I have seen in those days a young man, the heir to a great fortune (later a minister of sorts) standing under the flaring naphtha lamps of a muddy London evening, calling out the new gospel and the promised land. I remember the eager, stupid, upturned faces of the men and women who had come there from bestial depths of the slums to hear him; to go back into those depths, and there to remain. They lie in those depths to-day. It is not such a creed that will save them. I remember the great mobs that followed John Burns, and how I myself would go miles through the East End to hear him; and I remember that great whirlpool of men in Trafalgar Square on the most critical day when he and others accepted imprisonment. There is nothing now for which men would act so; no one now has a creed; therefore, I call that time of my youth a better time.
Of all that enthusiasm and conviction nothing came; the mill turned noisily enough, but it ground no corn. Those fevered exaltations were transformed within a few years to a contemptible shrieking and raving called ‘imperialism,’ and that also went its way, and worked itself out to its ignoble end.... We survive to-day to hear a perpetual flattering of America, a perpetual grumbling against the workers, their sullenness, and, overseas, the increasing peril of control over the alien races once so easily governed. The vulgarians who invented this music-hall cry of empire now suffer the vacillation and the increasing peril into which their own base bullyings have led them. They must live a little time longer and dree their weird, and learn what happens to those forms of pride which have not even the merit of dignity.
Of those years, one thing remains: the dock strike made Southampton.
I see the monstrous ships of the Atlantic passage pass up and down the dredged channel to Southampton Water, and, as I look at them earning their millions for the few masters of such machines, I say to myself: ‘This was the fruit—here is the only fruit—of those nightly enthusiasms by the London Docks, and of the cry for freedom, and of the passionate belief that within a few years after 1889 the poverty of London would have passed into an evil memory.’
I carried on between the forts at Spithead under the new day, with the wind steady from just west of south until I was relieved at the helm, and hour by hour we made for the Looe.
Now, with the Looe Stream, which is the gateway to the Sussex seas, I knew not whether I should take the coast in its order between the Owers and the Forelands, or carry on day and night to the straits. For I have cruised up and down that garden wall of my own land so much that it stands in my mind as a perpetual come and go, sometimes far out into the salt beyond sight of England, sometimes a run in before too much wind, sometimes a beating up for Beachy, sometimes just missing, and at others just making, any one of the impossible entries of my harbours.
For the county of Sussex—and Kent, too, for that matter—up to Folkestone and beyond has had tricks played with it by the Creator of the sea and land. There has been done to it what is often done to a human life—that is, the granting of an insufficient opportunity; opportunity enough to compel the use of a function, not enough opportunity for the fulness of that use. All the harbours are such that they can be made, but only on sufferance; Chichester Harbour (which is also Bosham), Littlehampton, Shoreham, Newhaven, Folkestone in its day, are not to be approached at low tide save for the work of man, and Pevensey is dead, and what was once the shelter of Hastings has been worn down by the seas, the chalk reef which came out like an arm to keep off the southwest weather; nor is the breakwater they have made there sufficient. Newhaven is dredged, indeed, and they have pushed out a great pier of stone into the sea to stop the eastward making of the bank at its mouth, and Folkestone has a roadstead made for it though it is incomplete and open, but in their nature all these harbours are to be used by the favour of the tide, and that is why it is so awkward to be caught in a gale outside while Arundel River, or the Bramber River, is still ebbing out over Littlehampton or Shoreham Bar; for both those bars show out at a low spring tide. Sussex in this is less favoured than the Caux Country of Normandy, which is her opposite number. For Trouville and Dieppe, of course, and Fécamp, and even Saint Valery, a boat like mine can get into at any time. This is for two reasons: first, because the Norman streams do not come from the country beyond the chalk hills as do our Sussex rivers, but are mere brooks, so that there is no weight of water to bring the clay silt down through the harbour-mouths; next, because they are not open to the southwest wind and to the eastward drift.
The Sussex rivers left to themselves get a bar piled up in front of their mouths by the southwest wind and the inshore tide, so that a bank of gravel grows up eastwardly continually in front of them. Thus the mouth of Shoreham river, the Adur, travelled eastward for three miles and more between the Conquest and the civil wars; until at last it came out into the sea right up near Hove. But later a great storm burst through the bank and made the present entry, halfway down.
Exactly the same thing happened with the Ouse. Its bank of shingle crept out eastward until, in the Middle Ages, the entry was at Seaford, and that is why Seaford was called ‘Sea’ Ford, and that is why the French would attack Sea Ford, and that is why, when they so attacked, ‘this Pelham did repel ’em back aboard,’ as you may read in Lewes Church. After that a storm broke through the shingle bank, making a new entry right down to the westward, and so brought into being what is still called the ‘New Haven.’
I have just said that the Looe Stream is the gate into the Sussex seas; and so it is, unless you go outside those rocks called Owers, which is a long way round: for the Owers run miles out to sea.
The Looe Stream runs like a river in the midst of the sea between the long-concealed flats and little rocks just under water at low tide of Selsea Bill and the reefs of the Owers outside. There is nearly three fathom in it at low spring tides, and the entry is marked by a couple of buoys just as one might mark the entry to a harbour: also, as with the entry to a harbour, you had best take the Looe Stream on the flood. So did we on that morning after the storm make our way against the ebb until we had Selsea Bill close before us, and we caught the flood through the Looe by the afternoon.
There I saw, upon the left, the pole and basket of the Mixen, that sea-mark which is my Sussex gatepost. And from that point, taking a course just south of east, I carried on for Beachy all through the night. The wind held, strangely unchanged, and no more rain fell. It was one of the longest spells of similar weather, exactly suited for my little boat under all plain sail, that I had known. For when the dull morning broke (and it was hazy) she still carried the same wind in her sails.
Indeed, it was so thick that I was a little anxious to catch the chalk precipice against the east and know where I was. There is a little inset making into the Bight of Sussex once one is beyond the Owers, and I might have been carried—especially with some little leeway—inside the point.
When I did see land it was not Beachy at first, but, a good way off on the port bow, a murky gleam, from the Seven Sisters: but then, quickly after, I saw dimly on a grim sky the sharp, perpendicular line of the Head and the stump of the lighthouse at its foot. My course had been well kept: I was heading well outside.
There is little to tell of that run, for it was uneventful. We had that day, somewhere about the Royal Sovereign Shoals, a dropping of the wind and its rising again from offshore, north of west, but nothing heavy in it, serving us well for our course up-Channel, the weather still too thick to see much of the land between Beachy and Dungeness. It was in full darkness that we made and passed that light and, with the next day, we still carried on to Dover.
I have a grudge against that great harbour of Dover: mainly, I suppose, because I have had bad luck in it, but also because it seems to me so wasted an effort of human energy. It has founded one of our new peerages, and while it was being made there was any amount of political talk about it, and also about the electoral conditions of its town. Those who know assure me that it was of vast service in the war, but I have read recently, I know not on what authority, that the Navy has abandoned it. It must always have been a difficult place to enter, with its two narrow gates and the violent tide across them. There is nearly always a lump outside, where the sea shows its annoyance at having this obstacle thrust into it; and trying to get in with a small boat like mine and in a light wind is a trial. There is peril of missing the entry in the rush of the tide, unless one comes close up to the breakwater-heads. If one does this, one never knows but that some great death-ship, on its way to Calais or Ostend, will leap out suddenly upon one as one opens the harbour. Moreover, there are all manner of regulations which I do not understand, as to where you may drop anchor, and as to where you may not, and once, when I left the boat for some weeks in secure care, I found her on my return completely covered with the soot of His Majesty’s coal.