Flotsam and jetsam: a yachtsman's experiences at sea and ashore

Front matter

Jliyi

Pi

Issued

CHAPTER II. Off Cape d'Antifer, 14th May, 1874

Some men are born lucky and others have luck thrust upon them. How many of us are there who pass our lives in running away from our own happiness, and are never overtaken by it till both it and we are well-nigh exhausted ! Lucky are they who are brought to book by Fortune, who get a fall early in the race, and who are perforce compelled thenceforth to go limpingly and to give their good angel a chance. A great Grief has often made a great man, a little grief has still more often made a little one completely to fulfil that purpose in his existence which else he would have missed. Solomon was a wise man, yet it took him a long life and seven hundred wives to find out that there is nothing worth doing but to eat, drink, and make love, and enjoy the fruits of one's labor. Some of us unwise ones must indeed have had our luck thrust upon us to find it out while we could still do all these things. A splendid summer day, wooing the very coat off your back and the shoes off your feet, a fair wind, just enough if it lasts to take you to your port, and a dinner composed by the cunningest cook in Havre, with nobody, not even the postman, to stand between you and your wildest fancies, these will compare— nay, they do being now present (for that is the test)

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compare — with, any kind of luck I know in these days ; and certainly none of these would have been mine if I could have had my own way say four months ago.

******

The curse of labor was a very short-sighted curse to inflict upon man, constituted as he is. Indeed it is no curse at all ; but rather the one only blessing in life, the source of all real content and the great consolation for all sorrows, and even for all worries. Of course one must have work that one can do, but that is a mere question of choice in a world where there is so much to do of so many various kinds ; and not a difficult question either, for almost anybody can do almost anything if they will but address themselves to it. The choice once made, what is there to equal or to come near to the delight there is in grappling with the work ; what moments are there like those when, bracing your nerves and setting your teeth, you rejoice as a giant refreshed, to run the race before you and feel the distance disappearing beneath your feet ? Not the triumph of the victory, still less the repose on the other side the goal — for that is but a kind of death between the races in which alone you feel that you really live. I can understand those who work for the sake of the work, I can't understand those who work for the sake of the rest that is to follow. See the man who has " retired from business'' of whatever kind — is not his first act to go into business of another kind ? He leaves selling cottons and takes to buying pictures and society. What then ? He has only exchanged a work be could do for one he cannot, and he will certainly gain no more but rather much less profit and glory in the one than in the other. ******

I am persuaded that this world was organized for an entirely different set of creatures from those who inhabit it. Looking at this infinite multitude of stars above me, many of them certainly, and all of them possibly, inhabited, I can well understand how easily the wrong set of inhabitants may have got

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into our Planet by mistake, just as in the old stage trick of putting the wrong letter in the envelope. " The only thing that is at all decently done on earth, ' ' said a great man once to me, " is the coming of the leaves, which we do at least get when we want shade ; all the rest is wrong ; for instance, the days are long in summer when, the sun being hot and the night pleasant, they ought to be short, while they are short in winter when the sun is so valuable that we want more, and the night so detestable that we want less of it. ' ' Look again at winds. If they were sensibly arranged we should have them blowing strongest on shore, where gales are of no great importance, while they would always be moderate at sea, instead of the reverse being the case. Then there are the tides, so arranged that they run strongest when they rise highest, whereas it would be manifestly better if they were to do so when they rise the least, because that would give one so much better a chance of getting into tidal harbors.

The moral order of things is an old subject of complaint. Yet it only needs one reform in order to make them perfectly easy of treatment — that is a means of comparing moral capacity. For then we should have nothing more to do than to say that every man shall have all the enjoyment he is capable of containing, but that he shall not steal from other men's measures that which will not go into his, but only run over and be absolutely wasted. There is enough enjoyment in the world for all, and to spare, but your two-gallon man will get three, four, or five gallons more than can be of any kind of use to him, while your one-gallon man is perhaps empty altogether.

******

Dieppe, 15th May, 1874.

Why it should always blow half a gale of wind right on the shore whenever you are waiting your tide to get into these French harbors is another thing I should like to know. The only advantage I at present see in it is that it keeps you up all night hove-to off Cape d'Ailly, and furnishes you with the

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work and excitement of furling half your sails and double-reefing the rest. Which illustrates what I have already said, for now we are in I only feel rather tired and bruised with our knocking about, and have lost all interest in the weather. ******

I fear the French are now at least beginning really to experience the effects of the war upon their commerce. At Havre it is impossible to get freight of any kind for any vessels, and this port of Dieppe has not above five vessels in it where usually there are two or three hundred. Never did a place look so utterly deserted. I have just had my hair cut in order to talk about it, and this was the conversation that took place to a running acoompaniment of scissor-clicking :

" C'est qu'on n'a pas de confiance dans la solidite du G-ouvernement, et alors les affaires ne marchent pas, comme monsieur voit." *

<f Oh, pour 9a, oui."

i ' Croyez done a la solidite* du Septennat. ' '

"Oh! Monsieur !"

******

A charming people are these French. The whole of the Hotel Royal turned out to welcome me when I went to dine there yesterday, asked me affectionately all round after my health and my doings, and provided me with a sauce Hollandaise,

* "When people have no confidence in the strength of the Government, then affairs do not get along, as monsieur sees." "Yet they had confidence in the Empire." "As for that, yes."

"And nevertheless it was not very solid."

"No, but upon the whole people did believe in its strength all the same."

"Well, then, trust in the stability of the Septennat." "Oh, monsieur!"

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which was like eating the kingdom of joy. I remember an old French gourmet once said to me, " Jeune homme, quand vous aurez epuise* les delices de 1' amour, des affaires, de la politique et de la religion, vous finirez comme moi par vous rabattre sur la cuisine." I begin to fancy I must have already arrived at that stage.

******

I never saw yet a woman so ugly that her lover could not believe in her beauty ; but I have seen one to-day so ugly that I doubt if she can believe in her own. I have loved many women, but never a beautiful one in all my life, and yet I have for the time always believed each to be the only one of ner sex.

CHAPTER HE

Dieppe, May 19th.

We ought to be very grateful to Providence for having implanted in each one of us that admirable conviction that / am the centre of the universe. If we, any of us, really believed that the world went round the sun instead of the sun goinground the world, or that we went round the world instead of the world going round us, life would be unendurable. As it is, all men and things are instruments and playthings for each one, even the most mean of us. I am not more intimately convinced that Bill was invented for my service than Bill is convinced that I was invented for his ; and he is right. I can't escape from revolving round Bill, and in all our dealings I am forced to feel his attraction and repulsion just as with all other bodies heavenly and earthly. His notions of making beds and coffee are my masters, and I have at last finally submitted to them ; yet he has adopted my notion of brushing clothes and boots in part, and on the question of table napkins

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and clean knives and forks we act with about equal force on each other. So that Bill is now so far reduced as it were to the position of a mean sun, which is never quite in its right place, but which must be supposed to be there for practical purposes.

******

Shoreham, 21st May, 1814.

I wonder why in pictures of vessels at sea they are almost always represented as under full sail, with a fair breeze. In reality they should be represented close-hauled in a gale of wind, beating up for port against a head sea. It is a fine feeling to be proud of something, and I was proud of the Billy Baby last night when I saw her stripped like an athlete for the struggle, with storm jib, close-reefed mainsail, topmast struck, bowsprit reefed, and all snug, and felt her flying along under me within four points of that cruel north-easter — while my crockery was equally flying about the cabin below. Truly those that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters — these see the works of the Lord and his wonders in the deep. And it was a wonder, indeed, to note the first red streaks of morn away to the north-east, and to see them grow into the blessed light of day. A beautiful and lovable world indeed if people would only come to the right places in it.

******

The Billy Baby lies ignobly on her bilge inside the harbor, a scorn and a rebuke to the inhabitants of Shoreham, and provoking even the reflections of the cheap butcher who has come down to sell his joints by the sound of trumpet, forgetting that he too has a soul to be saved. For even Ned is but human, and turning up this narrow and, to all of us, unknown passage, he ran her ashore at four o'clock this morning. It should be a warning to every one never to go into strange places on a falling tide without a pilot — even when it is impossible to get one. It matters little ; the next tide will take us off, though at present there isn't a teacupful of water in the harbor

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— and after all you must be somewhere. I know people who are in bed at this moment.

****** There are things that would have been too much for the apostle John. Here is one such. When in Paris on Tuesday, I provided myself with a bunch of asparagus as big as a fiveinch cable, and brought it down triumphantly to Dieppe for a Billy Baby dinner. Moreover, I got particular instructions from my valued friend Henri of the Cafe Bignon how to cook it. Now yesterday, struggling as we were with half a gale of wind, I, of course, could not dine at all to make any sense of it ; but to-day, lying tranquilly at the end of the Shoreham canal, within two miles of Brighton, I thought of my asparagus, and retailed to Bill all Henri's instructions as to its treatment, the prominent one of which was that it was to be lightly scraped before cooking. And now will anybody imagine my dismay to find that Bill, being ignorant of the ways and qualities of " grass," has scraped away all the heads, and cooked nothing but the white stalks ! I feel as if I had lost a day. ******

The only revelation we have of things unseen must be such as we can derive through reasoning by analogy from things that are seen. Let us leave Invention and learn from Experience. Thus doing we shall soon see that Thought at least is eternal. No idea ever dies. It may be thrown into the air, but the very winds will take it and plant it, maybe in a far distant soil, to germ and grow into a tree, in the branches of which the birds of the air shall lodge, and the trunk of which some day a workman shall take and make one half of it into a god to fall down and worship, and with the other half shall kindle a fire. Neither is an idea ever born. Create it you cannot. You take other ideas, and by their apposition you build up out of them what you call another and a new one. Alas ! no, it is not given to you. You will find that same idea in David or in Solomon, or else it is in the Vedas, in the Koran, in Socra-

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tes, or Plato. Nor was it new when they gave it a form. It came to them as the sun comes, first indeed to those who earliest rise, but sooner or later to all. It rose upon them as it has to-day risen upon you, as to-morow it will rise on some other, and so to the end of time — which is the end of eternity.

******

Portslade-by-Sea, 25th May.

There is an idea which has been faced and accepted, adopted and propagated by all writers on civil organization from the greatest to the least, and which I am yet presumptuous enough to think absolutely false. It is this, that man in a state of nature is an animal utterly lawless and utterly solitary, a naked brute without a moral sentiment to clothe his immaterial, or a rag to cover his material nakedness, having no fellow-man in any kind of relation to him. It seems to me that that is, on the contrary, a conception of man in a purely unnatural state : for the first impulse of his nature is to clothe himself with a companion — even if it be but a woman — his spirit with an idea ; his body with a covering ; and his actions with a rule. Before he has done this he has not yet followed the imperious dictates of his nature ; when he has done it he no more ceases to be in a state of nature than an oak does because it was once an acorn, or than a swallow when it has built itself a nest, and flies away on its first winter journey to warmer climes. Find me a man placed on the earth, an acorn under it, or a swallow above it, content to remain as they are, and I will admit that the state of nature is a state preceding the effort to follow the dictates of nature. Till then, never.

This then being so, what becomes of all the elaborate theories and systems of polity and economy that have been built on the erroneous notion I have cited ? What becomes of the materialist and the self-interested conceptions (however modified by " enlightenment"), all these being founded on the assertion that all law, all society, all intellectual or moral motions of man are mere human inventions, ingeniously and for a pur-

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pose embroidered on to the original man of whom they formed no part ? Why, they disappear, are extinguished, condemned, lost and gone forever. Let us more rationally — yes, more rationally — believe that man in a state of nature would be in a state of perfect sociability, ideality, and Law, and that he falls short of that only because he is so far not in a state of nature. ******

"When you see a man drowning before you, do you hold that you have done your whole duty to him because you have paid your yearly subscription to the Humane Society ? I trow not. And now about the poor. Shall we say when the wretched cries for alms, that we have paid our poor-rates ? Are we to reply that his claim to a living share of the earth's fruits is a claim on the whole of society, and that we have discharged our quota ? Not so. I admit that this man who has done a day's work, and created for me a slight commodity, has a claim on me for his wage. Yet he has a claim only on me, for the commodity is for my own sole use. Shall I then refuse him whose claim is not only upon me but upon all my fellows as well ? If so, I declare society bankrupt along with myself.

******

To-day is Whit-Monday, and I see a string of seven omnibuses filled with people vulgar, and probably imperfectly washed, jaunting along the road on an excursion, the while they affront the air with many various songs, having only this in common — that they are all out of tune. Thanks to heaven I do not know them, and I can therefore rejoice that they in their way rejoice. And now if only one of them, through the sight of new objects, shall get an idea into his or her head, if merely that cornet-player shall discern dimly the harmonies of these dark piles planted in the blue water, of these yellow masses of pine awned with soft gray sky, and crowned with fleecy chaplets of cloud — why the day will be a profitable one to him, and maybe through him to all mankind.

* * * * * *

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I once loved a woman. I held her for the best, the truest, the purest, and the strongest of God's creatures, and I could not endure to be near her for the doubts that arose every instant whether she really were all this. I love her now no more. I know her for a poor make-believe ordinary person ; and now her society is just as pleasant to me as that of any other human creature — neither more nor less.

******

This is an ungenerous world. Last night I set my trammel, thinking to catch at least a plate of fish for breakfast. This morning I found that somebody had hauled it in the night, taken out all the fish, and cast the net ashore on the bank. I cannot approve of that. The fish no doubt were as much his as mine, but considering that the net was mine alone, he might have left me half the take.

CHAPTER IV. On Liberty, June 1

Bill having given me a week's leave to go and see my mamma and my young woman, I had a good cry over leaving the frigate, and took my departure to be among those incomprehensible people who choose to live ashore when they might have a comfortable ship for half the money, and little more than twice the trouble. What a strange twist this is in men's minds that makes them all seek their pleasure in doing what they can't do well, and leaving what they can so do as a tiresome business, only to be done under dire compulsion ! Whether there is anything beyond the bare sweeping of a crossing that / can do I know not, but it is clear to me that at any rate I can never be but a very poor sailor-man, and I am amused with myself to find that playing at sailors is nevertheless my most cherished delectation. I am sure if I only go on long enough I shall fancy myself quite a salt. What curious humbugs we all are ! ******

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The art of war consists in knowing when to run away. So does the art of life. For it is always to be remembered that in battle both sides are all the time in a terrible fright, and that the question on which hangs the fate of the day is not which side is most brave, but which is least frightened. Therefore a good general who doubts the relative capacity of his troops to stand fright, will judiciously run before he meets the enemy, and while he can still do so under pretence of making a scientific ulterior combination. I once knew a man who had been disgracefully handled by a woman. He confided in me, used very strong and very proper language as to her baseness, and told me that he had taken steps to meet her under circumstances which would enable him to show all the contempt and disgust he felt for her, and how thoroughly he had been cured of his deception. I advised him on the contrary to run. He would not, and now he is a married and miserable man. * * * * * *

2d June.

I have seen a minster which has made me ask myself once again how people can believe the common fable of the historians that the English were up to two hundred years ago a poor, uncultivated, half-savage people. This cathedral represents an amount of wealth, of labor, of sentiment, of loving art, and of devotion which ten Englands, and the natives of the Continent to boot, could not produce in these days. There are the pulses, the sinews, nay the very heart and life of thousands in those aisles, and the whole soul of a man in every touch of the chisel on those sculptures. Are we really richer, do we really work more efEectually, are our aims higher and our feelings stronger and purer than in those so-called barbarous times ? Then let us build but one edifice equal to this and I will believe it.

* *****

I never knew a single-minded woman. Their ideas are always married to themselves — and sometimes polygamously to

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somebody else besides. An abstract notion or principle is quite beyond them. The other morning going ashore to buy some eggs for Bill, I asked the woman who sold them if she could assure me that they were fresh-laid. " Bless you, sir," she replied, 1 ' I wouldn't sell them for fresh-laid if they wasn't." ****** The necessity of having in all things an immutable, invariable standard that can be appealed to, has always been held to be, and is in fact, manifest. Some people believe in the Bible, some in the Pope, some again mount higher and believe, as it were, through the Bible and the Pope, in the Divine truths of which they are the exponents. If we would be exact, allowance must be made, in every case of exposition of higher law, for the deviation of the material instrument. But what if it is believed that there is no deviation at all ? What if the vessel is navigated in that belief, and one day it is discovered that the bearings of things are all at sixes and sevens ? The other day, to my horror, I found I had got Cape d'Ailly on a bearing by my hitherto unsuspected compass, which would if it were a true bearing have put me a couple of miles up the country on the French land, whereas in fact I was at sea. Which brings me to this : that it is a thousand pities we cannot i 1 swing' ' the Bible, the Pope, and other great standards, find out, as I am about to do with the '' Billy Baby's" compass, what their exact deviation is with their head in any given point, and so make a table of corrections for future reference.

******

3d June.

Never leave the side of a woman you love. In a day she will cease to regret you, in two she will replace you by somebody else, in three she will refuse to believe that you exist. Here have I been away from Billy Baby for a week, and I can eat and drink as though nothing had happened.

What strangers we all are to each other on the face of this

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earth ! and how certain we all are to get credit precisely for the qualities we do not possess, and to be reproached with failings from which we are free ! How many men are called supercilious because they are timid, ill-mannered because they are shy, ill-natured because they love their fellows too well not to seek to benefit them at their own cost ! How many again are pronounced generous because they are selfish, wise because they have stolen other men's ideas, and able because they have placed themselves under other men's conduct ! I find the people at the various ports I put into all call me " captain" already, and I expect to end as admiral.

4th June.

It is always the leaders of men who play them false. It is the judge who perpetrates injustice, the priest who invents impiety, the minister who misgoverns his country, the popular assembly which betrays its choosers. This is inevitable when it is a trade to judge, to pray, to govern, and to talk ; for the trader looks only to the profit and permanence of his trade, and cares nothing for the wares he sells or the customer who buys them. You find men to pass Adulteration Acts to prevent chicory being mixed with coffee, sand with sugar, and water with milk, yet the idea has never been so much as conceived that it is a fraud to mix profit with public duty. Nevertheless this is at the bottom of all public troubles.

* * * * * *

The most delicious, the most fascinating and artistic woman's dress I ever saw was one of which I caught a glimpse in Paris lately, made of black glazed calico. It belonged to, or at any rate it was on, a lady who was stepping out of a brougham into a shop in the Rue de la Paix. I saw it but for three moments, but I shall never forget it. And the most beautiful face and figure, the most finished grace, the most unaffected wit and frankness, and the best manners I ever knew belong at this moment to a young lady who lives, we will say in Nottingham,

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and dresses on £20 a year. If she were mine I would make her into a company, advertise her, and benefit many shareholders besides myself. Being as she is more rare and precious than many mines, I shall carefully say nothing about her but this, that the London drawing-rooms are poor places to look for anything of really superior kind.

CHAPTER Y.

Off Beachy Head, Saturday, 6th June.

There is a use in everything no doubt, but I really should like to know the practical use of fogs in this well-regulated world. It is not that I doubt their use, but only that I should like to be able to explain it to the misbelieving advocate of fine clear weather — such as Ned. This same mania for explaining everything, the determination to bring down every mystery of the universe to the level of Pinnock's catechism, is probably at the bottom of a good half of the blunders of mankind. We have applied the universal rule of three to, and made a net resuit of profit and loss out of, most things. Even religion is captured and set to work to make the best of both worlds. Are we forever to pretend to seek out the Almighty to perfection, and not believe in his works till we can measure them with our foot-rule, or his laws till we have written them in articles thirty -nine or more ? Should we not rather be content to leave some few things in mystery ? I also could invent a use for fogs if I chose. I could repeat what some wiseacre has invented as to their causes in and their influence on the atmosphere. Nobody would be the wiser, though somebody might be the more presumptuous for it. I prefer to rejoice that here is one more of the many things I don't understand. It is contrary to my little interests for the moment, since it hides even Beachy Head light from me. But the first thing we have to