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

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CHAPTER I. CowES, 8th May, 1874

A REAL man is always alone in the world. Were he not he would not be a real man, as I understand it — that is to say, a distinct entity, not a copy of all other men, but with the principal and important part of him thoroughly belonging to himself. How shall such a one find a mate who shall really be such to him ? Pieces of looking-glass indeed he may find, which will according to their quality more or less reproduce the outside of him as they will of any other — they have been quicksilvered to that one end ; but a duplicate of himself ; nay, or another at all like himself, he may not hope for in man or woman. For his especial character is that he is what he himself and Providence have made him ; that he has set up in the chaos with infinite labor and good fortune a little platform of his own just broad enough for the sole of his foot. Another cannot stand there with him, though many be above and some perhaps below. If he be the real man, that place is his and his alone : he is a separate being and principle, and as such he can have no companion.

This is no part of my story — or of my notes, or whatever form this writing may take, for I have not yet made its acquaintance — but merely a reflection on John Stuart Mill's autobiography, which I read coming down in the train. He thought he had found a mate, and labors touchingly to prove her such ; but to my mind he fails as touchingly. Only I was struck by the fact that he who was a great man, and I who am a little one, have both come very independently to the same conclusion — that for any man, great or little, it is at least impossible to find companionship there where most usually it is sought. " There is," he says, " an inclination natural to thinking' ' (and he might have added, to unthinking) ' ' persons when the age of boyish vanity is once past for limiting their own society to a very few persons. General society as now carried on in England is so insipid an affair, even to the persons who make it what it is, that it is kept up for any reason rather than the pleasure it affords." To me, who was then on my way to limit my own society to three North Sea fishermen, this was very satisfactory, and I settled once for all that Mill was at any rate a social observer, if not a social philosopher.

'' The society of three North Sea fishermen, indeed !" I think I hear some refined one exclaim. Yes, indeed, the society of three North Sea fishermen — of three men who have passed their lives among stern realities, who are ready and brave, true and intelligent, and who have not been demoralized by a daily consumption of platitude and sophistry. Not from Cowes are they, nor like the men of Cowes, who have been demoralized thus and by other means, but fresh from the Dogger, with all their rough honesty upon them. If I were in London I should be in contact with A and B and C, notorious and self -admitted imitations of a dishonest ideal. Are these not much better than they ? Yes, indeed ; and I am mistaken if they do not leave me purer and higher notions of society than any one of my three Londonners, infinitely superior persons though they be as the common scale of comparison goes. ******

Why on earth will this stove not burn ? I need it badly enough, Heaven knows, for it is as cold to-night as the face of a great lady ; and the mere run hither down from Southampton through the murk of the evening has chilled me to the bone.

And withal somebody must have run down the Spit buoy again, for though I never went close to its proper place, and saw all the other buoys, we none of us made this.

But I remember that I have not yet given an account of myself and of these notes. I came down in the train with three strangers. One of them offered me a light, and said it was a fine day. That was not true, and if it had been true would not have been important. Nor would it have been more true or more important if I had known whither that man was going, and what his portmanteau contained. Yet these are the first questions people seem determined always to ask and to answer any man, instead of the last as they should be.

How can I say who or what in the world I am ? I don't know — do you ? You have no doubt a form of words ready on your lips — *' M or N, as the case may be"; but words without ideas are mere abattis, trees without root ; of no further consequence until they have been converted into the form of some new idea.

Certainly I am not a hero. Yet I am going, so far as I see, to talk of myself, which is, in fact, what we all always do, whether we know it or not. A very impertinent habit, no doubt, and quite indefensible ; and yet at the end of the account, as the French say, what you and I most want to get at is a notion of me and of you, which is also what we get at, or even near, the least often. Otherwise we should perhaps hate, envy, and despise each other less than we do. Just think of the force of human sympathy. Any man who gets up at Charing Cross, and opens his mouth, will have a crowd of people about him before he has said two sentences !

Poole, Saturday, 9tli May, 1874.

Ah ! it was a lovely sunrise this morning for those of us who saw it, and the outline of land and sea, of mast and rigging, pencilled themselves softly on the gray sky as the light stole after us down the Solent. And to think that there are people who live in houses, and lie abed of a morning !

******

I remember there was once a man who invented the principle of self-interest as sufficient for all mankind all through life. Jeremy, thou wast a noodle. Didst thou not see, dost thou not now see, that we are all of necessity mere trustees ? Here is Ned, for instance, roused up at three this morning, and now striving all he knows to make out that black buoy. Yes, I do pay him a salary, and as between us it may seem at first a mere affair of self-interest. But is he not a trustee for his old mother at Aldeburgh, to whom he is going to send a post-office order for one-pound-ten this very day, and also for his young woman, whom he intends some day to endow with the scanty bliss of a seaman's marital attentions — nay, even for the fabricator of those sea-boots and the Chinaman grower of that tea which makes me shudder, but which he gulps down scalding with so much gusto ? All for self ? What, even his young woman ? Then self has no longer a meaning, and we

are stumbling as usual over words.

******

Was there ever such a rich, bountiful, delightful climate as this maligned one of ours ? I know none, and don't believe there is any with so inexhaustible a play of light, shade, and atmosphere. Here, while I have been looking from my deck at this decayed, sordid town of Poole, have I seen in ten minutes at least half a dozen different cities in it, each with its particular tone of beauty, and all various. They say it is like Venice, wherein they are wrong, for it is far better and more beautiful to look at, and with far more, if with other, beauties than Venice. Not to live in, though — nor to sit for in Parliament — but just to look at from the deck of a boat.

How strangely the mind of man is constituted ! Here is Bill, my equerry-in-waiting, groom of the chambers, and cordon hleu, quite unable to see that nothing will save one from losing all the bedclothes in the night except tucking them up. I have explained this to Bill, and shown him how it is connected with the eternal laws of physics that when a man rolls about with an unquiet spirit, clothes must go if they are not tucked in. I suppose he intends it as a hint to lie quiet. I will take it as such.

Havre, Wednesday, 13th May.

There are two situations in which a man feels that he is quite alone, and that he can look for help to no human being but himself. The one is on the back of a runaway horse, the other in command of his vessel at sea when he is running for a tidal harbor in a gale of wind, and finds he can't save his tide in and will have a lee shore to deal with. Woe betide him if he dare not then trust his own judgment ! Woe betide him indeed if he cannot readily form new plans ! On the whole, I think the runaway horse is the better place of the two. I saw a barge deep laden come out of Poole yesterday, and watched him going up Channel — I wonder how he fared in the breeze — and it was at the time a pleasure to think that we had a better craft under us than he. Poor fellow ! I dare say he thinks just as much of his skin as I do of mine, little as either of them is worth in the general scheme of creation !

The art of the true use of garlic is the whole secret of tasteful cookery. Rub a crust of bread with garlic and put it in your salad, and the whole thing at once has a savor which nothing else would give it. And so with men. I know one, for example, who would be simply nothing were he not known for the profession of infidelity ; but having that, he is supposed to have a flavor of his own and is considered accordingly ;

whereas in reality he has only been rubbed over with other men's garlic.

****** How hard it is to do the very smallest thing precisely as it should be done ! Just go to the very centre of anchors and cordage and try to get a two-hundred weight Trotman and ninety fathom of seven-inch warp. It will make you respect failures for the rest of your life.

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)

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.

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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 arc 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 he 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 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 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 accompaniment of scissor-clicking :

" On avait cependant confiance dans 1' Empire."

*' Oh, pour 9a, oui."

' ' Croyez done a la solidit6 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, monsieui- ! ' '

which was like eating the kingdom of joy. I remember an old French gourmet once said to me, ' ' Jeune homme, qiiand vous aurez epuise les delices de I'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 Aer sex.

CHAPTER TIT.

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 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, 1874.

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

— and after all you must be somewliere. 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 Socrates, 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 purpose 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 — ^jes, 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.