Ask a modern staff with every modern advantage, and even with a good modern road on which the columns could advance on a front of four, to move by a single road a quarter of a million human beings, half of them fighting men, from Augsburg to Milan. Consider the preparation such a march would mean; the exact forethought required, establishing the position of each column at the end of each day’s march; the calculation of provisions, the arrangement for the passing up and down of waggons or of pack animals, the strict discipline necessary to prevent bunching throughout the whole column; the confusion—these and a hundred other points. We all know that very good staff work, taking plenty of time, and with every modern advantage of map and transport, will do it in such and such a fashion. We also know that a few mistakes on the staff might easily so bungle the affair that only a dribble would get across in time, and the bulk would starve and die. Yet these huge barbaric forces, in some undescribed way, so traversed the mountains and debouched upon the plains of Italy, having evidently thought out some form of screen or advance guard—otherwise they would have been blocked on emerging from the pass—having some clearly elaborate system of commissariat, and so on. Not a word of all that has come down to us from antiquity. We do not know how it was done. What is more, we cannot see _how_ it was done by men who had no writing, and only the vaguest notions of topography.
The harbour of Poole, for which we were making during that run along the Dorset coast when we were hailed by the Needle man, has a problem of the sort attaching to it.
You come round the Anvil Point, and there, if you are lucky, you catch another tide. There are many such points on the coast where you can carry the tide with you much longer than the due six hours or so, by coming into the midst of a fresh tide at the very end of the old one. The main stream seems to shoot past Anvil Point, towards the Island. If you come to Anvil Point and the corner of Dorset just at the very top of the flood and have the good fortune to get round and open Swanage Bay, you are out of this main stream just before the ebb begins, and another, younger flood takes you up past Old Harry and towards Poole.
Old Harry is an isolated chimney of chalk rock which still stands, expecting doom. He had a wife standing by him for centuries—a lesser (but no doubt nobler) pillar. She crashed some years ago and now he is alone. He cannot wish to remain so much longer, staring out to sea without companionship. I think he longs for his release.
Beyond Old Harry you come to that odd entry of Poole, the history of which is, I say, inexplicable to me. It was a main harbour for the Romans; and when the Scandinavian pirates came down to destroy this outer province of Christendom, they used it as a known base. It was sailing out of Poole that a great fleet of their ships—ninety I am glad to say—coming to pillage this Roman land, were piled up and destroyed in Swanage Bay; and it was from Poole that they went up water to Wareham, and thence made their foray by land to Exeter.
Yet Poole, thus easy to the ancients, could never be entered without local knowledge. It is a trap, baited and set. As you look from overseas, there stands clear before you the entry to a great harbour. You see plainly a narrow gate, an obvious door into a wide sheet of sheltered water within. But if you steer for that entry, you strike. For, running down parallel with the coast for more than a mile, is a long, high, hidden sandbank, so that you must get into Poole to-day by making for the shore more than a mile below the entry to the harbour, and then running up a trench of which you can see nothing from the surface of the sea, but which you must keep to or wreck your ship. To-day that strange approach is amply buoyed with a bright light at the seaward end, and no one can miss it. But what did the ancients do, who had, it may be presumed, no charts—certainly the pirates had none—and who could not, save in some very special weather, have determined the exact point of entry by the lead? The savages from Norway may have depended upon captured pilots, or upon men who had purchased their knowledge of the fairway by disasters of their own in earlier pirate raids. But we hear nothing of all this in the records. We are simply told they came to Poole continually as though it were as simple a matter as going up Spithead.
Poole harbour has traps within as well as this grinning trap of an entry, and the worst of these traps is the patchiness of the holding-ground. Unless you know where to drop anchor, you may be dragged in Poole, upwards, upon as fierce a tide as I know, with the flukes of your anchor dragging as easily through the soft mud almost as they would through water. But with all that, and although the Nona has caught fire there (the sea brings all adventures), Poole is a harbour that will always have good memories for me; and perhaps the Nona will go there at last to die.
Now that I am upon the home seas steering eastward out of Poole after rounding that last great buoy of theirs (for I dare not try the Swatchway), I am concerned to defend the proposition that there is more exploration to be done in things familiar than in things unfamiliar.
With what hesitation do I not set down those words! For they are paradox, and paradox is to my personal taste as detestable as advertisement. I will even confess to a little distaste of too much metaphor—or, indeed, of any trick or hook for catching the attention of the reader. Why should I suppose him jaded when I have so many interesting things to say?
But here paradox is unavoidable; for it is clear that in the plain sense of the words the exploration of a place unknown must yield more matter than the exploration of a place familiar. What I mean is that where one knows a thousand things, each of those thousand leads on to another thousand, and so quickly makes you a million. Whereas where you know nothing, you go on from your first discovery to one or two more, and then to ten or a hundred all in a chain. So that the exploration of the known is like multiplication, and the exploration of the unknown is like addition. Or again, the survey of the known is like the sowing of a field with a manifold harvest; whereas the surveying of the unknown is but the lengthening out of a trail.
And all this mass of words am I tempted to because I am entering the home seas, which I count from the Anvil to the South Foreland as being my garden or back yard; though it is true that my general estate extends much farther afield. What is more, the home seas themselves expand a little during these last years of too much sailing along the coast of our Great Island, and I am not sure that Portland Bill is not now my gatepost, instead of the Anvil. But all this matters not at all.
The Bay between Poole and the Wight is so domestic and inward a thing that many would laugh to hear it called the sea at all. But let them be as I was on that night and they will find it is the sea right enough, and that it can raise a fine hubbub, and that the salt water of it can tumble about with the best of them.
I take it that there is no trial more trying in the sailing of a little craft than taking her through blinding weather at night close inshore—whether that weather be blinding through feather-white slants of snow or through violence of sudden rain.
Well outside you make your course and keep to it indifferently, for you have all the room you need; but when you are running from a coast point to a coast point with the wind on shore through the darkness it is another matter.
The wind that night had backed to the east of south; having so far favoured me, however, that it never backed round enough to make me go about. I was abominably short-handed, and on that particular occasion could only count upon myself, for reasons which I will not debate. My course was for the North Channel under Hurst Castle, where there is a passage so narrow that even the Nona could hardly beat through it between the shingle bank and that odd spit of land on which Hurst Castle itself stands, and where Charles, the last true King of England, lay a prisoner after having lost his power. That channel has to be made with skill. You must lie close to the land, but if you lie a thought too close you touch a hump of gravel which lies off the point. Your business in shooting at that mark on such a blinding night is to keep Hurst Light just on your landward bow until you judge that you are perhaps a mile off. Then you must pass it over your bow just to the starboard side, and then, when you are close up against it, so that it seems you might strike almost, you must pay away again, put the light to port, and skirt the land by half a cable or less, and so you will round the long spit of Hurst and find yourself inside the sheltered water of the Solent; all this if you have a leading wind.
At the setting out from Poole you must make a course lying well outside Hengestbury, not going too close inland, for there are shoals and, I think, rocks. It is only when you have the mass of Hengestbury Head standing up like a sort of dull island against the night and a mile or two north of your beam that you can begin, or a little later, to make the Hurst Light your mark; and it was there on this stormy night that my troubles began; for both the Needles far away a-weather and Hurst itself were continually obscured by the most violent sheets of rain, which came in gusts driven before the wind.