The Cruise of the Nona

To the memory of
Philip Kershaw my
brave and constant
companion upon the
sea: but now he
will sail no more

To Maurice Baring

My Dear Maurice—

I have dedicated to you two books: one was a book On Nothing. This I dedicated to you because, being on nothing, it dealt with what is better than the fullness of life.

Another book I dedicated to you was The Green Overcoat, and this I dedicated to you because you had written a play called The Green Elephant, and we thereby held communion in green things.

I now dedicate to you this book, because you also have written a book upon Things That Come to Mind, and this book may well turn into something of the same sort. Yours was called The Puppet Show of Memory, and dealt with the things and people you had seen and known. What mine will be called I do not yet know, for I hold that a child should be born before it is christened.

I have been led into this opinion by the action of an acquaintance, who much disputed with his wife what name the child should bear, it being not yet born. To this choice they attached great issues; for they rightly thought that a name determines a lifetime much more than does a horoscope, and for this reason they consulted no astrologer. First they explored the grander sounds, names of dominion and power. They considered Esmeralda, Ruhala, Semiramis, Darumdibaba, and Rimbomba, as also Haulteclaire, following the noise of pomps and wars. Wearying of this, the glamour of strangeness seized them, and they attempted Pelagia, Sonia, Mehitabel, Oona, Célimène, Mamua and Berengarde, Machuska, Gounor, and Zaire; but these seemed, upon a second reading, affected: as indeed they were. So they fell into childishness, and wallowed in gardening, reciting Pansy, Daisy, Rose, Violet, Pimpernel, and even Forget-me-Not, which led them into the Furor Hebraicus, and such terms as Miriam, Lilith, Deborah, Eve, Mizraim, Sheba, and the rest—very unsuitable; from which they reacted to mere abstractions, such as Mercy, Peace, Charity, Grace, and whatnot. But these seeming insipid, they fell maundering after a donnish fashion and dared consider Æthelburga, Fristhwith, Ealswitha, and other abominations, till an angel compelled them to desist and they were driven to the solid path of the queens, and advanced Maud, Adelaide, Matilda, Elizabeth, Guinevere, Anne, and jibbed at Jezebel. Next they ran wild and careered through Tosca, Faustine, Theodora, Athalie, Antigone, Medea, Pasiphaë, and many others. Finally, they perched, she upon the name Astarte, but he upon the, to my mind, lovelier word, Cytherea. They both mean the same thing, only one was a well-modelled Greek, and the other a horrible Hittite. It was the woman who wanted Astarte, and the man who wanted Cytherea; so the child was to be called Astarte, and she was not even allowed to have the second name of Cytherea.

All that was on Thursday, the 2nd June. On the 13th, being a Monday, in the early afternoon, the child was born, and was a boy.

There was no more discussion upon its name, because its uncle, a rich man, was called James. So the boy was James, and there was an end of it.

I have been led on, as you see, but the essence of this book is that it shall be a sailing through the seas of the years, that is, a flight through the airs of time, or, again, a leading on and a passage through the vales of life: now culling this sour fruit, now that poisonous herb, and now again this stinging plant, which I had thought to be innocuous.

For whether I should write, Maurice, a book of reminiscences or of wandering, or of extravagances or of opinions, or of conclusions, or of experiences, I could not make up my mind after a cogitation of three weeks and four days, which occupied the whole of my remaining faculties between the town of Blois, upon the Loire, and the town of Châlons, upon the Marne, my journey from the one to the other being taken this very year circuitously, in the company of a Bear, by way of Bayonne, where the bayonet, Rosalie, was first made; Saint John at the foot of the Pass, where they boil crayfish in white wine; Roncesvalles, where Roland died, and I nearly did; Burguete, where they charge too much and where the kitchen smoke goes out through the middle of the roof; Pamplona, the only permanent thing Pompey ever did; Saragossa, which never changes; Reus, where they spin cotton; Tarragona, which is biding its time; Barcelona, which got there first; Puycerda, and, after that, the Gorges of the Tet.

I was by this time a long way from Blois, but I had come to no conclusion on the name of my book, and my mind was still like one of those conferences to which the parliamentarians of various countries travel at our expense from time to time, and are there delivered of heavy speeches without meaning, which make one think of a corpulent elderly man groaning across a ploughed clay field after a week’s rain in the dark of the moon. At Nîmes I had not decided what to call the book, nor down in a valley of the Cévennes, nor at Lyons, nor in the Jura, nor in the Vosges, nor in Strasbourg; until at last I came to Châlons, as I have said. And, sitting down there to a meal in the hotel very finely called “The House of the High Mother of God,” I still remained undecided. And I am so, to this day.

I cannot make it a book of reminiscences, because I can remember nothing for more than about two days, and also because I will not write about my contemporaries for fear of offending them. They are very good fellows, they have no particular characters or talents, they do nothing lasting, they are a generation of saltless butter with too much skim milk about it, there is little to say about them, and almost anything one says gives the little fellows offence. I would not call it “Opinions,” because I have none either, only convictions; and if I called it “Convictions” I might be misunderstood. I tell you I do not know what to call this book, but I am dedicating it to you because it has at least this parallel with your work that it is all about things that have passed through my mind.

Indeed, the naming of a book has always seemed to me a thing fastidious in both senses; that is, both a thing wearisome and a thing of picking and choosing. I am not quite sure that books ought to be named at all. If they were numbered, like the streets in America, they would be very much easier to catalogue and shelf (or shelve) and remember the places of. Thus your next book or so might be Baring 32, and this Belloc 106. And why not? It would in no way diminish their souls, their connotations. Cannot a man be head over ears in love with Number 15, Parham Street, and sick of 30, Tupton Square? I can!

Numbers, I say, leave us free to give personality and emotions to things. An anniversary is but a numbered day in a month, yet it shakes a man more than any feast name.

So should it be with books. When they are named, they give a false indication; moreover, the vast crowd of books that are poured out in this our day like fugitives from a plague-stricken city is so immense that the discovery of a new title is impossible. However, it will have a title before I have done, stap me, and it is dedicated to you.

At this point I ought to end; but, as I have already told you, it is in the very character of this book, of its essence, nature, and personality, that it has only an accidental beginning, no real end, and nothing in particular between the two. It is like those rivers of the Middle West which trickle out of a marsh, and then wander aimless, without banks or shape, mere wetnesses, following the lowest land until they reach the shapeless Mississippi, and at last the flats and mud of a steaming sea.

What a book! …

My mind now suggests to me (for my mind is separate from myself, and may properly be regarded as no more than an inconsequent companion) that I should do very well not to cut off the Dedication from the rest of the Opus. The putting of a dedication separately from a book has something about it of form; and form is just what I have to avoid. I am to wander at large, setting down such things as pass before my eyes of memory, leaving out pretty well all that is of importance (reserving that for posthumous publication), and doing no more than present this, that, or the other, of ephemeral things. For there comes a time in life after which a man discovers no more, has lost through the effect of the years the multitude of what he possessed both within and without, can only repeat phrases or decisions already well worn. He is fixed, sterilised, hardened, and has nothing left to say; that is the moment in which he is expected to set down, for the benefit of others, the full treasury of what was once his soul.

Some two to five years ago there was an outburst of books in England which I myself labelled (and, I think, justly) “The Cads’ Concert.” These were books in which men set down their connection with their fellows, giving each by name familiarly, purported to publish diaries which they had never kept, maligned the dead, insulted the living, and lied impudently upon both. They had a great sale, had these books, because they brought in rich or otherwise important men and women, known already by newspapers vaguely to the readers of such books, so that those readers had from “The Cads’ Concert” a faint reflection of High Life.

It was something quite new in the history of letters, and had, I am glad to say, a very short life. I do not propose to add one more vileness to that nasty little list.

How then should I approach this task which has been set me of writing down, in the years between fifty and sixty, some poor scraps of judgment and memory? I think I will give it the name of a Cruise; for it is in the hours when he is alone at the helm, steering his boat along the shores, that a man broods most upon the past, and most deeply considers the nature of things. I think I will also call it by the name of my boat, the Nona, and give the whole book the title The Cruise of the Nona, for, in truth, the Nona has spent her years, which are much the same as mine (we are nearly of an age, the darling, but she a little younger, as is fitting), threading out of harbours, taking the mud, trying to make further harbours, failing to do so, getting in the way of more important vessels, giving way to them, taking the mud again, waiting to be floated off by the tide, anchoring in the fairway, getting cursed out of it, dragging anchor on shingle and slime, mistaking one light for another, rounding the wrong buoy, crashing into other people, and capsizing in dry harbours. It seemed to me, as I considered the many adventures and misadventures of my boat, that here was a good setting for the chance thoughts of one human life; since all that she has done and all that a man does make up a string of happenings and thinkings, disconnected and without shape, meaningless, and yet full: which is Life.

Indeed, the cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens to the soul of a man in a larger way. We set out for places which we do not reach, or reach too late; and, on the way, there befall us all manner of things which we could never have awaited. We are granted great visions, we suffer intolerable tediums, we come to no end of the business, we are lonely out of sight of England, we make astonishing landfalls—and the whole rigmarole leads us along nowhither, and yet is alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril, and repose.

On this account I have always thought that a man does well to take every chance day he can at sea in the narrow seas. I mean, a landsman like me should do so. For he will find at sea the full model of human life: that is, if he sails on his own and in a little craft suitable to the little stature of one man. If he goes to sea in a large boat, run by other men and full of comforts, he can only do so being rich, and his cruise will be the dull round of a rich man. But if he goes to sea in a small boat, dependent upon his own energy and skill, never achieving anything with that energy and skill save the perpetual repetition of calm and storm, danger undesired and somehow overcome, then he will be a poor man, and his voyage will be the parallel of the life of a poor man—discomfort, dread, strong strain, a life all moving. What parallel I shall find in the action of boats for a man of the middle sort, neither rich nor poor, I cannot tell. Perhaps the nearest would be the travel at a fixed price upon a steamer from one port not of the passenger’s choosing to another not of his choosing, but carried along, ignorant of the sea and of the handling of the vessel, and having all the while no more from the sea than a perpetual, but not very acute, discomfort, and with it a sort of slight uncertainty, which are precisely the accompaniments throughout life of your middle sort of man.

So I have given this book a name: The Cruise of the Nona. Had I called it The Cargo, I might be nearer my intention. At any rate, I am now off to sail the English seas again, and to pursue from thought to thought and from memory to memory such things as have occupied one human soul, and of these some will be of profit to one man and some to another, and most, I suppose, to none at all.

It was late in May, near midnight, the air being very warm and still, and the sky not covered but somewhat dim, with no moon, when I took the Nona out from Holyhead Harbour, having on board one companion to help me work the boat, and a local man who could speak Welsh for me in whatever places I might make along the coast.

The very slight breeze, which had barely moved us through the water after we had got up the anchor, died away long before we reached the end of the breakwater, and it was necessary to pull her out with the dinghy in order to fetch round the end of the stonework and get to sea. There was at that time of the tide a little current running towards the Stack, which would slightly help us on our way once we were outside, and with this we drifted a full hour and more, aided now and then by faint breaths of air, which rose and died again like memories. So came we, with the turn of the night, under the glare of the lighthouse at last, and then put the nose of the little ship round for the point of Carnarvonshire and the strait between the mainland and Bardsey Island, which is called Bardsey Sound.

It was a course of about thirty-three miles, with no chance, apparently, of covering it in all that night, nor perhaps in all the coming day as well; for we had struck, as it seemed, that hot, steady summer weather in which one may play at a drifting match for days on end.

While it was still dark the distant mountains could barely be seen as something a little blacker than the sky. They looked astonishingly low, as mountains always do on a moonless night, when there is nothing to distinguish their details, and nothing against which to compare them, or by which to tell their distance. Already—it being now nearer two than one o’clock—a little wind had arisen, settling down, as it seemed, into somewhat east of north, and blowing over the Anglesey flats. It gave us perhaps no more than a couple of knots an hour, but it was heartening after the long calm, and as we had all sail set she pulled to it steadily enough. I was at the helm, my companion was still awake, sitting in the cockpit and talking to me, and the hand who was to be with us till we next landed smoked beside us on deck.

The wind had freshened somewhat, we were making perhaps four or five knots, when the dawn began to show beyond Snowdon, and those great hills at once looked higher against the glimmer of grey light. Soon the whole coast was apparent, and the Yreifles with their triple peaks (clearer than I had expected; indeed, too clear for fine weather) lay right ahead and Bardsey Island beyond them and the narrow sound in between. The wind seemed steady, as though it would hold. I reckoned that the tide would turn against us anywhere between six and seven in the morning, that it would turn back through the Sound about noon or one o’clock, and I calculated that we should be running into Cardigan Bay, past Bardsey, on the middle of the ebb, an hour or two later than that time.

But what happened was something wholly unexpected; it is always so at sea, and that is why it is said that the sea brings all adventures. Indeed, I think that as we go on piling measurements upon measurements, and making one instrument after another more and more perfect to extend our knowledge of material things, the sea will always continue to escape us. For there is a Living Spirit who rules the sea and many attendant spirits about him.

But on that brightening morning there was nothing to warn us. The glass was high and, if I remember right, still rising; the sky uncovered and clearer than it had been by night; the wind slight, but holding steady; and all was soldier’s weather, so that anyone could have taken that little ship through such weather where he would. It was weather, one would say, made for the instruction of the young in the art of sailing.

By the time it was fully light, we were making between six and seven knots, for the wind had sharply risen. As it was an offshore wind, there was as yet no sea raised, but little tumbling whitecaps, very pleasant to look at, and all the movement coming on our quarter from over the land. With the rising of the sun it blew hard. We were yielding to it too much; we had taken down the topsail an hour before, and now I thought it wise to take in a reef as well, which we did in the headsail and the mainsail, but leaving the jib as it was, for that sail was not a large one.