Chapter XII: Part 12

But the worst enemy of prose to-day is the snobbishness of rules and forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and _no more_. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, ‘except when euphony demands it.’ I would go further; I would say that when the spoken language has arrived, as ours has to-day, at the universal use of the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric and in verse the end is the emotion you desire, non-rationally, to excite; but in prose the end is rational presentation, narration, or statement of thesis: nothing more.

Judged by such standards, the two best prose writers in English are, I think, Dean Inge and Mr. Gosse; for they, each of them, write on subjects where they have much to say, with the use of no words other than those needed for such expression, and they put those words invariably in the right order. Cecil Chesterton is dead.

I had almost written that there is no such thing as ‘great’ prose, in the sense in which there is ‘great’ rhetoric or ‘great’ verse. The very best prose may be dull if the subject expressed is dull to the reader. You will get no better prose, for instance, than Newman’s ‘Arians of the Fourth Century.’ It is not dull to me, because I happen to be interested in that bit of history, but it would be fiercely dull to any reader who was not. Nevertheless it is first-rate prose. Newman, having to write about a particular thing upon which he had made himself immensely learned, having to tell a certain number of facts, and to express a certain number of ideas, does so with the best choice of words in the best order—and that is prose.

The very fact that any sound definition of prose involves many negative and only one positive (to wit, the positive need for lucid expression) makes it true that good prose is a common art. Excellence in prose is not common to all: far from it; but the faculties whereby excellence is reached are common to all. A man who is a first-rate walker, who carries his body with an exact poise, who can walk far without fatigue, and at a good pace, is a rare man; but we can all walk, and we all approach in various degrees the standard that man has reached. So it is with prose. Those who think that good prose must have something odd about it—a few archaic words, little eighteenth-century tricks here and there, subjunctives popped in, like currants into a cake—these resemble men who in walking every now and then in high spirits do a little dance for fun. They are free to do so; we are not displeased. We cannot help noticing them (which is, perhaps, their object), and no one is the worse for the _gambado_. But in so far as they indulge in the fantasy, they are not walking; and if they do it the least bit too much, they are playing the fool. A wise man said to me once, ‘Don’t go and get your words from the artist colourman’s.’ Would that I had remembered his words in youth as I now humbly acknowledge them in age.

But the rhetorician wisely indulges in extravagance, and as for the poet, he may use what words he likes, and go to any extreme, or to any excess, so long only as he hits the mark. For it is with poetry as with love and with singing in tune. It is with poetry as with the sense of reality. It is with poetry as with the toothache. Either you have it, or you have it not.

There is no getting near poetry; and though there are degrees in it, the boundary between its being and its not being is as sharp as a razor: on the one side is It, and on the other is nothingness. By which I do not mean to say that poetry is only found in certain violent stabs of emotion such as Shakespeare and Keats can launch, for it often inhabits page upon page, as throughout (I will maintain) all the Fourth Book of ‘Paradise Lost,’ and countless other great achievements of the past in every tongue. But I mean that, in a long flight or a short one, immediate or continuous, poetry is poetry, and not to be mistaken for anything else. Charles Kingsley (I ought to have dragged this in at Appledore, and not have waited for Rye) said to a woman, ‘Madam, there is poetry and there is verse; and verse is divided into two kinds—good verse and bad verse. What you have here shown me is not poetry, it is verse. It is not good verse, it is bad verse.’

But, really, if I go on in this endless way of discussing the difficult trade of letters, I shall never get her nose round for the sea again. I had almost forgot I was sailing. What! Of two such occupations, the benediction of dealing with the sea and the degradation of scribbling, can you forget the better for the worse? I can. I am of a fallen race. I follow downwards.

But I am aboard the Nona again, and must put her out down-channel. This will I now do, and sail out of Rye by the first of the ebb under too strong a northeast wind at two o’clock in the morning with the waning moon just rising, the sky clear, two reefs in my mainsail, the second jib, and a reef in my foresail, knowing well that I must watch all night, and that I shall get no sleep till morning. For it is one of the glories of sailing that you are under the authority of the heavens, and must submit to the whole world of water and of air, of which you are a part, not making laws to yourself capriciously, but acting as servant or brother of universal things.

It would be no bad thing if some one (I am not competent) were to draw up a list of advices for the brutish man who is too poor to sail a big boat, or is not such a fool as to desire one: I mean a list of advices for a man who sails such a boat as the Nona: say, boats from seven tons to twenty.

The first article in such a list would be this: _Cruising is not racing._

But on this one could write a whole volume, with digressions upon the general evils and corruptions of these our latter times when the Beast has most certainly been let loose out of the Pit, and is going about the world breathing smoke out of seven mouths, and stamping 666, with his hoof, on the foreheads of all his elect.

For no one can doubt that the practice of sailing, which renews in us all the past of our blood, has been abominably corrupted by racing. I do not know whence the evil came, but I suppose it came like most evils, from a love of money. The love of money made men admire the possessors of it, and so they came to think of sailing as they do of riding horses, or of any other sport—as something to be tested by what the rich man could do. And clearly, when it came to making machines for going fast through the water by the aid of the wind alone, the rich man had his advantage. Then I suppose there came in also that craze for measurable things which has done us all so much harm in the last lifetime and a half. When I say of the Nona, ‘She is a good boat,’ when I stroke her and she purrs, there is nothing here measurable. When I say of that really abominable boat [_name censored_] (well worthy of her name)—that I had rather she had been sunk at birth than continue to sail the seas, you cannot apply a single measurable test to prove that the solid, noble Nona is good and the flimsy, whimsy [_name censored_] is bad; but in racing you can. Boat A gets in front of Boat B. Any fool can test that, and to-day was made for fools.

Well, then, whatever the root of the evil, evil it is, and it has corrupted our way of living in happy little boats. Remember, and write it down: ‘_Cruising is not racing._’ If your boat is a home and a companion, and at the same time a genius that takes you from place to place and, what is much more, a good angel, revealing unexpected things, and a comforter and an introducer to the Infinite Verities,—and my boat is all these things,—then you must put away from yourself altogether the idea of racing, as much as, when you consider a wife, you must put away the intellectual woman and the waxwork girl—both of whom may have their place for all I know. The cruiser, the strong little, deep little boat, is all I have called it. It is a complete satisfaction for man; but if you let in racing you are letting in the serpent.

Here you will say, ‘Have you then never raced?’ Never, sweetheart, except to get away from danger, which I loathe. I have never raced another boat in my life, although I have been on other men’s boats when they were racing, and admired their special talent, just as I would admire the talent of a man who successfully climbed the greasy pole. You must expect of your boat—your companion boat—a rational behaviour. You must say to yourself that when she is doing seven knots, she is doing well, and when she is doing nine, she is excited, and will be the better for a night’s rest.

When you are on a long passage, even with steady weather, you had better bank on three to four knots and no more. For what with beating, fishing perhaps, the falling of wind, over-reefing in terror, and the rest of it, you will not do more. I have always thought to myself, knocking up and down the coasts of dear England, that if I did a hundred miles in my twenty-four hours, I was doing very well indeed.

Once I spent a whole day drifting with the tide from the two Etaples Lights to the Dune, and very nearly all the way back, but even that did not persuade me to a motor, for, of all things abominable to God and His Saints, I know of nothing more abominable than machinery and petrol and the rest on board a little cruising boat.

I would rather die of thirst, ten miles off the headlands in a brazen calm, having lost my dinghy in the previous storm, than have on board what is monstrously called to-day an ‘auxiliary.’ The name is worthy of the thing. By auxiliaries the Roman army perished. Further, it is a nasty foreign sort of term. Call it the machine and tell the truth. I am told by those who use the abomination that it is ashamed of itself, and often will not start, as though to say, ‘You came out to sail the seas, and I am reluctant to cheat wind, weather, and tide in your favour.’ I will not deny that mechanism is valuable to those who conduct huge hordes, the rich and the poor, from Europe to the New World, but in a little cruising boat I will have none of it. It would be foolish to be rid of it in armament, for there it does give one’s country a great advantage, but in a little cruising boat it is as much out of place as is electric light where one should use candles, or as are motor-cars in the hunting of wild beasts. But I must return to things more practical.

My next rule would be: _Get everything shipshape and, so far as you can, keep it shipshape._

That is, see that the falls are clear, that everything is properly stowed away; that you know where everything is to be got at in any emergency; that you have to look for nothing; that you make the most of every space—and the rest of it.

All this I say knowing full well that I myself am incapable of it; but I am giving advice, I am not practising. I am expending myself for the good of others, and what I myself do is no affair of yours. The best known and the most tragic tag descended to us from antiquity is, ‘_Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor._’ Some would say that they are not only the most tragic words the great pagans bequeathed to us—the pagans upon whom we all repose—but would add that they are also the most ironic; for if you stop a little after the _proboque_, and add in another voice the following two words, you will appreciate the sardonic accent.

My own boat has usually come into port more like the disturbed nest of a dormouse than like the spick and span arrangement which I advise. Half the blocks will be jammed, the anchor will be caught under the bows, and, as like as not, the fluke of it hooked over one of the whiskers. The falls will be all tangled up together. The warping ropes will be mixed up with the anchor chain in the fo’c’sle, so that there is no getting at the one, or paying out the other. She will perhaps be coming in under three reefs with hardly enough wind to move her, because it has been blowing a few hours ago, and I have been too lazy to shake them out. Her jib will be slack, her cabin light broken where I have put my heel through it. A hundred other little familiar touches will make whatever landsman is passing his time gazing out to sea from the pier-head recognise from far off the Nona, as the Arabs recognised the great ship of Richard the Lion-hearted, saying, ‘There comes the red sail of the Frankish king.’ There never was such a boat as the Nona for coming in hugger-mugger. But do as I preach, not as I practise. Have everything in its place and a place for everything, so that, in a flash, you can shorten sail, let go the anchor, get to your warping ropes, or do any of those many things required by sailing-men. Even Plato was moved to discover the way in which the horrible Phœnicians used space aboard their ships, and had everything in order, though Heaven knows he could have had little sympathy with the sailing of the seas. Indeed, very few men who have written in the sentimental and rhetorical fashion (of which he was a master) have had also a call for the outside. But even he, I say, admired the order of shipboard. So be it with you.

Go into all the least details, think of how any object you have aboard will be treated by the weather. Use no ornament which the salt air can spoil, and put not one ounce aboard beyond what you need.

My third rule is this: _Keep tight decks._

I speak with feeling here, for most of my life the rain and the salt sea have come through upon my face as I slept, as coffee does through those abominable new contraptions which they call ‘filters,’ and which they put above your cup instead of boiling the coffee honestly apart as our fathers did. Most of my life, half the days at least that I have sailed the sea, water both salt and fresh, and always tasting of varnish and of tar, has trickled through also upon my provisions, notably upon bread, which it quite astonishingly spoils. Therefore I say from experience, keep tight decks. It is very simple. You have but to go along the seams carefully on a hot, windless day, with a spike or a screw driver and a mallet, prodding in shredded rope, and treating it afterwards with any one of the compositions they sell.

My fourth rule (I am giving them in no order of importance) is: _Have an anchor heavy enough for your craft._

It is a temptation to have too light a one for the easier handling. It is always a mistake. An anchor drags mainly through lack of head. Holding-ground always makes a difference but, with little craft, lack of head is the trouble. You must pay the price of heavy work for the sake of security, and it is better to have an old-fashioned anchor than the stockless anchors they sell now. These are all very well for large boats, but I do not believe in them for small ones. Be at the pains of getting your anchor up properly, and unstocking it, and also, when you let it down, of mousing the catch. Nothing will get you into more trouble than not being able to let go your anchor quickly, when there is necessity; and, in that connection also, mind you keep your chain clear. It is a good plan to tie small but conspicuous shreds of bunting or coloured string at every two or three fathoms of the chain in the first part of it; thus you will know how much you have let out, for although it is always better to let out too much than too little, it is annoying to have a great length of chain dragging about in shoal water, and the noise of it moving may confuse you into believing that you are dragging. I spent an abominable night once off a shingle bank in heaving water, where the tide ran strong, from having let out too much chain in the dark. The metal lay all along the bottom like the great sea serpent, and the movement of the boat sent a violent wrangling of iron up the chain all night long, so that I was perpetually running upon deck, between poor intervals of sleep, to judge by the distant light whether she were dragging or no. And I had good occasion for anxiety, seeing that not far upon my lee the shoal came right up out of the sea, with the water breaking upon it. You might think that however much chain you had let out, your boat would lie to the end of it; but it is not so. If you have a great deal too much chain let out in shoal water, the weight of it holds the boat like a kind of second anchor, and it grumbles and shifts and moves all the time.

Now the putting on of these little markings is of value, also, to prevent you letting out too little chain. The rule of thumb is: Three times as much chain as there is depth of water. This, in my youth (and for my youth I must be forgiven), I neglected in the port of Harwich, thinking it was nearer high tide than it was, so the little ship got adrift, and was rescued, or, as the man preferred to call it, ‘salvaged,’ by a barge called the Lily. The barge had no right to be called the Lily, for it was foully dirty, and as black as soot. The owner of the Lily claimed one third of the value of my boat, ‘Because,’ said he, ‘it was salvaged below London Bridge.’ He attached to this formula a magical importance. I offered him two pounds. He wanted much more. I appealed for help to a ship that was lying in that harbour, and they sent off a boat’s crew for me to convince the man. He took the offer I made him, but said that he had been bullied. I do not think he had. I think two pounds is a fair price to pay for the trouble a man may have been at to put a boat out, and tie a rope on to a drifting craft of that size. But still he complained that he had ‘salvaged her below London Bridge,’ and had a right to one third of her value. But there again, what was the value of any boat in which I had already sailed?

My fifth rule would be: _Don’t keep too close to the wind; let her sail; keep her full._

This attempt to be always pointing up is one of the curses brought in by racing. Your own hearty middle-class boat can never point close to the wind. If she can, it is a bad sign, for she will be putting on airs. Be content if she will lie and sail at an angle of forty-five degrees from the direction in which the wind is blowing. If she cannot do that she is a bad boat, but if she can do that, she is well enough. Now this is called ‘within four points of the wind,’ being one eighth of the thirty-two points that make up the whole round of the compass. There are all sorts of smart craft which will point much closer than that, and there are particular kinds of rigs, used honestly and not for racing at all, which will keep much closer, I am told. Certainly the London barge seems to keep closer, that marvellous rig, that perfection of rigs for its purpose; and the Norfolk wherries, shooting up the rivers, seem to keep quite miraculously close, though I think in this their great momentum and the flood of the water helps them. But as for you, sailing ordinarily upon the sea, be quite content if she does her duty with the wind halfway between beam and bow. It is here as it is with most things in life, be content with the sound average, keeping the limits which God has set all around. Do not wish for too long a life, for too large a fortune, or for too much honour. Eat your peck of dirt before you die; take the rough with the smooth; consider that it is all in a day’s work; expect rain and fine. In general, write out a list of all the commandment-proverbs and learn that list by heart. Then break them.

They that sail too close to the wind have great difficulty in bringing their boat round, especially in a seaway, and there is nearly always some of their canvas (if it is an honest boat, and not one of your millionaires’ models) not doing all it should when you lie too close. In connection with this, I would add (without making it a separate rule): _Take care never to pin the boat—that is, never get your mainsheet too taut_; give the boom plenty of angle. Let your mainsail take the full wind. If you look at the pictures of the old boats in the time when men were men, you will see that they sailed with easy sails bellying, and were not concerned to look smart with stiff, boardlike sails. Of course, in the racing-machines, you get more speed by these tricks, but it is no way to treat a good boat of stock and sound ancestry. It is driving her and playing tricks with her. Be content to feel the power of the wind.

There are times when all these rules admit of exception. For instance, you find that you can just make a difficult channel in the last of the flow or the ebb, before it turns against you; and that you can only do it by lying very close indeed. Then you must coax your she-companion (by whom I here mean your boat), and even spill the wind out of her sails a little, so as to work her up and through, and you may then get in your mainsheet as close as you dare, and haul everything tight—too tight—headsail sheets and halyards as well, for you are attempting a feat. But I am all against doing such things as a habit; and if again you ask me why, I cannot tell you, and I will not argue. But while I am on this let me add that a great deal of your ability to lie close depends upon the proper set of your jib. The halyard always slacks a little after a bit of a run, or perhaps your traveller is not really right out to the end of the sprit. See to all that; for it is by your jib that you fetch a reach; and, talking of jibs, I come to my sixth rule, which is this:

_Do not from laziness fail to change jibs often; also, carry three jibs aboard._ The jib is the most sensitive part of your canvas on a small fore-and-aft craft. Too much canvas there will press you, too little will make the helm gripe, and in either case she will not be sailing her best. Changing jibs is a bother, but it is a task which must not be shirked. Many a man has got his boat out of hand by failing to set the second jib, or even the storm jib, when it was coming on to blow. Note carefully also which of your jibs goes best with such and such a reefing of your mainsail. The temptation is to carry too large a jib, and, therefore, to carry too weak a weather helm. It is better to have your canvas balanced. She will behave better in every way. The Nona, when she is under two reefs, carries her second jib pleasantly and with a smile, and yet how often (I must confess it) have I carried my first jib when I should have changed jibs! and that from indolence.

My seventh rule may seem a strange one, but I am sure that it is sound: _Carry a pole mast, and do not bother too much about hoisting your topsail._

A topsail is always a business on a small boat, a business to put up and a business to strike. There is many a wind in which it would add half a knot to your speed, but you are not racing, and the half-knot does not matter. The necessary occasions for carrying a topsail are exactly two: one, when the breeze is very light, and it makes all the difference between sailing at a reasonable pace, and merely crawling; and the other, when you are getting into harbour and have wind aloft, but little along the surface, or when you have your mainsail brailed up to see your way, so that only with the topsail can you get a sufficient amount of canvas and a weather helm.

I know that all this rough and ready talk about the topsail will sound like heresy to the men who are sailing their boats in all weathers, and think, as people do, of speed as a special advantage, but I am sure I am right. Plain sail is the rule, and topsail on a little craft is always something of a frill. It is never a necessity, and over and over again you will find it a handicap. What I mean is, do not use it for the sake of using it. Do not be ashamed of sailing without your topsail when other craft have got theirs set, if in your case it is a trouble to set it. Never, never set your topsail when you think she might be at all over-canvassed under it; your business is to sail, and neither to show off nor to make time.

My eighth rule (which, if I were putting them in order of importance would come very early in the list) is: _Look to every part of your gear_; not only when you are starting out upon a cruise, but all the time. Look minutely to every point where there may be weakness. See that all is secure, and that all the running gear runs freely. This means running your eye and hand over the ropes and looking closely to the blocks, and to the attachments of hooks and swivels, and to the ties of the leach upon the rings, and to the parrel line at the jaws, and, indeed, to all details, of which there is a very long list, when you come to think of it, even in the simplest rig. Take nothing for granted, test everything. When you find anything doubtful—a cleat that shakes a little, or a run that jams for a second, or whatever it may be—put it right at once. The whole thing may be somewhat of a business, but in this, as in most things on board a boat, work all the time.

But who am I that I should write thus? Was it not also I who, in May-month of the year 1901, ran from France to the English island most abominably over-canvassed, not being able to take in a reef because my throat halyard had jammed? I noticed a jerk in it, even as I left the shores of the Morini, and I neglected to put the block right because I was eager to be off. I said to myself, ‘It will work all right when the time comes!’ But it did not, and, therefore, did I run with a most astonishing speed, and, on to the end of the affair, in no small terror, until I saw tall England, looming up above me out of a sort of smoke; and ever since then I have been most attentive to that one block. And why not to the others? Because conduct is by mood rather than by reason, and the do-nothing mood is a mastering one; as witness the home dogs of the rich, the cats of the poor, and sundry other beasts, including man.

Now my ninth rule is: _Keep with you all the charts you can._

You can never have too many for your purpose. Many people are content with general charts, and do not take with them the plans of harbours. It is an error. The plans of harbours are even, in this sort of knocking about the coasts, more useful than the general charts. For a man can always tell where he is (more or less) along the coast, but the working in and out of harbours is the difficulty, and the knowing of where to lie, and what areas dry out, and the rest. But here it is important to warn those who are not used to such plans that to many of our harbours this guide is only approximate because the channel shifts so much. After almost every gale or exceptional tide, you need new local knowledge.

No plan, for instance, will help you much to get into Etaples or Saint Valery, in Picardy, or over Shoreham Bar and into its double fairway. You must get in as best you can by your judgment and the lead, or with a local man aboard. And the same is true of the Arum in a lesser degree, and even, once you are well within the bar, of Barnstaple River, and fifty others. Nevertheless, a plan is always invaluable. It gives you the main lines; and in the case of at least half the harbours, and all the larger ones, it gives you all you need.

In this matter of charts, never fail to have aboard you the book called the ‘Channel Pilot,’ or the ‘West Coast Pilot,’ or, in general, your book of directions for whatever part of the coast you are dealing with. The English charts are not only the best in the world, but one may almost say the only ones in the world. But our sailing-direction books are more than that—they are unique; no other nation has them, at any rate, not of the same quality. They are exact; they tell one pretty well all one wants to know.

What gives me great pleasure in them is that they are also picturesque. The unknown authors let themselves out now and then, and write down charming little descriptive sentences praising the wooded heights above the sea, or sounding great notes of warning which have in them a reminiscence of the Odyssey.

One paragraph I have put to memory, and often recite to myself with delight. It runs thus (after praising a particularly difficult passage or short cut behind a great reef of our coasts): ‘But the mariner will do well to avoid this passage at the approach of the turn of the tide; or if the wind be rising, or darkness falling upon the sea.’ I like that! If I could write Greek, I would write hexameters, translating that noble strain into the original of all seafaring language, telling how the goddess warned him of peril if he should attempt the passage when the stream of Oceanos was turning, and the night was coming forward over the abyss, and the shaker of the earth had let loose the winds.

I would write how she came up out of the deep, under the storm cloud, like a white sea bird and warned him of peril when darkness was falling upon the sea.

Do not, while I am talking of charts and the official sailing books—the ‘Channel Pilot,’ and the rest—be careless about lights. It is the easiest thing in the world to mistake a light. Time the flashes carefully, and compare them with what your chart or your book tells you. But remember that upon coming into harbour there is always confusion (especially nowadays, with electric lights everywhere and a mass of illumination on shore), which there was not twenty years ago. There is great danger to-day, on approaching any shore town, of mistaking the directions given. I have had trouble in two very different places through this: one, Hastings, where there is no true port at all, but only a breakwater, and the other Dartmouth. Not that civilians, or landsmen, or whatever you like to call them, have yet gone so far as to set up red and green lights in their windows, but that in the glare of the lights you may miss the leading marks, and that a white light when you are close in is of hardly any use at all unless it flashes regularly. I speak, of course, of small harbour lights alone. Also you must remember that these are not to be seen, as a rule, until one is quite close.

But I suppose, talking of lights, that the most difficult thing for the poor land-living fellow who now and then sails (the most difficult thing for people like you and me, that is) is dealing with the lights of moving craft when one comes up a fairway at night.

For this there are a number of rhyming rules, which we all of us have by heart:

‘When you see two lights ahead,
Port your helm and show your red.’

Or again:

‘Green to green and red to red,
All right—go ahead.’

But these rules, of which there are about a dozen or so, are only for the simplest cases, and my experience is that in any crowded fairway at night you must depend upon judgment, subject only to the first and most elementary rules, such as passing port to port. But even here there are one or two things the man of the small boat should bear in mind, and they are singularly like the things which the poor man must bear in mind in the company of the rich, or the ruler of a weak nation when he is dealing with a strong neighbour.

For instance, rules or no rules, no large craft will ever make room for you; you must make room for it. That is especially true of mechanical craft.

I remember lying off the Dorset coast in a dead calm with no steerage-way at all, and a huge great tramp going westward, full of some abominable cargo or other, and bound to some fever-stricken swamp beyond the ocean, lumping down upon me like a blind rhinoceros.

It was impossible for my little craft to avoid her. If it had been quite dark, I have no doubt she would have run me down with all the good nature in the world, but as it was still possible to follow from the shore what was happening, she did at the last moment give her helm just the slightest touch, and missed me by a nothing; so that I had the pleasure of half-shaking my spars out in the tumble of her greasy wake. When, therefore, you are in a crowded fairway at night, always give way; it is the only rule. And have the sense to behave as the lawyers do: forget that there is such a thing as justice, let alone honour or pride.

Then there is another rule to be remembered, which is serviceable enough, and that is, when you have plenty of room and the larger thing coming at you is still at some distance, keep your course for some little time, in order to give your enemy (as I will call him) the chance to do the right thing. There is nothing so baffling as to have to deal with another craft that does not know its own mind. If the hostile fellow sees you on a definite course, he has at least an opportunity for making his calculations and avoiding trouble.

Here is more advice, never get yourself in the wrong by having your own lights dimmed or out of order. Since they must be screened from the after part whence you steer, have some little splash of white or what not which shows you from the tiller that they are still alight. And as for your riding light, which so often has to do duty when all are asleep aboard, see that it is sound and of capacity and filled. You can hardly have too large a one; not for the sake of the light, but for the sake of the number of hours it will burn. And this I say, never having possessed one in my whole cruising life which did not leak or blow out in a gale, or come crashing down on deck through insecure fastening, or in one way or another behave in the fashion true and consonant to the Nona, which is the chief boat of all the boats in the world, and therefore, like the chief men of this world, is in trouble all the time.

Indeed, I think that there stand out among all the boats of history, supreme, singular, incomparable to lesser things, like the two horns of Hattin, or the Twin Stars, two boats—Noah’s Ark and the Nona; and of these two, the Nona is the better ship. I judge this by the pictures of the ark I have seen upon match-boxes, which I take to be upon the whole our best text, though late and somewhat corrupt. Such a craft could not have been handled with any satisfaction. It has no gear, only a sort of deckhouse; but it is famous, and of such antiquity that it should be revered—from its time onwards there has been nothing but the Nona. You talk of the Niña; of Columbus’s other ships—whose names I never knew, nor you either; of the Mora, that brought William of Falaise to Pevensey; of the White Ship and of the Ark Royal; of the Victory (which is now, they say, to sail upon dry land); of the Great Harry, of the Vengeur, of the Hood, and of the two beautiful enamelled motor-boats which are (I hope) to be purchased out of our pockets for the Salaried League of Nations at Geneva, and there moored along the wharf of its private garden, well called Tom Tiddler’s Ground. But none of all these ships is to be mentioned in the same breath as the Nona.

The wind dropped quite suddenly while it was yet dark before we had passed Fairlight, that is, within an hour’s running. It left, though it had been an offshore wind, something of a lump behind it, as nearly always does such a sudden cessation of strong weather. I have often noticed this; it is as though the wind blew the sea flat, and then, when the pressure of it was relieved, the water would move up again to show its freedom.

It not only dropped; it also, after half an hour’s calm, began to run right round ahead to the west, and even to the south of west, so that we had to put out far into the sea upon the starboard tack, and then beat back again towards the shore to make our course. In this way, the holy light of day had already begun to grow by the time we were opposite Hastings and the odd broken breakwater of the place; whereby they have attempted to restore, but failed to restore, something of the old harbour.

That harbour of Hastings has to-day quite disappeared, its defences worn down by the sea, but the Castle still stands there to show how important a haven it was; one of the great ports of mediæval England. What I have read upon the matter has not left me much clearer as to the exact lie of the sheltered water, but my interest in the place (apart from this, that certain of my forbears are buried there) stands in that odd disappearance of a great political function. Hastings was a port, and it is a port no more. Yet the town has survived, and even its use of the sea has survived; though now they must draw up their boats upon the shore.

I hope that Hastings has reasserted its right to christen the great battle. When I was at Oxford it was a favourite piece of humbug among the academic to call the Battle of Hastings ‘Senlac.’

This queer Gascon name they got out of a footnote of Lingard’s. Now it happens to be a sacred rule at Oxford never to admit any obligation to Lingard. Lingard is the creator of documented, exact English history. Three quarters of the things you hear put forward as modern conclusions upon the English past come first from that great and unique historian. He invented the science. Before his time no one had written a history from original texts; nor had any one taken a general survey.

Since his time he has become a quarry for all those who can, or pretend to, teach and write history. But it is an unbroken rule at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge to boycott his name.

Lingard made that one bad error. He called the Battle of Hastings ‘Senlac.’ Like schoolboys who give themselves away by copying, Freeman and his gang, following Lingard’s one mistake, worked the thing to death. They seem to have thought in their ignorance that ‘Senlac’ was an Anglo-Saxon term! And then, it was so grand to give a shock to general usage, and to introduce that note of the unusual which is the mark of the charlatan. Round demolished them.

How often have I not studied that famous field. It was but this year that I went all over it with a clinometer, taking contours, with two friends to help me, so that I might reëstablish the battle.

I know not what that fascination is which attaches to seeing, touching, standing on the very site of some great business of the past. I cannot analyse its nature, but I feel the strength of it profoundly, and I would I could recover the hours I have wasted all my life long in exactly establishing this, that, and the other topographical point of the past. What reverence do I not feel, and how justly, for such work as Rice Holmes’, in which every movement of Cæsar’s in those fateful August days of the first Invasion, is clinched down with iron proof, exact, converging.

There is nothing more delightful in the ocean of modern historical work, the moving empty sea of guess and unproved affirmation, than these few solid rocks of industry and common sense. The people who get the thing settled once for all are as different from the question-mongers and theory-spinners as is a vigorous air from confused harmonies; or better, as is the grasp of a living hand from the ghostly touches of the spooks.

What could be more masterly than Holmes’ establishment of the landing-place upon Deal beach, the calculation of the march to the Stour, the crossing-place, the storming of the camp on Bigberry Hill. It is like the fitting in of a jig-saw puzzle, everything made complete, certain, absolute, where before all had been chaos. Over and over again have I climbed that hill and sat me down on the rampart, in order to look below towards the ford of the river where the seventh legion crossed, and over and over again, sailing in the narrows of the channel, I have called up that great armament on its summer’s day, the galleys rowing with the tide round the South Foreland and the heavier transports far away towards the French shore.

It is, I fear, an evil pleasure of the mind, but it is a very real pleasure, none the less, which a man takes in that which should, if he were honest and charitable, provoke him rather to indignation, and the abominable follies of the academic fool do give me that pleasure, which I suppose I ought to fly. When a don shows his great learning by spelling Clovis ‘Hclodhovech,’ I feel not pain, as I should, but pleasure: it makes me think of ‘Clodhopper.’ When the official historian, hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that the great officials of fifth-century Rome knew no Greek, or when his fellow, similarly hall-marked and log-rolled, assures me that Homer’s poems were composed by a committee, I, who ought to be pained, laugh. So I do when they tell me, as one professor solemnly told the world in the pages of, I think, the ‘Spectator’ (but possibly it was another learned organ), that the French for ‘very beautiful’ was ‘_beaucoup belle_,’ or that the phrase ‘_La volonté générale est toujours droite_,’ means ‘The general will is always right.’

There is another trick of theirs which gives me infinite delight, and that is the solemn perversion of authority, of which the pleasant name is ‘Mumbo-Jumbo.’

The power to affirm anything at will to an audience of young and quite unread undergraduates, without fear of contradiction or examination, produces an impotent sort of pride in which the very nature of authority is forgotten.

A great scholar steeped in Greek literature says, ‘The style of this passage is the style of the third century.’ That is the voice of authority. A man thoroughly familiar with the language can say a thing like that, and men not familiar with the language must accept it, unless they find it challenged by any authority at least equal. If they all find similar scholars making a similar affirmation, humility and common sense demand that the affirmation should be taken as true.

But when the affirmer goes on to say that, because the style of a passage is that of the third century, therefore it cannot possibly have been written a hundred years later, he is talking nonsense so appalling that it makes one catch one’s breath.

A man steeped in English can say with authority to a foreigner, ‘This letter is in the style of Dr. Johnson, and of the eighteenth century; it cannot possibly have been written in the seventeenth.’ But of what value would his statement be if he added, ‘Nor could it possibly have been written in the nineteenth’? Scholarship has authority when it possesses data which those who accept that authority have not had the leisure or the industry or perhaps the power to examine. It possesses no authority whatever against the common sense of the most ignorant man. I come across a document in which there is used strong language against Richard III. The manuscript, which denounces him as the murderer of his nephews, qualifies the advent of the Tudor, and draws up arguments in favour of his claim. A competent expert who can say to me, ‘By the nature of the handwriting, I, who am most learned in such documents, can tell you certainly that this was not written shortly after Bosworth, but a hundred years later,’ must be believed.

The statement has authority. He can judge the date of the handwriting, and I cannot. But if he goes on to say, ‘Therefore the statement is not contemporary,’ he is talking the wildest nonsense, because our common experience is sufficient to tell us that men do, and may, take manuscript copies of things written before their time. If a man steeped in all the details of Elizabeth’s reign, says of a particular manuscript it is spurious because ‘at such a date in the late sixteenth century, a document of this particular kind would be found reduced to print and not recopied in manuscript,’ I should answer, by the use of my common sense, ‘Why not? How do you know what motive the man may have had who copied it? How do you know whether it has not been reduced to print in some form which we have lost? How do you know that it may not be some family possession which the owner did not want spread broadcast, or which he only had the curiosity to copy out himself?’

It is the nature of human pride to assume powers beyond those really possessed; but new forms of such assumption go for a long time unrecognised. The abuse of religious authority is a commonplace. Men are only beginning to wake up to the modern abuse of academic authority. Heaven knows how much we have heard of priestcraft, and it is true that men holding only spiritual authority have not infrequently pretended to an authority in other fields beyond their lawful scope. But such extravagance is far more forgivable than the academic assumption of false authority based upon supposed or affirmed proof when proof there is none. For the former is a mere exaggeration, but the latter implies a falsehood. If a man really possessed of second sight, and having given evidence of enjoying that strange faculty, goes on to pretend a knowledge of things of which he is in fact ignorant, then he is a charlatan presuming upon his merited reputation to acquire a greater and unmerited one. But it is a worse offence when a man pretends to repose his statements on common reason and actual experience in matters where these were absent.