0251
The barge which I had failed to sink had two insignificant square-sails set, like pocket-handkerchiefs, but was depending for most of its motion on a family of children who were harnessed to its tow-rope in good order.
Now the barometer began to fall still lower, and simultaneously the weather improved and brightened. It was a strange summer, was that summer! The wind fell, the lee-board ceased to hum pleasantly through the water, and we had to start the engine, which is much less amusing than the sails. And the towers of Bruges would not appear on the horizon of the monotonous tree-lined canal, upon whose banks every little village resembles every other little village. We had to invent something to pass the time, and we were unwise enough to measure the speed of the engine on this smooth water in this unusual calm. A speed trial is nearly always an error of tact, for the reason that it shatters beautiful illusions. I had the beautiful illusion that under favorable conditions the engine would drive the yacht at the rate of twelve kilometers an hour. The canal-bank had small posts at every hundred meters and large posts at every thousand. The first test gave seven and a half kilometers an hour. It was unthinkable. The distances must be wrong. My excellent watch must have become capricious. The next test gave eight kilometers. The skipper administered a tonic to the engine, and we rose to nine, only to fall again to eight. Allowing even that the dinghy took a kilometer an hour off the speed, the result of the test was very humiliating. We crawled. We scarcely moved.
Then, feeling the need of exercise, I said I would go ashore and walk along the bank against the yacht until we could see Bruges. I swore it, and I kept the oath, not with exactitude, but to a few hundred meters; and by the time my bloodshot eyes sighted the memorable belfry of Bruges in the distance, I had decided that the engine was perhaps a better engine than I had fancied. I returned on board, and had to seek my berth in a collapse. Nevertheless theVelsahad been a most pleasing object as seen from the bank.
WE moored at the Quai Spinola, with one of the most picturesque views in Bruges in front of us, an irresistible temptation to the watercolorist, even in wet weather. I had originally visited Bruges about twenty years earlier. It was the first historical and consistently beautiful city I had ever seen, and even now it did not appear to have sunk much in my esteem. It is incomparably superior to Ghent, which is a far more important place, but in which I have never been fortunate.
0258
Ghent is gloomy, whereas Bruges is melancholy, a different and a finer attribute. I have had terrible, devastating adventures in the restaurants of Ghent, and the one first-class monument there is the medieval castle of the counts of Flanders, an endless field for sociological speculation, but transcendency ugly and depressing. Ghent is a modern town in an old suit of clothes, and its inhabitants are more formidably Belgian than those of any other large city of Flanders. I speak not of the smaller industrial places, where Belgianism is ferocious and terrible.
At Bruges, water-colors being duly accomplished, we went straight to Notre Dame, where there was just enough light left for us to gaze upon Michelangelo’s “Virgin and Child,” a major work. Then to the streets and lesser canals. I found changes in the Bruges of my youth. Kinematographs, amid a conflagration of electricity, were to be expected, for no show-city in Europe has been able to keep them out. Do they not enliven and illumine the ground floors of some of the grandest renaissance palaces in Florence? But there were changes more startling than the advent kinematographs.
Incandescent gas-mantles had replaced the ordinary burners in the street-lamps of the town! In another fifty years the corporation of Bruges will be using electricity.
Still more remarkable, excursion motor-boats were running on the canals, and at the improvised landing-stages were large signs naming Bruges “The Venice of the North.” I admit that my feelings were hurt—not by the motor-boats, but by the signs. Bruges is no more the Venice of the North, than Venice is the Bruges of the South.
We allowed the soft melancholy of Bruges to descend upon us and penetrate us, as the motorboats ceased to run and the kinematographs grew more brilliant in the deepening night. We had to dine, and all the restaurants of the town were open to us. Impossible to keep away from the Grande Place and the belfry, still incessantly chattering about the time of day. Impossible not to look with an excusable sentimentality at the Hôtel du Panier d’Or, which in youth was the prince of hotels, with the fattest landlord in the world, and thousands of mosquitos ready among its bed-hangings to assist the belfry-chimes in destroying sleep. The Panier d’Or was the only proper hotel for the earnest art-loving tourist who could carry all his luggage and was firmly resolved not to spend more than seven francs a day at the outside. At the Panier d’Or one was sure to encounter other travelers who took both art and life seriously.
No, we would not dine at the Panier d’Or, because we would not disturb our memories. We glanced like ghosts of a past epoch at its exterior, and we slipped into the café restaurant next door, and were served by a postulant boy waiter who had everything to learn about food and human nature, but who was a nice boy. And after dinner, almost saturated with the exquisite melancholy of the Grande Place, we were too enchanted to move. We drank coffee and other things, and lingered until all the white cloths were removed from the tables; and the long, high room became a café simply. A few middle-aged male habitués wandered in separately,—four in all,—and each sat apart and smoked and drank beer. The mournfulness was sweet and overwhelming. It was like chloroform. The reflection that each of these sad, aging men had a home and anintimitésomewhere in the spacious, transformed, shabby interiors of Bruges, that each was a living soul with aspirations and regrets, this reflection was excruciating in its blend of forlornness and comedy.
A few more habitués entered, and then a Frenchman and a young Frenchwomen appeared on a dais at the back of the café and opened a piano. They were in correct drawing-room costume, with none of the eccentricities of thecafe-chantant, and they produced no effect whatever on the faces or in the gestures of the habitués, They performed. He sang; she sang; he played; she played. Just the common songs and airs of the Parisian music-halls, vulgar, but more inane than vulgar, The young woman was agreeable, with the large, red mouth which is the index of a comfortable, generous, and good-natured disposition They sang and played a long time. Nobody budged; nobody smiled. Certainly we did not; in a contest of phlegm Englishmen can, it is acknowledged, hold their own. Most of the habitués doggedly read newspapers, but at intervals there was a momentary dull applause. The economic basis of the entertainment was not apparent to us. The prices of food and drink were very moderate, and no collection was made by or on behalf of the artists.
At length, when melancholy ran off us instead of being absorbed, because we had passed the saturation-point, we rose and departed. Yes, incandescent-mantles and motor-boats were not the only changes in Bruges. And in the café adjoining the one we had left a troupe of girls in white were performing gaily to a similar audience of habitués. We glimpsed them through the open door. And in front of the kinematograph a bell was ringing loudly and continuously to invite habitués, and no habitués were responding. It was all extremely mysterious. The chimes of the belfry flung their strident tunes across the sky, and the thought of these and of the habitués gave birth in us to a suspicion that perhaps, after all, Bruges had not changed.
0263
We moved away out of the Grande Place into the maze of Bruges toward the Quai Spinola, our footsteps echoing along empty streets and squares of large houses the fronts of which showed dim and lofty rooms inhabited by the historical past and also no doubt by habitués. And after much wandering I had to admit that I was lost in Bruges, a city which I was supposed to know like my birthplace. And at the corner of a street, beneath an incandescent-mantle, we had to take out a map and unfold it and peer at it just as if we had belonged to the lowest rank of tourists.
As we submitted ourselves to this humiliation, the carillon of the belfry suddenly came to us over a quarter of a mile of roofs. Not the clockwork chimes now, but the carillonneur himself playing on the bells, a bravura piece, delicate and brilliant. The effect was ravishing, as different from that of the clockwork chimes as a piano from a barrel-organ. All the magic of Bruges was reawakened in its pristine force. Bruges was no more a hackneyed rendezvous for cheap trippers and amateur painters and poverty-stricken English bourgeois and their attendant chaplains. It was the miraculous Bruges of which I had dreamed before I had ever even seen the place—just that.
0267
Having found out where we were in relation to the Quai Spinola, we folded up the map and went forward. The carillon ceased, and began again, reaching us in snatches over the roofs in the night wind. We passed under the shadows of rococo churches, the façades and interiors of which are alike neglected by those who take their pleasures solely according to the instructions of guide-books, and finally we emerged out of the maze upon a long lake, pale bluish-gray in the gloom. And this lake was set in a frame of pale bluish-gray houses with stepwise gables, and by high towers, and by a ring of gas-lamps, all sleeping darkly. And on the lake floated theVelsa, like the phantom of a ship, too lovely to be real, and yet real. It was the most magical thing.
We could scarcely believe that there was our yacht right in the midst of the town. This was the same vessel that only a little earlier had rounded Cape Gris-Nez in a storm, and suffered no damage whatever. Proof enough of the advantage of the barge-build, with a light draft, and heavy lee-boards for use with a beam wind when close-hauled. Some yachtsmen, and expert yachtsmen, too, are strongly against the barge. But no ordinary yacht of theVelsassize could have scraped into that lake by the Quai Spinola and provided us with that unique sensation. TheVelsamight have been designed specially for the background of Bruges. She fitted it with exquisite perfection.
And the shaft of light slanting up from her forecastle hatch rendered her more domestic than the very houses around, which were without exception dark and blind, and might have been abandoned. We went gingerly aboard across the narrow, yielding gangway, and before turning in gazed again at the silent and still scene. Not easy to credit that a little way off the kinematograph was tintinnabulating for custom, and a Parisian couple singing and playing, and a troupe of white-frocked girls coarsely dancing.
AFTER the exoticism of foreign parts, this chapter is very English. But no island could be more surpassingly strange, romantic, and baffling than this island. I had a doubt about the propriety of using the phrase “East Anglia” in the title. I asked, therefore, three educated people whether the northern part of Essex could be termed East Anglia, according to current usage. One said he did n’t know. The next said that East Anglia began only north of the Stour. The third said that East Anglia extended southward as far as anybody considered that it ought to extend southward. He was a true Englishman. I agreed with him. England was not made, but born. It has grown up to a certain extent, and its pleasure is to be full of anomalies, like a human being. It has to be seen to be believed.
Thus, my income tax is assessed in one town, twelve miles distant. After assessment, particulars of it are forwarded to another town in another county, and the formal demand for payment is made from there; but the actual payment has to be made in a third town, about twenty miles from either of the other two. What renders England wondrous is not such phenomena, but the fact that Englishmen see nothing singular in such phenomena.
East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of England, and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very early in history, and many of their descendants, full of the original Anglian ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no place is more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center on the east coast, and the home port of theVelsa. Theoretically and officially, Harwich is the home port of theVelsa, but not in practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea, except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193 different spellings of the name.
Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was “a member of the Cinque Ports.” Notoneof the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically there were seven, but a member. A “member” was subordinate, and Brightlingsea was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared in the responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven ships for the king’s service every year. In return it shared in the privilege of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a few useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after all, it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442. The charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: “To all the faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.” By this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts, of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the “bonaventure mizen”; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity of the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of navigation.
Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing- or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested at the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars kicked up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of traveling fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships now at Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea with an astrolabe; the “bonaventure mizen” is no more; smuggling is unfashionable; fast craft are encouraged.
Nevertheless, on a summer’s morning I have left theVelsain the dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border of pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the whole visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original Angles first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era is reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water, and the Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the pristine reigns as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of the scene is indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what to look for. I was telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful flatness of Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. “But aren’t you educated up to flats?” he asked. I said I was. He persisted. “But are you educated up to mud, the lovely colors on a mud-flat?” He was a true connoisseur of Essex. The man who is incapable of being ravished by a thin, shallow tidal stream running between two wide, shimmering mud banks that curve through a strictly horizontal marsh, without a tree, without a shrub, without a bird, save an eccentric sea-gull, ought not to go yachting in Essex estuaries.
0278
Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular industry has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort only yesterday; that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It has, however, steadily progressed, until now, despite every natural disadvantage and every negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty yachts and some eight hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot get into Brightlingsea at all from the high sea without feeling her way among sand-banks,—in old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the inhabitants made a profitable specialty of salving wrecks,—and when a yacht has successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really the estuary of the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of Brightlingsea Creek, her difficulties will multiply.
In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there is no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from the shore, which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these perils, she will almost certainly run into something, or something will run into her, or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves. Yachts, barges, smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored anywhere and anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack always deems a yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor somewhere, and asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or ever has existed or ever will. Historical tradition—sacred! All craft do as they like, and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its sides.
Also, the creek has no charm whatever of landscape or seascape. You can see nothing from it except the little red streets of Brightlingsea and the yacht-yards. Nevertheless, by virtue of some secret which is uncomprehended beyond England, it prospers as a center of yachting. Yachts go to it and live in it not by accident or compulsion, but from choice. Yachts seem to like it. Of course it is a wonderful place, because any place where a hundred and twenty yachts foregather must be a wonderful place. The interest of its creek is inexhaustible, once you can reconcile yourself to its primitive Anglianism, which, after all, really harmonizes rather well with the mud-flats of the county.
An advantage of Brightlingsea is that when the weather eastward is dangerously formidable, you can turn your back on the North Sea and go for an exciting cruise up the Colne. A cruise up the Colne is always exciting because you never know when you may be able to return. Even theVelsa, which can float on puddles, has gone aground in the middle of the fair and wide Colne. A few miles up are the twin villages of Wivenhoe and Rowhedge, facing each other across the river, both inordinately picturesque, and both given up to the industry of yachting. At Wivenhoe large yachts and even ships are built, and in winter there is always a choice selection of world-famous yachts on the mud, costly and huge gewgaws, with their brass stripped off them, painfully forlorn, stranded in a purgatory between the paradise of last summer and the paradise of the summer to come.
If you are adventurous, you keep on winding along the curved reaches, and as soon as the last yacht is out of sight, you are thrown hack once more into the pre-Norman era, and there is nothing but a thin, shallow stream, two wide mud hanks, and a border of grass at the top of them. This is your world, which you share with a sea-gull or a crow for several miles; and then suddenly you arrive at a concourse of great barges against a quay, and you wonder by w hat magic they got there, and above the quay rise the towers and steeples of a city that was already ancient when William the Conqueror came to England in the interests of civilization to take up the white man’s burden,—Colchester, where more oysters are eaten on a certain night of the year at a single feast than at any other feast on earth. Such is the boast.
But such contrasts as the foregoing do not compare in violence with the contrasts offered by the River Stour, a few miles farther north on the map of England. Harwich is on the Stour, at its mouth, where, in confluence with the River Orwell (which trulyisin East Anglia) it forms a goodish small harbor. And Harwich, though a tiny town, is a fairly important naval port, and also “a gate of the empire,” where steamers go forth for Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. We came into Harwich Harbor on the tide one magnificent Sunday afternoon, with the sea a bright green and the sky a dangerous purple, and the entrance to the Stour was guarded by two huge battle-ships, theBlakeand theBlenheim, each apparently larger than the whole of the town of Harwich. Up the Stour, in addition to all the Continental steamers, was moored a fleet of forty or fifty men-of-war, of all sorts and sizes, in a quadruple line. It was necessary for theVelsato review this fleet of astoundingly ugly and smart black monsters, and she did so, to the high satisfaction of the fleet, which in the exasperating tedium of Sunday afternoon was thirsting for a distraction, even the mildest. On every sinister ship—theBasilisk, theHarpy, etc., apposite names!—the young bluejackets (they seemed nearly all to be youths) were trying bravely to amuse themselves. The sound of the jews’-harp and of the concertina was heard, and melancholy songs of love. Little circles of men squatted here and there on the machinery-encumbered decks playing at some game. A few students were reading; some athletes were sparring; many others skylarking. None was too busy to stare at our strange lines. Launches and longboats were flitting about full of young men, going on leave to the ecstatic shore joys of Harwich or sadly returning therefrom. Every sound and noise was clearly distinguishable in the stillness of the hot afternoon. And the impression given by the fleet as a whole was that of a vast masculine town, for not a woman could be descried anywhere. It was striking and mournful. When we had got to the end of the fleet I had a wild idea:
“Let us go up the Stour.”
At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever had been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded. Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were back in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills, that was all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small headlands, and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated that a channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys nobody could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no buoys, and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide, deceptive waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put about, we dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant fleet, in another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached mysteriously out of one of those bights, and it was maimed by two men with the air of conspirators.
“D’ ye want a pilot?”
We hardened ourselves.
“No.”
They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.
“Why in thunder is n’t this river buoyed?” I demanded of the skipper.
The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking the bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No catastrophe. The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause again, reversing the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far to port could be seen a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank. Impossible that it could indicate the true channel. We went straight ahead and chanced it. The next instant we were hard on the mud in midstream, and the propeller was making a terrific pother astern. We could only wait for the tide to float us off. The rowboat appeared again.
‘D’ ye want a pilot?”
“No.”
And it disappeared.
When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:
“Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?”
“We ‘ll go on,” I said. I could say no less.
0288
We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never aVelsa. And yet the smoke of the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay. The town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique sensation that afternoon.
“Shall we go on to Manningtree, sir?” said the skipper, adding with a grin, “There’s only about half an hour left of the flood, and if we get aground again——”
It was another challenge.
“Yes,” I said.
Manningtree is a town even more recondite than Mistley, and it marks the very end of the navigable waters of the Stour. It lay hidden round the next corner. We thought we could detect the channel, curving out again now into midstream. We followed the lure, opened out Manningtree the desired—and went on the mud with a most perceptible bump. Out, quick, with the dinghy! Cover her stern-sheets with a protecting cloth, and lower an anchor therein and about fifty fathoms of chain, and row away! We manned the windlass, and dragged theVelsaoff the mud.
“Shall we go on, sir?”
“No,” I said, not a hero. “We ‘ll give up Manningtree this trip.” Obstinacy in adventure might have meant twelve hours in the mud. The crew breathed relief. We returned, with great care, to civilization. We knew now why the Stour is a desolate stream. Thus to this day I have never reached Manningtree except in an automobile.
And there are still stranger waters than the Stour; for example, Hamford Water, where explosives are manufactured on lonely marshes, where immemorial wharves decay, and wild ducks and owls intermingle, and public-houses with no public linger on from century to century, and where the saltings are greener than anywhere else on the coast, and the east wind more east, and the mud more vivid. And theVelsahas been there, too.
THE Orwell is reputed to have the finest estuary in East Anglia. It is a broad stream, and immediately Shotley Barracks and the engines of destruction have been left behind, it begins to be humane and reassuring. Thanks to the surprising modernity of the town of Ipswich, which has discovered that there are interests more important than those of local pilots, it is thoroughly well buoyed, so that the stranger and the amateur cannot fail to keep in the channel. It insinuates itself into Suffolk in soft and civilized curves, and displays no wildness of any kind and, except at one point, very little mud. When you are navigating the Orwell, you know positively that you are in England. On each side of you modest but gracefully wooded hills slope down with caution to the bank, and you have glimpses of magnificent mansions set in the midst of vast, undulating parks, crisscrossed with perfectly graveled paths that gleam in the sunshine. Everything here is private and sacred, and at the gates of the park lodge-keepers guard not only the paradisiacal acres, but the original ideas that brought the estate into existence.
Feudalism, benevolent and obstinate, flourishes with calm confidence in itself; and even on your yacht’s deck you can feel it, and you are awed. For feudalism has been, and still is, a marvelous cohesive force. And it is a solemn thought that within a mile of you may be a hushed drawingroom at whose doors the notion of democracy has been knocking quite in vain for a hundred years. Presently you will hear the sweet and solemn chimes of a tower-clock, sound which seems to spread peace and somnolence over half a county. And as you listen, you cannot but be convinced that the feudal world is august and beautiful, and that it cannot be improved, and that to overthrow it would be a vandalism. That is the estuary of the Orwell and its influence. Your pleasure in it will be unalloyed unless you are so ill-advised as to pull off in the dinghy, and try to land in one of the lovely demesnes.
About half-way up the estuary, just after passing several big three-masters moored in midstream and unloading into lighters, you come to Pinmill, renowned among yachtsmen and among painters. Its haven is formed out of the angle of a bend in the river, and the narrowness of the channel at this point brings all the traffic spectacularly close to the yachts at anchor. Here are all manner of yachts, and you are fairly certain to see a friend, and pay or receive a visit of state. And also very probably, if you are on board the Velsa some painter on another yacht will feel bound to put your strange craft into a sketch. And the skipper, who has little partiality for these river scenes, will take the opportunity to go somewhere else on a bicycle. You, too, must go ashore, because Pinmill is an exhibition-village, entirely picturesque, paintable, and English. It is liable to send the foreigner into raptures, and Americans have been known to assert that they could exist there in happiness forever and ever.
I believe that some person or persons in authority offer prizes to the peasantry for the prettiest cottage gardens in Pinmill. It is well; but I should like to see in every picturesque and paint-able English village a placard stating the number of happy peasants who sleep more than three in a room, and the number of adult able-bodied males who earn less than threepence an hour. All aspects of the admirable feudal system ought to be made equally apparent. The chimes of the castle-clock speak loud, and need no advertisement; cottage gardens also insist on the traveler’s attention, but certain other phenomena are apt to escape it.
0297
The charm of Pinmill is such that you usually decide to remain there over night. In one respect this is a mistake, for the company of yachts is such that your early morning Swedish exercises on deck attract an audience, which produces self-consciousness in the exerciser.
Ipswich closes the estuary of the Orwell, and Ipswich is a genuine town that combines industrialism with the historic sense. No American can afford not to visit it, because its chief hotel has a notorious connection with Mr. Pickwick, and was reproduced entire a lifelike-size at a world’s fair in the United States. Aware of this important fact, the second-hand furniture and curio-dealers of the town have adopted suitable measures. When they have finished collecting, Americans should go to the docks—as interesting as anything in Ipswich—and see the old custom-house, with its arch, and the gloriously romantic French and Scandinavian three-masters that usually lie for long weeks in the principal basin. Times change. Less than eighty years ago the docks of Ipswich were larger than those of London. And there are men alive and fighting in Ipswich to-day who are determined that as a port Ipswich shall resume something of her ancient position in the world.
Just around the corner from the Orwell estuary, northward, is the estuary of the River Deben. One evening, feeling the need of a little ocean air after the close feudalism of the Orwell, we ran down there from to the North Sea, and finding ourselves off Woodbridgehaven, which is at the mouth of the Deben, with a flood-tide under us, we determined to risk the entrance. According to all printed advice, the entrance ought not to be risked without local aid. There is a bank at the mouth, with a patch that dries at low water, and within there is another bank. The shoals shift pretty frequently, and, worst of all, the tide runs at the rate of six knots and more. Still, the weather was calm, and the flood only two hours old. We followed the sailing directions, and got in without trouble just as night fell. The rip of the tide was very marked, and the coast-guard who boarded us with a coast-guard’s usual curiosity looked at us as though we were either heroes or rash fools, probably the latter.
We dropped anchor for the night, and the next morning explored the estuary, with the tide rising. We soon decided that the perils of this famous river had been exaggerated. There were plenty of beacons,—which, by the way, are continually being shifted as the shoals shift,—and moreover the channel defined itself quite simply, for the reason that the rest of the winding river-bed was dry. We arrived proudly at Woodbridge, drawing all the maritime part of the town to look at us, and we ourselves looked at Woodbridge in a fitting manner, for it is sacred to the memory not of Omar Khayyam, but to much the same person, Edward Fitzgerald, who well knew the idiosyncrasies of the Deben. Then it was necessary for us to return, as only for about two hours at each tide is there sufficient water for a yacht to lie at Woodbridge.
The exit from the Deben was a different affair from the incoming. Instead of a clearly defined channel, we saw before us a wide sea. The beacons or perches were still poking up their heads, of course, but they were of no use, since they had nothing to indicate whether they were starboard or port beacons. It is such details that harmonize well with the Old-World air of English estuaries—with the swans, for instance, those eighteenth-century birds that abound on the Deben. We had to take our choice of port or starboard. Heaven guided us. We reached the entrance. The tide was at half-ebb and running like a race; the weather was unreliable. It was folly to proceed. We proceeded. We had got in alone; we would get out alone. We shot past the coast-guard, who bawled after us. We put the two beacons in a line astern, obedient to the sailing directions; but we could not keep them in a line. The tide swirled us away, making naught of the engine. We gave a tremendous bump. Yes, we were assuredly on the bank for at least ten hours, if not forever; if it came on to blow, we might well be wrecked. But no. The ancientVelsaseemed to rebound elastically off the traitorous sand, and we were afloat again, In two minutes more we were safe. What the coastguard said is not known to this day. We felt secretly ashamed of our foolishness, but we were sustained by the satisfaction of having deprived more local pilots of their fees.
Still, we were a sobered crew, and at the next river-mouth northward—Orford Haven—we yielded to a base common sense, and signaled for a pilot. The river Ore is more dangerous to enter, and far more peculiar even than the Deben. The desolate spot, where it runs into the sea is well called Shinglestreet, for it is a wilderness of shingles. The tide runs very fast indeed; the bar shifts after every gale, and not more than four feet of water is guaranteed on it. Last and worst, the bottom is hard. It was probably the hardness of the bottom that finally induced us to stoop to a pilot. To run aground on sand is bad, but to run aground on anything of a rocky nature may be fatal. Our signal was simply ignored. Not the slightest symptom anywhere of a pilot. We were creeping in, and we continued to creep in. The skipper sent the deck-hand forward with the pole. He called out seven feet, eight feet, seven feet; but these were Dutch feet, of eleven inches each, because the pole is a Dutch pole. The water was ominous, full of curling crests and unpleasant hollows, as the wind fought the current. The deckhand called out seven, six, five and a half. We could almost feel the ship bump... and then we were over the bar. Needless to say that a pilot immediately hove in sight. We waved him off, though he was an old man with a grievance.
We approached the narrows. We had conquered the worst difficulties by the sole help of the skipper’s instinct for a channel, for the beacons were incomprehensible to us; and we imagined that we could get through the narrows into the river proper. But we were mistaken. We had a fair wind, and we set all sails, and the engine was working well; but there was more than a six-knot tide rushing out through those narrows, and we could not get through. We hung in them for about half an hour. Then, imitating the example of a fisherman who had followed us, we just ran her nose into the shingle, with the sails still set, and jumped ashore with a rope. The opportunity to paint a water-color of theVelsaunder full sail was not to be lost. Also we bought fish and we borrowed knowledge from the fisherman. He informed us that we had not entered by the channel at all; that we were never anywhere near it. He said that the channel had four feet at that hour. Thus we learned that local wisdom is not always omniscience.
After a delay of two hours, we went up the Ore on the slack. The Ore is a very dull river, but it has the pleasing singularity of refusing to quit the ocean. For mile after mile it runs exactly parallel with the North Sea, separated from it only by a narrow strip of shingle. Under another name it all but rejoins the ocean at Aldeburgh where at length it curves inland. On its banks is Orford, a town more dead than any dead city of the Zuyder Zee, and quite as picturesque and as full of character. The deadness of Orford may be estimated from the fact that it can support a kinematograph only three nights a week. It has electric light, but no railway, and the chief attractions are the lofty castle, a fine church, an antique quay, and a large supply of splendid lobsters. It knows not the tourist, and has the air of a natural self-preserving museum.
0308
TIME was when I agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict that the Orwell is the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I know it better, I unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is a nobler stream, a true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its banks wilder, and its atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of it is that it does not gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the Blackwater is September, when the village regattas take place, and the sunrises over leagues of marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.
Last September theVelsacame early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island—which is an island only during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their home in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons or so, fully “dressed,” and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys, to preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but the intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long lane of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide to cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive band which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose, and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a visit—one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor before the mast or like a longshore loafer—and told us a tale of an amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all her life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her, he lost his nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a fisherman at anchor in a dinghy, “Which is the channel?” The fisherman, seeing a yacht whose lines had been familiar to him for twenty years, imagined that he was being made fun of. He drawled out, “Youknow.” In response to appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out, “Youknow.” At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he drawlingly advised: “Let the old wench alone. Let her alone.She’ll find her way in all right.” Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water rises. There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the dead of night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned round to face the coast-guardsman. “Look here,” said he to the coast-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any further.You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers nowadays.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any further.You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers nowadays.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.
The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the lane of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given moment in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy events are finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in the long races have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the Quarters, and proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames barges lie, and past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide was still slack. We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the Blackwater, and we anchored a few miles below that municipal survival, in the wildest part of the river, and watched the sun disappear over vast, flat expanses of water as smooth as oil, with low banks whose distances were enormously enhanced by the customary optical delusions of English weather. Close to us was Osea Island, where an establishment for the reformation of drunkards adds to the weird scene an artistic touch of the sinister. From the private jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in process of being reformed gazed at us steadily in the deepening gloom. Then an attendant came down the jetty and lighted its solitary red eye, which joined its stare to that of the inebriates.