There lay in the narrow river a very large, hideous, and dirty steamer, and I could not see how she would have room to turn, for she was pointing upstream, under the distant benediction of that marvellous great tower. I said to a sailorman who was leaning on a post, and looking moodily at this steamer (which may have been his ship for all I know): ‘How will she get out of this?’ To which he answered: ‘Starn foremost, like the Mevagissey Bee.’ I asked him what that Bee was, and by way of answer he lurched away. I have asked many men since, and no one has been able to tell me.
Fowey, then, I say, is the most western port to which, or from which, I ever took the Nona. And Fowey is a thing by itself. One may say of it what Mr. Barry Pain said in his review of that ought-to-be-most-famous book called ‘Delina Delaney’: ‘This is a thing which only happens once in a thousand years.’
Fowey is the harbour of harbours, and the last port town left without any admixture of the modern evil. It ought to be a kingdom of its own. In Fowey all is courtesy, and good reason for the chance sailing-man. For your provision, or your transport, or your mooring, you pay no more than you should, and whatever you may need in gear is to be had at once; and in Fowey have I had a sail made for me in, perhaps, one sixth of the time it would have taken anywhere else along the coast eastward. It was a jib, and it fitted. In Fowey, also, there is security from all winds, good holding-ground, and, what is best of all, an air in which all other places may be forgotten, and in which the cares of this crowded island melt away. I suppose when the crash comes, and the ruins have been more or less cleaned up, Fowey will remain to carry on the traditions of a better England. I hope so. There is no fault to be found with it. Now, can this be said of any other town except Leominster? I think not. I have never sailed into Fowey or out of Fowey without good luck attending me. I have never had to beat in or out of Fowey; I have always had a leading wind. I have had light airs, of course, outside, but I have never been becalmed. The last time I left that blessed land—to which, perhaps, I never shall return—it was under so gallant a northwest breeze, so clear a light in the first of the midday tide, that the career along the coast to Plymouth Sound was like a song.
It is unreasonable, but those stretches of coast-wise sea in which one has had good fortune remain in the mind exceptional, and carry with them a sort of false air of security, as though they were always so. Men must have had the terror of their lives time and again off that coast; but to me it always seems, when it returns as a picture in my mind, sunlit, and framed in vigorous small seas, with the attendance of a noble and a sufficient breeze. With what pleasure have I not noted the speed she made as she passed the measured mile by Polperro, and how pleasant to see Rame Head growing perpetually before one, until the Nona opened the majestic breadth of Plymouth Sound.
As for Plymouth, I fear there is some evil of perversion about that mood which makes so many men (and I am one of them) disgruntled with exaggerated fame. Modern legend has got a way of selecting a few abiding places of its own, and there trampling down the grass and all around with such a multitude of repetition and exaggeration and ready-made phrase as corresponds, in the things of the mind, to the most intolerable mud in the things of the soil. Is it print which has done this, and steam—newspapers and the railway? No! So much evil could not have come from material things: its real source was in the degraded modern mind. What with Drake and the Armada, and the Bowls, and the Rock upon the other side of the sea which failed to land upon the Puritans, and the perpetual reiteration of all these things, I would rather see Plymouth breakwater from the Sound, and so sail past, than look on the Sound from the Hoe. But I admit that this mood is evil, and that it is something of a perversion to feel such irritation against mere wearisome repetitions. One has only to leave them alone.
It is a heavenly piece of coast, all this southern bulge of Devon, with its little secret rivers and untainted towns. The people are good and the land. So, with reservations, is its sea even beyond the Sound. Though once, indeed, I did suffer off Bolt Head one of the two most abominable spills of wind I ever suffered—and the first was off Beachy Head by Birdling Gap on Whit-Tuesday, 1902, a day ever to be remembered.
For the air fell off Birdling Gap just like water out of a bucket, and nearly blew the Nona flat upon her beam. I let go the sheet with a run, but as it was she dipped, perhaps, a third of her mainsail, and nearly broke her lover’s heart with fear. It is so sometimes with these high lands. The wind does not run true. It blows over them, and curls through a depression upon their edges, and curves, splashing down solid, in a bolt, on to the deep below. For, on that day by Beachy, all those years ago, the true wind was but just enough northerly to let me keep a course for Newhaven, hauled very close and saving every inch. But that gust came suddenly right on the weather beam, from far east of north, and nearly settled my then young craft and him that cherished and still cherishes her.
As for the spill off Bolt Head, it fell after a clear midnight, since the War, and it was more than a spill; for it blew steadily for the best part of an hour and then ceased. But, like its younger brother off Beachy, it was peculiar to the high land; for it came due northerly, whereas the main wind had east in it. I was watching the morning star burning like a sacred furnace on the edges of the black hills when Satan sent that wind and tried to drown three men. But we reefed in time—there were three of us, one for the helm and two to the reef; and when dawn broke, and the blessed colours of the east renewed the day, strange!—one end of the boom had three reefs down, and the other only two!
A coast of good memories: may it stand for ever in spite of petrol and every other evil thing. There might be no London at all, so kindly and so well guarded are all the men and women of its little harbour towns, and so uncrowded its hills. The Erne and the Avon I have never entered, but the Yealm I know: a difficult river in which to anchor, on account of innumerable moorings, a winding water in a wooded gorge, difficult also for wind. And Salcombe I have sailed in and out of—I suppose the happiest harbour in the world. It has many little beaches of its own, the homes of men standing separate upon them, far inland creeks, not too strong a tide, a bar somewhat shoal but always deep enough for the Nona, and a clear fairway to be fetched from within and from without, I take it, upon any wind; for the harbour opens well inside the narrows, and the seaward shores open well outside them.
Upon this piece of coast, setting out once from Plymouth, there came to me an experience of no particular moment as history, but of powerful effect upon my mind. It marked, in a sort of mysterious omen way, or, perhaps, I should say in a sort of visionary way, the unleashing of the Great War.
It so happened that in that summer of 1914 I had had occasion to go from Hampshire to one of the western ports, where I was to pick up my boat, and take her ultimately into Plymouth Sound, and thence, when I should have the leisure, I proposed to take her out again, and stand eastward up the coast.
I was staying in Hampshire with a friend who had a house in the New Forest. It was on a Sunday I set out thence. He sent me in his motor to Salisbury, where I wished to get Mass before going on by train. During the Mass, the priest, after his announcements, asked the congregation to pray for the soul of the Archduke heir-apparent of Austria, who had been murdered at a place called Sarajevo. I had never heard the name, and I had but a vague idea of who this archduke was, of his relationship to the Emperor, and of his heirship to the throne of Hapsburg-Lorraine. I came to the Nona, where she lay, and sailed out with her into the sea for some days. I had no conception that anything could be brewing.
When I came to land again, and went up to London, I found the air to be filled with all the possibilities of that time. The Austrian Government had sent to the Servian Government a note, the like of which had not been heard in the history of Christendom. It made demands which no government claiming to sovereignty could accept. For my part, when I read the terms of the note, I was in no doubt that it was of Prussian dictation. I am in no doubt to this day that it was of Prussian dictation.
There are two ways of ascertaining the origin of such a thing. One is the material way, the consultation of the only available documents, and the only certified direct human evidence. The other is the moral way, when one says: ‘This can only have been written by So-and-So, or, at the very least, can only have been inspired by So-and-So.’ Thus, if I find upon the table of a doubtful, weak kind of a man—and a courteous one at that—a letter framed in the very terms and manner of a bully, constantly his associate, then, though the letter be in the handwriting of the former, and on his own paper, even if there were convincing proof that when the actual writing was done the man was alone, I should yet say that the real author was the bully, and not the gentleman. He may have learnt it by heart at dictation. He may have copied it from the other’s draft. At any rate, it is morally certain that the one man, and not the other, is the true author of the thing launched—is the one responsible.