From that Cornish town I had the next morning to make my way back to London; and Stephen Reynolds, whom I met, got her round the land safely to the ports upon the southern side, whence later I resumed this cruise: Stephen Reynolds, that strongest-souled and most sincere of men, who desired and did good all his life. It is the meeting with such men, and the comparison of their public label with their true function, of their false renown or lack of renown with their certain standing in the eyes of their Maker, which lead all wise men to a perfect contempt for the modern world.
Does any one remember him now of those who are reading this? Perhaps one or two, perhaps no one. He loved the poor: he understood the sea. He was a brother and a support to sailing-men, and he had charity, humility, and justice in equal poise. But the truth is, I take it, that our world is no longer fitted for governance by, nor even for advice from, its rare great men. It is fitted for governance by those who boast so exact an admixture of folly and of vice as makes them reasonably consonant with the stuff they have to govern. As for those who are too good for us, or too wise for us, why, the sooner they are out of it the better for them. And so it is the better with Reynolds....
But I wish that I could come across him again in this world, somewhere at the meeting of sea and land, and talk with him again about the schools of fishes, and the labours of those who seek them along our shores, and the souls of sailormen.
I confess to a complete ignorance of going round the land, that is, of turning the point of Cornwall, and of passing from the northern to the southern coast. Three times have I set out from Saint Ives with the firm intention of passing the Longships, and putting her round up-Channel. Never have I done so. For the Seven Gods, or one or another of them, forbade it. Had I ever fallen so low as to put a motor into the Nona, she would have gone round like a bus or a taxi; but under sail alone it was forbidden me. Each of those three times I started with a light wind and was becalmed; and at the end of the each of those calms I drifted back so far upon the flood that I sickened of the attempt. Saint Ives is a very long way from London, and a still longer way from Sussex, and a man cannot spend his life indefinitely taking that immense journey back and forth for nothing. And that is why I sent the Nona round the land.
I have never made Newlyn. I have never gone into Falmouth, so there is still something left for me to do. I have, indeed, seen all that coast from within, and walked back and forth across the last peninsula of England, and compared Mounts Bay and its rock with the towering brother island upon the further shore: for every such sea-girt height is dedicated to Saint Michael, being a natural perching place for winged things. The two Mounts are little models of the two national histories: each begins as a monastery; but one becomes a king’s prison, then derelict, then a sort of national showplace; the other becomes a country house.
You may trace a parallel in the fate of the Templars in the two capitals. The secret society of the Templars, with its gigantic wealth and universal conspiracy, was suppressed (to the salvation of Europe) six hundred years ago. Their centre in Paris fell to the King, became in its last stages an appanage for younger sons and cousins of the Crown, then a prison. It was at last destroyed in the very beginnings of the new Paris under Napoleon. Its memory has almost disappeared.
The Templars’ centre in London passed gradually to the lawyers, and now fulfils, among other functions, the very useful one of preventing cabs from getting too quickly from the Embankment to Fleet Street.
As for the two round churches, the mysterious symbols of that great, now dead, freemasonry (which for a moment threatened all our lives), that one in which the Mass was preserved has disappeared from that capital of Europe where the Mass has perhaps most power, but that from which the Mass was driven out is still carefully maintained in its externals, and stands there still in the midst of London—dead.
It was upon this coast of Cornwall that I once, to my shame, wholly misread the outline of a headland, not from sea but from land.
Standing upon the shoulder of the Lizard peninsula, and looking eastward upon a clear summer’s day, I misread the Dodman. Now from land this is unpardonable, because one has on land points of reference, and, indeed, had I been careful, and with a map before me, I could not have made such an error. But from the sea it is a thing that happens very much oftener than sailing-men are willing to admit.
I remember once, many years ago, coming in from far outside, and making sure of a point of French land, which I thought I knew by heart. I saw a characteristic dip, and, in front of it, the nearer lump of land which I knew for an island, and then there was a gap, or ‘V,’ which I could have sworn to be the harbour town I knew. It is true that I was surprised to find it lying so far over my starboard bow. I had thought it to be right before me, but I trusted my eyes rather than my reckoning. As we drew nearer I found all that inference in error. I had, indeed, failed in my reckoning somewhat, but it was the other way about, and the place I was looking for lay more than twenty miles to the eastward, and, when I first saw land, my harbour was hidden below the last horizon, over the port bow.
One would think that the outline of a headland, once one had known it from a particular side, was an unmistakable thing, and one would think that the same would be true of a characteristic range of hills seen lengthwise, or even of the entrance to a valley harbour.
After all, the same sort of thing is at once recognisable by land: a man does not mistake the Wrekin, or the Malvern Hills.
But at sea, for some mysterious reason, you never can be sure; and that is why such pains are taken in the elaborate descriptions and plans of sailing directions, and in the little pictures which they make in the official books. It is not only a matter of what is called to-day ‘visibility,’ though it is true that the thickness of the air makes a great difference to one’s judgment of distance. No matter what the conditions, the most absurd mistakes can be made, and are made continually, and that by practised men. It was only the other day that I mistook Grisnez for the end of the cliff some miles to the east of it above the flat of Calais. You would think that Beachy Head, seen from up-Channel looking westward, was unmistakable; for it has the exact outline of a hippopotamus, with its little ear and fat forehead and snout, and there is a long flat before it, so that anything rising up, one would think, was bound to be Beachy Head, but it is not so. A man who has been knocking about the Channel at night, and does not quite know where he is, except that he is somewhere off the Sussex coast, may (it sounds absurd, but it is true) take Fairlight in a haze for Beachy Head, or (coming eastwards) he may catch in a dull dawn the low cliffs beyond Newhaven, and, if the thick air hides Beachy from him, he may take these for that headland.
Much more excusable, and yet much more common than mistaking the outline of hills, or a headland, is the mistaking of a light. All of them have carefully marked spaces of time, a flash for so many seconds, or a change of colour, or what not. But a man cannot always be bothered to time these things, and in a little boat under a strain he may not be able to do so. But the very commonest form of error in this, as in everything else, comes from an absolute and false certitude. You say to yourself, ‘There is no doubt at all that that light is such-and-such a light.’ You have been waiting to pick it up, and when you pick up a light you are certain it is that light, unless the timing of it is quite grossly different from what you expected. But you may be quite wildly wrong. I suppose no one will believe me when I tell them that I have known Saint Catherine’s mistaken for the Hogue.
But there are more absurd cases still. Many years ago, a ship called the Mohegan struck the rocks called the Manacles, which are inside Black Head, in Cornwall. She was going down the Channel, and there would seem to be no question of danger in the matter. The Lizard Light is there, staring plain enough; one only has to keep it well on the starboard bow going down-Channel, and one is sure to miss England. One cannot hit the Manacles so long as the light is well off one’s starboard bow, for they lie inside the Point. Therefore, when the Mohegan struck, she must have had the Lizard Light on her port bow, and the lookout man, and the man steering, and the man setting the course, and the man in command on the bridge must have known perfectly well (one would think) that the situation was impossible. Yet strike she did, and no one has ever really explained how it happened.
There are some of these mistakes which cannot be avoided, and which are explainable, not by any failure of the human reason, but by a very natural confusion between similar things. Thus, any one runs a risk at Dungeness on account of the two lighthouses there; I mean any one going up-Channel, and aiming at giving that point a very close shave.