Dungeness grows out to sea at a certain rate, so that, at long intervals, a new lighthouse has to be built to mark its extremity. Though it grows outwards thus into the Channel, the end is steep-to, and there is plenty of water right up alongside the land. Therefore, any one going up-Channel makes for the lighthouse direct, intending to pass within a few yards of the shore, for this shortens an up-Channel course. Also, if you have the tide with you, you have a strong stream there to help you.
Now, about one hundred years ago, they built the old lighthouse where Dungeness then was. That old lighthouse is now about one mile inland. It does happen, and I am witness to it with hundreds of others, that the modern lighthouse on the extreme end of the point may be obscured by day, when the old lighthouse is visible. In that case a man tends to steer for the old lighthouse, thinking it to be the new one, and he is aiming, of course, right on-shore when he thinks he is just going to miss the point.
The worst mistake of this sort I myself ever made was mistaking the Varne Buoy for the South Goodwin Lightship. It is not so impossible as it sounds. The weather was thick; I had been drifting for many hours without much wind, and with no certitude of where I was except that I was somewhere in the Straits. I looked up-weather, to the northeast, and saw in the brume what looked like a hull and a pole. I could not be quite certain whether there was a ball on the pole or not, but I certainly took it for a lightship; and, judging from the time that I had left the French harbour, and the sort of pace I thought I had made in my little boat, and tricked by the weather (which was much thicker than it looked), I made sure that this apparently distant object was the Goodwin. It was not till I came within a hail of it that I knew it for what it was—the Varne Buoy, not a hundredth the size of a lightship.
I suppose that the regularity and certitude of modern mechanical life on land tend to make men exaggerate the fixity of evidence. When men dealt more with the caprice of Nature, they were more ready to admit two things which modern men underestimate: the possibility of marvel and the fallibility of the senses.
Different periods take quite different standards in such affairs. Our own time prides itself on a specially clear vision of reality, and ridicules the credulity of the past. Yet I notice a hundred things in which I could imagine posterity stupefied at our inane credulity. We accept, in everything which does not immediately concern us, a bare newspaper statement made anonymously. We accept it as we accept the evidence of our own senses, or more; we accept it although it is unvouched for, unproved, untested. We accept it—to be brutal—because it is printed, and because it is printed on a large scale.
There is a whole mythology of ‘prehistory,’ which has grown up, mushroom-like, in less than a lifetime, which pretends to explain the unknown past of man, and which has already become more fixed and sacred to the multitude than any mythology accepted by our fathers. Not one of the millions who accept that mythology could give you even the briefest account of the supposed steps of evidence upon which it reposes. In this process the strange mechanical, universal, influence of what is called ‘popular education’ plays a very great part, and whereas the half-educated man was always a danger, to-day he is a catastrophe.
Or, take not prehistory—which is a mere imposture—but recent recorded real history. Millions of children are told that the American Colonies revolted because they were unjustly taxed by England; that after a long struggle they won, and that they won because they were right; because they had the same qualities as our own sacred selves, being of our own sacred blood; that the trouble ought never to have arisen, and was only due to the folly of a few misguided and pigheaded English gentlemen who happened then to hold political power. I will bargain that—above the labouring mass—this is the attitude taken by nine men out of ten in England to-day towards the American War of Independence. On the top of that all are told—or given the impression, at any rate—that England soon repented of her error, and came to regard the United States as the noblest of her children.
They are not told that an expensive war had been waged by the Mother Country in defence of the Colonies; that long and difficult negotiations had been undertaken to see how that expense could be shared; that certainly a majority of the colonists—and probably a large majority—were on the side of England, and against the rebels, and that the final defeat of England was mainly due to the intervention of the French, and especially to the more close concentration of the French fleet. They are not told that the English people regarded themselves as perfectly right, that they continued to detest the Americans with the most vivid hatred for a hundred years afterwards, or that the policy of pretending a friendship with America is quite recent, and only grew up after the strength of the new country was apparent, when the long agony of the Civil War had turned in favour of the North. Worst of all, they are not told that this pretence of identifying the United States with England is being carried on against increasing odds, as the United States becomes less and less English in tradition, in blood, in morals, and everything else.
The false legend is swallowed whole, and it is a very good example of how mythology can have a direct practical effect for ill. Our general opinion is only now beginning to be shocked by the foreignness of America, and is still bewildered by the refusal of Americans to regard themselves as English. You can always be certain of middle-class and lower middle-class support in England (I do not say popular support, for the populace are quite indifferent to the whole affair) for any foreign policy which takes for granted that America is but another England overseas.
I saw a very good example of this at the beginning of the last year, 1924, when I was watching opinion at home and abroad upon what were then called the ‘Expert Committees,’ and later, the ‘Dawes’—that is, the two committees sitting in Paris to decide whether the Germans had concealed large assets abroad, and also to decide what the Germans could pay by way of reparations.
For three solid years the international financial powers which directed our policy in the matter of German reparations had denied the accumulation of German wealth abroad, and had persistently clamoured that the Germans could never pay more than a small fraction of the sums claimed of them, if that. From the same sources there had been in England a persistent clamour for ‘expert’ examination of the question under American direction, and the basis of this last demand was the certitude that America would only act in the matter as the willing helpmate of England. The committees met, but the initiative for calling them together was American; the American delegates, and behind them the American Government, were the deciding forces. When the reports came out, there was a stupefaction, gallantly concealed; for those reports, insisted upon by the American delegates, completely contradicted in every point the propaganda of the past three years. They insisted that the Germans had accumulated vast sums abroad, especially in the United States, and that Germany could soon pay indefinitely, at the rate of £125,000,000 a year. The result of having nourished these illusions upon American relations to England was that the foreign policy adopted officially by the British Government was thrown out of gear. The English Governments (acting in this respect differently from the way in which the English public as a whole would have acted) had supported Germany to the fullest of their ability. They had postponed all efforts of reparations, they had insisted that all demands to obtain payments by force were illegal; they had refused to help their Allies to obtain such payments; their Treasury spokesman had told everybody that Germany had nothing concealed abroad to speak of, and certainly could not pay on any considerable scale. They then asked for a Committee of Experts, took it for granted that American pressure on this Committee would be in their favour, openly pledged themselves beforehand to accept the report, and were bewildered, when the report came out, to find it opposed to them.
Those who govern us have been compelled to accept the Dawes Report—even to set it working—and they watch anxiously its coming effect upon that balance whereby England lives. They are caught in a trap. Had they known a plain, modern historical truth, that America is a foreign country, they could have preserved an independent national policy. It is now too late. America has mastered us.
The next port from which I have taken the Nona after the turn of the land is Fowey, for, though I have gone into Mevagissey once in my life, it was but in an open boat, sailing across Saint Austell’s Bay; and there, in Mevagissey, I did not learn what I had always desired to learn, and what to this day remains a mystery to me, and that is, the history, nature, and fate of the busy little buzzer the Mevagissey Bee. It was in the port of Boston, in Lincolnshire, that I first heard of this animal, having then not yet arrived at my thirtieth year. Perhaps I had heard its name before, and had not noticed it; but it was there that I was first struck by the account of its strange demeanour.