0313
Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it, is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle affords esthetic pleasure.
There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the Chelmsford Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and lock-house steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond the lock was a basin in which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian schooners discharging timber and all the romance of the North. The prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage on the canal, at any rate as far as the next lock, and we asked the lock-keeper how far off the next lock was. He said curtly:
“Ye can’t go up to the next lock.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was any more.”
We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a county town, having a depth of only two feet.
He sharply defended his canal.
“Well,” he ended caustically, “it’s been going on now for a hundred or a hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day or two.”
We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we apologized..
Later—it was a Sunday of glorious weather—we rowed in the dinghy through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of Maldon was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were flitting about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being Sunday and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place was naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but there was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to be bored, the ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its church-topped hill.
Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger’s residence all complete, as in the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty of barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and indefatigable. I have not yet visited in theVelsaany Continental port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie in wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind. Assuredly a Thames barge—said to be the largest craft in the world sailed by a man and a boy—in full course on the Blackwater is a noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of enterprise in transport.
The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was not flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.
At seven o’clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.
“Is this creek long?” I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek with the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they had never seen it before.
“Aye, it’s long.”
“How long is it? Is it a mile?”
“Aye, it’s a mile.”
“Is there anything up there?” Another pause. The boat was drawing away from me.
“Aye, there’s oysters up there.” The boat and the men withdrew imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below, at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last cruise, of the season.
0320