards off the bow, little gleams of white through the mist, which were the foam sliding from the rock surfaces, as we slipped by. The Nona’s movement was so very slight that even if she had struck a glancing blow, nothing that was not jagged would have harmed her greatly; but we were preserved and did not touch.

We had this further good fortune, that, just as it grew quite dark, the sound of the slight surge to leeward receded and disappeared so that we knew we had turned the headland and opened the first bay of that long inland arm of the sea. Our chart showed us good depth and good holding-ground, and a good berth for the night, granted that there should be no other craft about. We heard none such through the fog; no voices, no swinging spars, no movement at all. So when we had got well into the bight, we dropped anchor; trusting to luck that, as she swung to her chain, she would not strike shoal ground nor anything near. Had we still had the dinghy, I would have gone out and explored and made certain, and risked my chance of getting back aboard through the mist, but, having no dinghy, we had to take things as they were, and these seemed secure enough, for we were well out of the fairway. The first of the night was interrupted by that perpetual call of the great horn upon the headland, but before midnight the fog lifted, the sound ceased, and a profound silence fell upon the sea and the land. We had also the comfort of seeing that we had plenty of room to swing, with the shore perhaps a quarter of a mile away.

That night as I fell asleep I designed the second and third verses of the ‘Chanty of the Nona.’

The next morning we found, following the flood up the Haven, a very slight breeze from the west and north, not enough to allow us to beat up against the current; so we passed the time till the beginning of the ebb, or rather till the flood should slacken, sailing slowly up that long fiord, Milford Haven, of which one reads so much in history, but which to-day, having no industrial hinterland, has half dropped out of men’s memories. Two evils of the past are rooted in its landscape, for it was here that the first Tudor claimant, ‘the foul usurper, Henry Tydder,’ landed with his French mercenaries to try for the crown, which he grasped in two weeks on Bosworth Field. And it was hence that the transports sailed for the Puritan orgy of lust, loot, and massacre in Ireland under Cromwell’s leadership. I wondered as I cruised about, watching the shores and the little town near by, what further fate Milford Haven might hold for England. Things go by threes—especially evils—what will the third curse arising from this inlet be?

The wind freshened just as the flood was slackening, so we turned to beat out. It was well into the afternoon when we took the open sea, with the wind a trifle north of west, so that our last board out of harbour was a free run. We took her well outside so as to be able to set a straight course for Lundy and beyond, intending a passage to Bideford River, and the ending of this voyage.

The wind dropping somewhat, it was evening before we had well passed Saint Goven’s lightship, and all that night we went quietly over the seas with a gentle following wind until, before morning, we raised Lundy Light full and clear. But the wind failed us at dawn, falling first to irregular puffs, and at last, when we were about a mile and a half northeast of the island and pointing right for Appledore Bar, it fell off altogether. Little patches of slightly ruffled water, here and there, fewer and more distant one from the other, at last faded out to nothingness; and we lay helpless, hardly moving, until the set of some slight current drew us half a mile further on into that strange piece of water called the Great White Horse Race.

What this may be in heavy weather or even in a strong breeze I cannot tell, for I have never been through it before or since. As things were, in that dead calm, it was a perpetual succession of fairly even, long, smooth, watery hills, with troughs astonishingly deep and rounded crests astonishingly high for a morning without wind. There was no way at all on the Nona; she lay buoyant enough, but like a log; broadside on and rolling damnably for hour after hour; shaking her spars with every lie-over, as though to so many hammer-blows; throwing the boom with a bang, although I had made it as fast as I could, and giving a violent jerk at the mainsheet each time she ended a swing. It was a miserable ten hours or so that we endured, gazing at Lundy from the top of each passing heave, and drifting there paralysed under the useless sky.

Lundy is one of those neat things which you get now and then in Nature, and which look as though they had been specially designed on a rather careful plan with one simple object. One would think Lundy could do no harm—yet I always remember the Montague.

It is so placed that it gives shelter in any weather. It is a sort of little breakwater set up in the midst of the Bristol Channel, offering security to all craft, coming up or down; for there is good holding-ground everywhere about, and you can lie under the lee of the land whichever way it may be blowing. The only drawback of the neighbourhood for small craft is this same White Horse Race, in which we had been caught by the calm. Even in that oily weather, its great swells passed us half way to the height of our jaws, and our topmast, excessive for the little craft, made her roll all the worse, while the motion was so jerky that at times I feared for the fastenings of the shrouds at the sides. But a larger craft would think nothing of this patch of sea and, save for it, all the water round Lundy is exactly made for security.

I have never landed on the island. I have heard many legends about it, none of which I repeat for fear that they are false. But what I should most like to know (only I have never met any one who could tell me) is whether the pleasure of isolation which these places afford increases with the years, or at last becomes intolerable? I knew a man once who, during all the latter part of his life, was torn between the desire of possessing an island, and his fear lest, once he had bought it, he should find that he had purchased misfortune. All his friends told him that islands were like those legendary objects of bad luck which one man has to pass on to another and which each new holder soon finds unendurable. To be king of one’s own land, to be quite cut off from the complexity and futilities of the world, to have a little country all of one’s own, neatly bounded, inaccessible if one chooses to make it so—that is enough to tempt any one who has lived among men. But I am assured by many who have not themselves tried it, that after a very short experience in such things one has no desire but to be rid of them. A community might find it endurable enough and, indeed, religious communities have often found it so; but not individuals, nor one family. Lundy, however, is larger than most, and perhaps the sense of isolation is less.

When we had lain tossing in the White Horse Race all through that morning and on to well past noon, there came, to our great joy, about half-past one, a little breath, a little slant of wind, from off Hartland Point. For all those hours we had had no steering-way at all, merely drifting and tossing to the loud clapping of empty canvas. But now the sails filled and, weary of the sea, we put her nose round for Bideford River, with this pleasant little breeze slightly blowing and coming right from the starboard quarter, so that she sailed at her best. The tide was at the neaps, there was little current, we had a straight course to steer.

The wind rose, the sun was clear and shining, and all the sea sparkled and was alive. It was a weather in which to remember the little sacred places of the shore; the little towns with their own gods of the sea, and springs tumbling through them from the cliffs above: the little places that preserve their own happenings. And one such place of which I had very often heard was there, far off upon the starboard quarter, and I knew it by the chart for Clovelly.

There are places holy to Apollo, Delian places, protected tiny townships of the sea.

So from the tumbling water between Bideford River and Lundy, that wooded coast, so isolated, remote, sacred, appeared the touch of white in the green which marked Clovelly. Looked on thus over the water that rushed by, and in the swirl of the ship’s way, Clovelly seemed what I had read in books as a boy it was, and what I suppose it once may have been, when England was England.

But England to-day from the land is a very different thing to England forever from the sea. Some years later I had again to seek Clovelly from the land, and I shall no more forget it than did that Northumbrian man whom God raised from the dead, and whose experience is told us by the Venerable Bede, could forget his glimpse of hell.

I had come with friends in a motor-car, because I had been told a man should see Clovelly before he died. I had come from the noble isolation of Hartland, where the great seas were running in upon the rocks after a gale and thundering at the doors of that good inn which faces ocean there. Our road ran high above the sea, and as we came near to the turning beyond which the cleft of Clovelly would open below us, and its vision of peace, we heard a murmur like that of bees swarming. As we came nearer it was a confused clamour of human beings, and as we came nearer still we saw the dreadful thing in its entirety.

A great mass of chars-à-bancs were parked on the road itself, on the steep edge of the hill and cleft whence one looked down on the village and the sea below. There, blocking the ridge road, an immense mass of lost souls struggled and fought for the most part, or stood squeezed in a sullen despair. Their function was—not their intention, but the use to which the irony of Divine Vengeance had put them—their function was to form a solid wall by which all access from the village below, all further opportunity of climbing, should be forbidden. Meanwhile up that cleft swirled, surged, pushed, strenuously and unfailingly, one mass of packed, dark-clothed mortality, closely hemmed in by the cottages (I wondered that their walls stood the strain!), and looking from where we stood very much like black pressed German caviare, the acid stuff which is sold for the destruction of the race. This wedge had its base upon the seashore and was filled with a communal desire, with a mass mind, impelling it to attempt the height—a hopeless task! For the char-à-banc crowd above could not have been pierced by cavalry, let alone by an untrained infantry such as was this mob working hopelessly uphill.

So far so bad; but worse remained behind. For on the calm sea of that bay were to be discovered three steamers, each of them looking like a piece of cigar-shaped board on which innumerable black ants had swarmed. Of these the one nearest to the shore was still discharging in its boats further human beings, who were fighting to land on whatever little strip of foothold could be found, while the two other ships stood by ready to reënforce the attack.

So true is it that men desire beauty before all things and that great beauty draws all men to it.

The atheists, of whom some few stalwarts remain, strong against the pantheist flood; those who despise mankind when they are healthy and when they are unhealthy despair of it; the men who make nothing of life and think it immaterial whether man be or no—these are, in my judgment, of a clumsy habit in argument. For they talk in mere negations. But if they would breed (as is their intention) a proper contempt for the supposed Divine in man, a proper negligence of our fellow beings and a right view of the whole insignificant human affair, they ought not to confine themselves to negatives, they ought to present vivid images, concrete and striking, and say: ‘Look there and judge mankind!’ I suggest to them Clovelly on a holiday; also the sands of Weston-super-Mare; also Saint Lazare Station in Paris, the Frederick Street Station in Berlin, or Liverpool Street in London, just after office hours on a week-day; or again, a crowd in Catalonia, outside the ring, when by some accident the bull gets loose.

There are other brilliant images all ready to the atheist’s hand: a dining-table of the rich, with some thirty guests, men and women, exactly alternate, like the red and the black cards in a patience, the wretched couples turning ten minutes to the left and ten minutes to the right, like jacks; the wine of only one kind—yellow and acid with bubbles in it. Or again, they might give the same effect with the vision of any public vehicle, designed to hold twenty-four but packed with forty. Or again, they might do no more than distribute snapshots, judiciously snapped, of the men who are most talked about in this our day.

The truth is the atheists do not know their job; for it has been clearly proved upon the thumb and the four fingers of the left hand that men cut off from the Divine are also cut off from reason.

So we sailed on, leaving that tiny white point of Clovelly far behind in its combe, dark against the afternoon sun, and ran straight for Bideford River, till we came to the fairway.

We had also a mark to steer by which was unmistakable; it was a gate of dark smooth water in a mass of white surge. For rollers, though there was but a hearty breeze, through some mysterious process of the sea, were bursting with violence upon the bar of the river as though it blew a gale. The bar looked like one tumbling wall of angry white, even from a long way off, and, between that wall and the east side of the harbour-mouth, was this one narrow gateway of smooth water. We passed through it safely enough, steering by the leading marks, which are here quite clear, and brought up in the deep pool off Appledore, waiting for the tide to take us up to Bideford.

All that bit of coast is Charles Kingsley, with his violent fanatical genius (for it was no less) and his power of imprinting himself upon the place. Fanatical men are not usually happy; but I think Kingsley must have been happy, because he had the tide under him all the time. Everything in his own lifetime was going his way. The cause to which he was attached, the destruction of the Faith, appeared to be triumphing more and more; though the slightest accident the other way (such as Newman’s conversion) was an intolerable irritant to him. He lived in that part of the earth which he most loved, he enjoyed all its habits, he was supported by everything around. You could get no better and, at the same time, no more comic criticism of that Kingsleian mood than what has happed to the name ‘Westward Ho,’ which Kingsley rendered famous. ‘Westward Ho’ simply means the westerly of two landing-places. ‘Ho,’ or ‘Hoe,’ is a wharf: but that ‘Ho’ has been spread broadcast throughout the world of English as a sort of ‘Halloa,’ or ‘Yoicks,’ to call the adventurous overseas; and not one man in a thousand, I suppose, but thinks of those two little letters as a hoot (perhaps he gives them a nobler name); as a call, resonant of the Elizabethan sailings.

One of the saddest things I know about the beach near Bideford River is the deadly hatred with which the dons have persecuted poor, dear Kenwith. Kenwith is a place where a few boatloads of Danes landed in the Dark Ages, and were defeated by the English. The name is quite clear, the tradition is equally clear, and the description of the position is unmistakable. Therefore have the learned, as is their wont, insisted with the utmost virulence that the tradition, the name, the description, are all a popular error, and that the place where the little scrimmage really came off was miles away.

It is interesting to analyse the motives of this sort of thing. We are all familiar with it. The universities of all countries, but especially of our own, are a regular hothouse for breeding it; but when one first comes across it, one is puzzled why it should come into being at all. Whence springs this lust for saying that the Gospel of Saint John was not written by Saint John? that Homer was not written by Homer? that the Battle of Hastings was not called the Battle of Hastings—although all the people who fought there called it the Battle of Hastings? that William the Conqueror had only a handful of men there—though his secretary, who saw them, and read all the documents connected with them, gives us fifty thousand? that Julius Cæsar’s Gallic War was written by his tutor—and all the rest of the nonsense?

The powerful force urging dons to make fools of themselves in this way seems to me to come from a convergence of three currents. First of all there is the vanity of the learned man, who has all the better opportunities for action because few have any knowledge at all of the matter, and he is fairly safe from criticism—or thinks himself so. His fellows will not give him away. It is clearly a flattering thing to think that one is right where all the world has been wrong, and, in a time like ours, when there has been accumulated such a mass of special technical knowledge, people are ready to swallow almost any assertion, because they know not what new evidence may have appeared.

The second source is that very human thing, the love of the marvellous—though it is the love of the marvellous appearing in a very degraded form. Your pedant says: ‘All the apparent evidence, all tradition, all that you would call common sense, would make out Little Muddipool to be that same Little Muddipool where the treaty of Little Muddipool was signed. It is called in plain words “The Treaty of Little Muddipool,” and its last words are “Made by us at Little Muddipool.” But I tell you that it was not Little Muddipool at all, but a place a hundred miles away with a different name.’ The spirit at work there is exactly the same spirit as that which says: ‘Common sense and your own experience will tell you that the bishop must have crossed the river either by a bridge or by a boat. I tell you that the holy man sailed across it on his coat. What do you think of that?’

And the third cause is a negative one. The perpetual substitution of hypothesis for fact (which is the great mark of dons to-day) ends by getting men into a state of mind where they can no longer weigh the proportions of evidence: they can no longer distinguish between the certain, the probable, and the absurd. Thus, it was but a little time ago that an Oxford don came out with a miracle. He said he had discovered any number of classical passages containing concealed anagrams, furnishing the most astonishing information; for instance, that Euripides, when he was a little boy, wrote the plays of Æschylus. A stopper was put on him, however, by a man who wrote to the ‘Spectator’ (of all papers), proving that the said don’s name was but thinly concealed in an anagram of the opening lines of the ‘Iliad,’ so that he must have written that excellent poem, not when he was a little boy, but long before he was born. And so much for that.

Another pleasing thing about Bideford River is the startling contrast between Appledore, on the business side of the harbour over against the sea, and Instow, all so genteel upon the further shore: Appledore frankly a lair, and Instow a desirable resort. Appledore for beer, Instow for wine; and the English talked in the one almost incomprehensible to the other. I have sometimes thought that whenever the foundations of society shall be shaken, the strong men of Appledore will sail across (you can almost walk it at low tide but for one thin channel) and storm and loot Instow. Pretty well every modern set of human habitations has this contrast of rich and poor quarters, but when there is water flowing in between them it is the more striking: with hard work on one side of the stream and the fruits of it in leisure upon the other.

My voyage was over. I had brought up in Bideford River before the long bridge of Bideford, and I made all quiet for the night, and for a long time to come. For there would I leave the Nona in charge, till I could take her out again.

Swaying in the cabin that night also, I finished writing the Chanty of the Nona, of which if any man say that it is a vile piece of verse, I am ready to agree with him, but if another man say that it heartens him, and fills him with the sea, why, I am ready to agree with him also. It is all one. Bideford River is the end of my passage and a place of rest. We come to death at last, as is our due, and we come into port out of the sea, and all things reach their end.

I have always thought it a very ridiculous thing to bother too much, after thirty, over literary fame: if it comes, let it come, but for God’s sake let us have no publicity with it, for to be pointed at and known is to live in a glass cage. And very much do I applaud those men who do what in youth I myself desired to do, but was unable to do, that is, to write consistently under a false name, and carefully cover one’s tracks. I wanted to write verse under one name, history under another, travel under another—but fate was too strong.

Of the men who have done this in my time the most successful was Dodgson, the mathematical don at Christ Church—that is, of The House. He had calculated well; and the immense fame of Lewis Carroll and of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ left him private and secure.

Mention of that book also makes me consider how false is nearly all literary fame, or, rather, how great an element of falsity there is in nearly all such fame. ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a very remarkable book, as are, indeed, other books of Dodgson’s, though not all. But a large element in its vast diffusion was its consonance with a particular ‘drawing-room’ mood of a particular day. I shall be called blasphemous, I know, but I am perfectly certain that ‘Alice’ will not long survive the ease and unquestioned security of the England of her day. For every implication in morals, and even in humour, with which Dodgson’s books are crammed, sprang from that security and that ease. Nor is there a stronger symptom of so abnormal a passage in human affairs as was the English gentry’s generation of 1833-99 (abnormal, for normal men live under a strain and a peril, and in active defence against the barbarian or the menacing enemy) than the delight of Dodgson’s vast audience in nonsense: in the humour which is founded upon folly as contrasted with the wit that is founded upon wisdom. Even the facile composition of odd childish words, which had a slightly reminiscent sound, was sufficient to delight that generation. But when the terrors and the heroisms permanently return, the sawdust will run out of such things.

And, after all, what is the possession of literary fame? Can dead men use it? Does any man possessing it, unless he be asinine in his vanity, think himself the true creator of some really high line his pen has happened to set down? Is there any writing man with a true judgment of great things in writing who does not doubt his own achievement? Or is there any who, when some particular piece of verse or rhetoric which he has written convinces him of its merit, does not admit to his own soul that not he was the true author, but rather some force working through him?

Again, does not any writer who is also reasonably manly prefer any one of man’s virtues to an accident of verse or prose? Who with stuff in him would not rather be a brave boor than a cowardly poet?

So much for literary gents. Excluding my own self, I should like to see them all driven aboard an immense barge, and the same towed out to sea and there scuttled. Their absurd little quarrels, their posings, their insufficiency, the chaos of their minds—all these things are a burden, and there is not one day’s riding upon a horse or sailing upon the sea (let alone still better things which, for the honour I bear you, I will not mention here) that is not worth the whole tonnage and shiploads of their printed stuff, save here and there a piece of lyric verse, or here and there a good run and rhythm in half a page of prose.

But, I say again, that’s all one. Here am I in Bideford River, at anchor and come to the end of the seas, leaving her, the Nona, my companion and my home, my very loyal boat, under the tutelage of the long bridge of Bideford, which is notoriously the end of the world.

Now a day came when I had some freedom again. So I set out at once from Devon with one companion, and, finding all on board as I had left it, I set sail to leave Bideford River. I proposed to myself to explore the outer sea beyond Hartland, which till then I had not seen, though now I know its character and its harbours familiarly enough.

The tide so served that it was evening when I set out, nor was it easy to shoot the channel at the bar of Appledore, in spite of the strong ebb, because such slight wind as there was had too much north in it. For the same reason we had to beat all that night, fetching up towards Hartland Point in two long boards; helped at first by the tide, but later, of course, finding it against us. It was daylight again before we came to the headland, and opened the coast beyond.

The ancients made a solemn and special sanctity, it seems, of this barrenness and strength and height of Hartland. The Romans called it the Point of Hercules. They felt, I think, that when they rounded it, they were coming into another sea; for they were much alive to the mystery of things. If they thought this of Hartland, that it was a boundary, they were right. Within Hartland, you are under the wing of England, and in homely water; outside Hartland, you have all the West before you, and the power of Ocean. And so with us that morning. Even as the wind died down there came a mighty succession of slow heavings, which grew more regular and defined until at last the smooth water, just crisped here and there, by mere breaths of air, ran in giant folds—parallel, regular, unceasing, enormous. All that sea, I say, is odd, and I have felt spells upon it.

The long rollers came prodigious out of the southwest under almost a calm. There was not wind enough to do more than give the boat steerage-way—it was lucky we had that, for if it had been a dead calm she would have rolled broadside on and shaken herself badly with that too tall topmast of hers, as she had done on an earlier day in the White Horse Race. The rollers came on and on; not the relic of a gale (for there had been none anywhere), but raised by one of those innumerable mysterious influences which between them make the sea. They lifted one after the other, hiding the horizon; we topped them, we sank into the trough; they heaved majestically on, to thunder upon the savage grandeur of Hartland.

Our time has discovered so many things in the material world (and has grown paralysed to so many other more important things) that we profess to explain everything with perfect links of cause and effect. It is an occasion to use the phrase ‘We miserable sinners.’ For we shall never know anything at all compared with the unknown. What makes such waves?

For that matter, why is one sea so different from another? You measure the amount of salt, the weight of the water, the strength of the wind. Though you had all the factors we can measure, these three and a score of others (the pressure of the air, its wetness, its heat, and so on), yet you could never say why the difference between one sea and another appears. All measurable factors might be the same, and yet the seas quite different. You can, indeed, hardly describe that difference any more than you can describe the difference between two instruments of music, the flute and the trumpet; or the difference between two materials in portraiture, marble and bronze. We only know that it is there. But our stupidly proud time misses such essential categories.

Why is it that what they call ‘The New World’ is something utterly different in quality, taste, intimate soul, from the old? We have here not only the conflict between England and America, but between Spain and the Argentine, and between England herself and the white colonies, and between the French and the French Canadians. It is not newness; it is not lack of tradition; it is difference of timbre—as violent as the difference between a railway whistle and the note of a thrush, or between wood and iron.

Modern men knowing a dozen out of a million causes reason downwards from the rules they have, instead of trusting their perceptions as their fathers did.

I take it that the great differentiations in human history proceed from these uncharted depths of cause, and that one civilisation splits apart from another through stirrings in the very root of the soul. Meanwhile, men prophesy and the future makes fools of them.

The great administrators of wholly foreign lands are men who have not pretended to understand these differences, or to combat them, still less to suppress them. They are men who have recognised the alien blood and, as it were, entered into it. That is government; that is Empire: to get into the shoes of the governed.

In the strange, successful, perhaps ephemeral, adventure which has put our high European culture in command over the lives of others in the East and in Africa, not a few men have arisen tested by circumstance and conforming to this idea. I have heard with respect the judgment of others upon half a dozen Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen of the sort, though I have not seen their work. Russians have told me of compatriots of their own who have achieved such things beyond the Urals and the Caspian. Of Germans I never heard that any were so much as capable of beginning the great task. That the Spaniards changed half a continent we know. But the only instance that ever came under my own eyes, and that but for a few days, was the instance of Marshal Lyautey. Lyautey’s Morocco is an astonishing affair.

It is true that there lay behind his great achievement more than a lifetime of foundation—the steady French transformation of North Africa. It is like a coral reef, solid, detailed, infinitely particular: the work of innumerable units, sacrificed, obscure, tenacious, creative, permanent. None the less, what Lyautey has done is a building by itself. It is like the new Gothic of Brazenose or Magdalen at Oxford: one may say that there lay behind this also the multitudinous, patient work of a lifetime or more since Pugin began: or it is like Parsons’ turbine, which came after so much experiment, but stands by itself all the same.

It is not belittling Lyautey’s great work in Morocco to say that these things are only possible when there is frankly recognised the essential principle of personal responsibility in governing; or (to put it in Colonial phrasing), ‘one-man control,’ or, to put it in Aristotelian terms, ‘Monarchy.’

There is no other working form of administration over multitudes of men, except the aristocratic; and the aristocratic form of administration—which ruled for nearly three hundred years over Protestant England after the Reformation had destroyed popular monarchy and made wealth supreme—is only possible in those rare communities where men enjoy being governed by a clique and look up to, and revere, a special class whom they think of as their natural masters.

What Marshal Lyautey has done in the organisation of French Morocco has been based upon two foundations which, when they are absent from the effort to govern aliens—as one or both commonly are—make such government increasingly difficult; until, at last, it has to be abandoned. The first of these foundations is working with the alien people whom one administrates, not against them, nor even above them. The second foundation is the deliberate investment of one’s own capital and energy for the benefit of the alien governed rather than for one’s own benefit: that is, the development of communications and of building, the extension of instruction, the improvement of waterways, afforestation—all manner of expensive functions which you can only get from a government directly concerned for the good of all the people and which will never be undertaken by the private home trader working for his pocket alone.

It is the absence of this sympathy with, and eager help of, the governed which prevents a trading community from ever biting into alien soil. For, in a trading community, the administration of a foreign dependency is directed to helping the home merchant or settler. The road is driven, the river is bridged, not primarily for the benefit of the governed, but primarily for the immediate profit of the governors. With this there goes a contempt of the governed, which is a dangerous sign, and later, that more dangerous sign, a hatred of them.

The foreign rule, therefore, gets more and more distasteful to the governed. For half a lifetime they wonder at it: then they grow restive, finding themselves despised to no purpose. Then they permanently rebel. At last the unnatural tyranny breaks down. When it breaks down the governors gradually depart and little impress of their foreign rule remains.

It was so apparently between Carthage and her dependencies.

But when the governors expend themselves for the good of the governed, an amalgamation takes place between the national spirit of the one and of the other, and the superior trains and shepherds his subjects into a common civilisation. One of the tests of success in alien government is to note whether the governors despise or admire the governed. If they despise them it is proof that they are unfit to govern. If they admire in them what is to be admired, all goes well. I found in Morocco that a contempt for Islam (I do not say a difference from Islam, but a contempt for it, a contempt which would regard the Moor as a ‘native’ and the French as in some way a ‘superior race’) was only to be discovered here and there among the worst of the colonists. It was your half-educated, lower-middle-class immigrant who took this attitude and gave all the trouble. The higher you went in the scale, the greater was the liking for the Moor and for his civilisation, the greater the desire to understand him and to know his past, the greater the admiration of his art, his dignity, his faith. When one got to the head of things, in the Residency-General and in the Marshal’s own household, there was an understanding of the whole Moorish past and present like the understanding which a scholar has of his beloved text; it was an intimate and all-pervading familiarity.

I carried away with me from that glimpse of the Atlas and of the treeless run of burnt land beyond (for I travelled while the heat was still upon us) vivid pictures in the mind: first of a vast tract of dead upland, utterly bare, between Oudja and the Moulouya (I had come from Oran); this tract had about it the accursed inhuman effect of the great American deserts in the West of the United States; then, next in order, of Taza on the edge of the hill fighting, and of the story I was told there of two Moorish brothers. One of these would fight under the French for six months and then desert. Thereupon the other brother would enlist in his place. So much was the object of each the pleasure of fighting and the advantage of pay, and so little the political idea of independence.

Nor could any one forget who has seen it (and it is now become or will soon become, a commonplace of travel) that great new road which I saw in its last making, but which was already nearly completed. It is driven right through Barbary like a stay, like a back-bone, from the Bay of Carthage to the river-mouth of Rabat on the Atlantic tide; near one thousand miles in its actual trace, and following the great ride which the first Mohammedans took when they overwhelmed the West—when that horseman rode into the sea surf on the sands by the bar of Rabat River and cried out: ‘Had you not set bounds, O God, to the earth, with this your sea, I would ride for ever westward and continue to conquer in Your Name.’ A man may take his motor-car on the boat to-day from Marseilles to Tunis and follow that strict and graded broad way uninterruptedly till he comes to the Atlantic and, turning south to Casablanca, ship it again for Europe.

The surprise of that Moroccan feat was the way in which it was handled during the Great War. When war was already certain in the last days of July, 1914, the Government in Paris, the politicians, sent orders to the Resident-General that all troops should be withdrawn to the coast, the interior to be abandoned, and reconquest (if possible!) to be achieved after the Peace. We who know what those words ‘after the Peace’ have come to mean, know also that it would have been the end of the French in Morocco. It would have been the return to the old pressure upon the Algerian frontier and evidence to all Islam that Europe had failed.

What the soldier did was to maintain his garrisons in spite of the politicians. What was astonishing, he continued the development of Morocco during all those four years of mortal strain, as though the peace had not been broken. Still was the railway laid, and still the new road completed, and still were the buildings set up, and still was the wild hill country contained by its ring of troops; until, when the curtain lifted in ’19, Europe saw, not the Morocco there had been when the Occident entered on its great struggle, but another Morocco, wealthier, stronger and more settled, with great new European towns side by side with the Moslem, and with the whole territory organised.

These new great towns are planned and are built under a military rule—and that is very wise, for the anarchy of individual mercantile effort would have made the experiment break down. No house may be built in the European fashion to jar against the spirit of the place. Everywhere the roofs must be flat and the outline preserved. Also the European town is kept wholly distinct from the Mohammedan. Thus in Meknes you may hear Mass in a chapel which lies within the very thickness of the city wall—it is the old chapel of the Portuguese prisoners during the past of the great Sultans—but you may not enter that chapel from within the city; the door faces outward, upon the country side of the wall. Upon the day before I left Morocco, a soldier who was driving me upon the heights above one of the new cities in his car said to me musingly, as we had halted to look down upon the view of mixed Europe and Africa and of all that vast new wealth: ‘It is just ten years ago that the Sultan of the day, annoyed with his brother, had him devoured by lions.’ Those who love contrast will not find it stronger anywhere than in this strange land.

But these distant memories of Morocco go ill with the presence of a Devon sea under the breaking of a chill dawn. Those African pictures in my mind, hot sand and palm, painted by memory in the night, grew pale and disappeared in the northern daylight, as do the coloured flashes of the headland lights with the coming of the day.

There was still no more wind than would just make the Nona feel her helm. My companion slept below. The heave of the sea grew less; and then, to my disgust and dread, over the sea, already too hazy (so that the high land some three miles away was like a ghost), a fog came drifting up and enveloped us altogether.

I put her up a point more westerly, so as to be on the safe side, for I did not know what current there might be here, and I had to give the land a good offing. I did not want to come up through the fog in such calm weather to hear, close at hand, the treacherous murmur of slightly moving water upon rocks.

Of all experiences at sea in a small boat, under sail, there is none in these days of steam and petrol more trying (after a certain length of it) than being thus half-becalmed with barely steering-way in a part of the sea where the great ships ply up and down, they themselves independent of the stillness that holds you fast. You can hear (as I did on that morning) the beat of the propellers, miles away or close at hand. You hear the hooting from time to time of a ship’s siren—but there is nothing to tell you where your danger may be, nor upon what line it may be approaching you. Some with more experience could, perhaps, have judged that these occasional sounds were at such and such a distance, each or none of them threatening; but to me it seemed as though every steamer in the Bristol Channel was atop of us. I have no doubt that had the fog lifted I should have had nothing in sight but a couple of outward bound tramps halfway to the horizon, and perhaps one small steamer in from the Atlantic seas, and going up to Avonmouth, rather nearer to our shore so as to save the strength of the tide. Indeed, when the fog did lift towards noon, the sea was of that appearance, with not half a dozen craft to be seen, and none near. But in the white, cold blankness of the mist (with nothing whereby to judge save the ear), the rhythmic beating of the blades seemed anywhere close at hand; and if the hooting of the steam whistles was dull and dim, that seemed due not to distance, but to the blanketing of the dense cloud. It rose at last, first in patches and wreaths, then altogether, and a pale sun showed over distant land.

There is one thing that has always puzzled me about the Devon and Cornwall peninsula, and that is why the entry into it, up to quite late in history, seems to have been from the north.

The deep harbours and secure anchorages are to-day on the south. There is a whole string of them; and it is the south that faces towards the main civilisation of the continent. You have the profound inlet of Falmouth, you have Fowey, you have the miles of inland water at Plymouth, you have the Yealm and Salcombe, and the Dart and Teignmouth. Yet the legends, and even the history of Dumnonia are more concerned with such shallow, small, and difficult places as Saint Ives, Padstow, and Bideford River. The wealth seems to have been more on the north than upon the south, for you will note that the pirate raids principally struck there, and the shrines also, the ancient shrines, are rather on the north than on the south; and on the north also is Tintagel, of which it was said by Tristram: ‘Blessed be Tintagel and all that dwell therein.’ The relics of the saints were established in the northern harbours. The seats of government were on the north: there, in the north, is the story of Arthur; and when Cornwall communicates with Brittany in the early Dark Ages, men seem to sail round the end of the land—though the southern harbours are there, pointing right at the further shore.

Did that peninsula swing as on a pivot axis? Did it deepen to the south during the long, hardly-recorded ages?

I knew nothing of these harbours of North Devon and Cornwall, not even by hearsay. I read up diligently in my ‘West Coast Pilot’ that river which seemed the best for entry along these coasts, and hoped to make it before evening. But the wind died down altogether, and we drifted aimlessly enough back upon the flood, then down again on the ebb, through the night, and all through the morning and the noon, and on into the afternoon again of the second day.

It was full evening, and the sun within an hour of its setting, the air much warmer now and the light mellow with a powdery gold, when a strong breeze came up out of the very sun, as it were; out of the glory. The Nona heeled to it, and was now to be handled at will, making a good run a little north of west, with the opportunity for beating as we chose. We beat up towards the river-mouth, sure, as we thought, that the wind would hold, and that we could easily run up the stream and so to the town beyond before darkness. What we had not reckoned with was a sheer cliff lying along the river-mouth to the west, overhanging it and cutting off the wind. On the eastern shore was an immense stretch of half-covered sand, bearing a name of disaster, and famous for wreckage. Having lost the wind, we could no longer manœuvre, and, what was worse in that narrow passage, we found that the tide did not run true to the sea-tide outside.

We had counted upon the flood making; but, whether because there was more water than usual in the river, or from some odd effect of the wind, or because locally it is always so (though the ‘West Coast Pilot’ told us nothing about it, nor the chart either), the river was still running out violently, and there seemed no sign of an upward-going stream before darkness.

I had almost determined to let her drift out again, catch the sea wind when I got beyond the wall of the cliff, find anchoring-ground well offshore, and wait there for the day, when there appeared, coming down the river at great speed, a white motor-boat, large and exquisitely apparelled, splendid with burning bronze, regally accoutred in unspotted gleaming mantle of the foam-colour, of the cloud-colour, of the snow-colour, and a line of gold all around. It was indeed a boat apparelled, not only as to itself, but as to its two humans; and shameful did the Nona appear, homely, draggle-tail, sordid, even after so very calm a passage, when contrasted with that dandy of the inland waters. Alas! That dead wealth should dig such gulfs between mortals and that poverty should lessen virtue!

But, to be just, it is not only wealth that breeds these fine sights, it is also a certain temper in the owner. And I knew very well that though I had three million pounds and some odd pence over I should never have a tidy boat. I could not sleep in such a thing.

Anyhow, there she came, thundering down the tide. I had thought she would pass me in her rush of speed, and I held up until she should have done so, for it would have been dangerous to have tried to go about with such a weight of movement coming on us, and our own course half out of control, dependent only upon occasional slight splashes of wind from over the cliff. But the motor-boat slowed down, and its owner asked us if we wanted a tow up to the town. We met him with gratitude: he was of that very considerable class known as the Good Rich, with whom are the Penitent Thieves, the Reformed Drunkards, the Sane Professors, the Womanly Furies, and all other candidates for heaven. We threw a line aboard him and made fast, and so went up just as the darkness came, and dropped anchor in the pool under a neat little city, which lived by the traffic of that difficult waterway with its strange tide. But, then, all tides are strange.

My companion and I sat in the hatch that evening under quiet stars, smoking pipes, watching that most pleasant of sights, the home lights of a little harbour town, and their trembling reflections in the water, the slight swaying of the masts of fishing-boats moored by the quay. We wondered together at the way the tide had behaved when it tried to baulk us of our entry, and we decided before we slept that it was better never to reason upon tides, nor even to accept print upon them, but to take them blindly as they came, for ‘No man living can understand the tides,’ said my companion, and, as he said it, he sighed; and he was right.

No man living can understand the tides. And the mystery of the tides is as good a corrective as one could find to our deadening pride in exact measurements, and to the folly of attempting to base real knowledge upon mere calculation: our pretence to a universal science, and to a modern omniscience upon the Nature of Things.

The bungling of landsmen in the matter of tides begins with Galileo. That worthy had a talent for getting off the rails and he bungled on the tides as he did on comets. Then came Newton. Why does the tide flow every twelve hours on the average, instead of every twenty-four? If it be true, as I suppose it roughly is, that the moon is the main puller of the tides (helped and hindered a little by the sun, and certainly by other forces of which we know nothing), then there ought to be a tide every twenty-four hours. Put a lot of fluid round a solid sphere, and set a pull, working from some point well outside the fluid. It looks as though the fluid would heap up towards the pull. It being discovered that the fluid heaped up not only towards the pull, but also on the other side of the solid sphere, away from the pull, the mind of man could not rest without proclaiming an explanatory dogma, and we were told (by Newton among others) that the pull not only heaped up the fluid towards itself, but also dragged away the earth from the water on the far side. Indeed, Newton worked it out and proved that it was so.

If the phenomenon had been the other way about, if the fluid had behaved as one would expect it to behave, and had heaped up only on the side towards the pull—oh! believe me! a formula would have been discovered to explain that with just as much ease as the formula which has been drawn up to explain the real state of affairs.

But this original false dogma is not of very much interest compared with the immense complexity of the tides, and the inability to follow them with any sort of completeness by reason of that complexity.

For the tides behave in the most inexplicable fashion. They follow, of course, certain habits, which we know (from the observation of liquids everywhere) to be in the nature of a liquid in movement. They pile up higher as they rush up funnels. They are checked by ridges, they form eddies—and all the rest of it. But they are continually playing anomalous tricks; and any one who tries to work up a theory of the tides makes a fool of himself: still more does any poor sailing-man do so who uses science to discover what the tide may be doing in a place he has not yet tried. He makes not only a fool of himself, but also, very probably, shipwreck.

Why should a tide run three hours late inshore along the Bight of Sussex? We are told it is an eddy. Of course it is. But why an eddy of such extraordinary retardation? The main Channel tide runs from headland to headland. It is ‘true,’ as the phrase goes, at Saint Catharine’s, and again at Beachy and so on to Dungeness; and if you are going up-Channel outside, you carry it with you ‘true’ all the way. That it should be a little retarded in the Bight of Sussex one might understand, but that Bight is very shallow (it is only fifteen miles from the deepest point by Shoreham to the outer line), and yet you have this three hours’ difference! The tide still runs hard to the west alongshore, three—anyhow, two and three quarters—hours after it has turned eastward outside.

Who can explain why there is nine hours’ ebb on the easterly shore of Portland and only three hours’ flow? It is a monkey trick, designed to prevent the poor sailorman from sneaking in just under the Bill: it gives him only three hours out of the twelve in which to do it, with Scylla on his left, and that most abominable howling Charybdis called Portland Race on his right. And if he comes up to the Bill at the end of his three hours’ limit, he has his heart in his mouth for fear that he should find the ebb stream catching his bows the moment he is round the Bill, and driving him headlong into the heart of the Race.

And what about the double tide of the Wight and Poole, the gulder, as they call it—the mystery of the Dorset and the Hampshire seas? In the days of my innocence I used to believe what I was told: that the double tide in Southampton Water was due to the water coming in first through the Needles channel and then around by Spithead later. It sounded reasonable for Southampton Water. But when I first made Poole, and found that they had a double tide there as well—and even out beyond Saint Alban’s Head—my philosophy was shaken, and my scheme of things fell heavily to the ground. Why on earth should there be a double tide on that coast? Who could explain it?

The enormous tide at the end of the funnel of the Bristol Channel is reasonable enough, though it is a little odd that it should be so very much bigger at Chepstow than at Gloucester. But how will you account for the prodigious heave at Saint Malo? Why does the flood come up Arun River like a racehorse recently invigorated with a bucket of beer, and at Newhaven hardly move at all up the Ouse?

I have stood outside the old piers at Newhaven in a little boat, with a northerly wind, expecting the first of the flood to help me to beat up, and waited for the quarter flood, and the half flood, and, later than that, and still have seen the sluggish surface water running out to sea against all the tidal laws that were ever written down: running out to sea, though the level of it steadily rose.

But there is no end to the mystery of the tides. Why is there a tide at Venice? It is not much of a thing, but it is there. And, for that matter, there is a tide in the Lake of Geneva. Here, again, the learned come barging in and tell us all about it. Closed basins (they say) like the Adriatic, even quite small ones, like the Lake of Geneva, have their little tides after the fashion of water swung in a basin. The explanation is given in some simile like this: ‘If you shake a basin slightly, the water will begin to swing with a regular movement back and forth.’ So it will. But who shakes the Lake of Geneva? Or who catches the Adriatic at either end, and gives it a regular balance up and down, exactly so often, every so many hours?

All this questioning sounds like the Book of Job; but, note you, that I, for my part, am with Job, and against the scientists. For Job, or God, or whoever it was who set the catechism, put the questions and was careful to avoid the answers, and for my part I will do the same, not only in the matter of the tides, but for the whole basketful of things on which the scientists have been pontificating with increasing uppishness for the last two hundred years, until at last they have led us to the morass wherein we are sinking. When they pontificate on tides it does no great harm, for the sailorman cares nothing for their theories, but goes by real knowledge, and I by my sworn authority, the Admiralty texts, the like of which for excellence the world has not: ‘High water, full and change, six hours, thirteen minutes after Dover. The stream is barely perceptible in the first three hours of the flood, but runs very strongly in the third, and through three quarters of the fourth hour; after which it slackens. There is no perceptible stream in the last two hours of the flood.’ Or again: ‘On rounding the Devil’s Point the tide is lost.’ There is no theorising, no mumbo-jumbo. The thing itself, reality, is stated; and it is true. There is not even a passing wonderment as to where the tide goes to when it is lost. The ‘Channel Pilot’ tells you the truth. You stick blindly to its text and you are saved.