The Toilers of the Sea

by Victor Hugo

  Royalists, they welcome the vanquished republic; Huguenots, they admit the Catholic exile. They even show him the politeness, as we have observed, of hating Voltaire as much as he does. And since, in the view of many people, and particularly of state religions, to hate our enemies is the best way of loving ourselves, Catholicism should be much loved in the Channel Islands. For a newcomer escaped from shipwreck and spending some time here in the course of his unknown destiny, these solitudes sometimes bring on a profound despondency: there is despair in the air. And then suddenly he feels a caress, a passing breath of air that raises his spirits. What is this breath of air? A note, a word, a sigh, nothing. This nothing is enough. Who in this world has not felt the power of this: a nothing!

  Some ten or twelve years ago a Frenchman who had recently landed on Guernsey was wandering along one of the beaches on the west coast--alone, sad, bitter, thinking of the country he had lost.61 In Paris you stroll about; on Guernsey you roam. The island seemed to him lugubrious. Everything was covered in mist, the breakers thundered onto the shore, the sea was discharging immense quantities of foam on the rocks, the sky was hostile and black. Yet it was spring; but the spring of the sea has a wild name: it is called the equinox. It is more a hurricane than a zephyr; and there are memories of a day in May when, under this blast, the foam leapt up to twenty feet above the top of the signal mast on the highest platform of Castle Cornet. This Frenchman felt as though he was in England; he knew not a word of English; he saw an old Union Jack, torn by the wind, flying on a ruined tower at the end of a deserted promontory; there were two or three cottages nearby; in the distance there was nothing to be seen but sand, heath, moorland, and spiny furze; a few batteries, low built, with wide embrasures, showed their angles; the stone dressed by man had the same melancholy aspect as the rocks worn down by the sea. The Frenchman felt rising within him the deepening feeling of internal mourning that is the beginning of homesickness; he looked and listened; not a ray of sun; cormorants on the hunt, clouds fleeting by; everywhere on the horizon a leaden weight; a vast livid curtain falling down from the zenith; the specter of spleen in the shroud of the tempest; nothing anywhere that resembled hope, and nothing that resembled his native land. The Frenchman was pondering on all this, more and more cast down; then suddenly he raised his head. From one of the cottages, half-open, there came a clear, fresh, delicate voice, the voice of a child, and the voice was singing:

  La clef des champs, la clef des bois,

  La clef des amourettes! 62

  XX

  Not all reminiscences of France in the archipelago are as happy as these. One Sunday on the charming island of Sark an acquaintance of ours heard in a farmyard this verse of an old French Huguenot hymn, very solemnly sung in chorus by religious voices with the grave tones of Calvinism:

  Tout le monde pue, pue, pue

  Comme une charogne.

  Gniac', gniac', gniac' mon doux Jesus

  Qui ait l'odeur bonne.

  Everyone stinks, stinks, stinks

  Like carrion.

  There is only my sweet Jesus

  Who smells sweet.

  It is a melancholy and almost painful thought that people died in the Cevennes to the sound of these words. This verse, though involuntarily high comic, is tragic. We laugh at it: we ought to weep. At this verse Bossuet, one of the Forty of the French Academy, cried: "Kill! Kill!"

  In any case, to fanaticism, hideous when it is the persecutor, august and touching when it is the persecuted, the outward hymn is nothing. It has its own grand and somber internal hymn that it sings mysteriously in its soul, whatever the words. It permeates even the grotesque with sublimity, and, whatever may be the poetry and prose of its priests, it transfigures that prose and that poetry with the immense latent harmony of its faith. It corrects the deformity of formulas by the greatness of trials accepted and torments endured. Where poetry is lacking it substitutes conscience. The libretto of martyrdom may be dull: what matter if the martyrdom is noble!

  XXI

  Fishermen, great eaters of fish, have large families. This law holds good in the Norman archipelago, where there may be up to seven or eight children per cottage. This gives rise to particular problems, involving true matters of conscience. What is the first duty of a pilot? He is a pilot, and he has a duty to mariners in distress. He is a father, and he has a duty to his children. He is himself in distress. Risking your life is of no consequence when you are on your own; but the question changes when you are part of a family unit. In a hurricane and in darkness, when out at sea a ship is in distress and there is a chance that anyone going to its aid may not return, the pilot finds himself caught between two shipwrecks, the shipwreck of the seamen in danger who without him will perish, and the shipwreck of his children, who without him will die. It is a fearful dilemma. He has to think of his family. This means that heroism is for sale; a man is not an angel of salvation free of charge; he has his price.

  Frequently, such is the strange asperity of man, the price is negotiated at sea, in clouds, in lightning, off a reef. One party is selling life, the other is buying it. It is a question of take it or leave it. The benefit is not to be given away free. The man who is drowning finds the price proposed too high. There is a dispute over a few coppers on the threshold of this formidable good action.

  It is certain at any rate that one night, in the midst of a storm, someone who was on the summit of a cliff, battered by wind and rain, heard below him, in the deep, raging sea, the following dialogue, interrupted by the sinister interventions of the wind. Two black shapes could be distinguished in the darkness, two vague shapes of vessels bobbing up and down, close together, on the foam, and speaking to one another: "Where have you come from?"

  "Take care. Don't come too close. My mizzen mast may fall on you."

  "Where have you come from?"

  "I don't know."

  "Where are you making for?"

  "I don't know."

  "Do you want me to rescue you?"

  "Take care. I have more than one mast. It may fall on you."

  "Do you want me to rescue you?"

  "How many of you are there in your boat?"

  "Three men."

  "If my mast fell on your boat you would be drowned. Go away."

  "If I go away you are lost."

  "God will preserve us!"

  "Do you want me to take you in to Guernsey? I am a pilot."

  "Where is Guernsey?"

  "There."

  "You are wrong. It is Jersey."

  "I am not wrong. It is Guernsey."

  "God will preserve us!"

  "What ship are you?"

  "La Galante."

  "Where from?"

  "Portrieux."

  "Whither bound?"

  "Newfoundland."

  "What have you on board?"

  "Nineteen men. Plus my cargo."

  "Do you want me to rescue you?"

  "Who are you?"

  "Pilot Number Six."

  "Your name?"

  "Letivier."

  "Where are you from?"

  "St. Peter-in-the-Wood."

  "God will preserve us!"

  "Do you want me to rescue you?"

  "How much?"

  "Fifty pounds."

  "Will you take twenty-five?"

  "No. Fifty."

  "No. Twenty-five."

  "I'm off, then."

  "Right: off you go."

  "You're just off the coast: it's a stony bottom. Do you hear the alarm bell yonder? In a quarter of an hour you'll be done for."

  "Will you take forty pounds?"

  "No. Forty-five."

  "All right: forty-five."

  And so Letivier saved La Galante. Such is the grim bargaining process.

  XXII

  HOMO EDAX 63

  The configuration of an island changes over time. An island is a construction by the ocean. Matter is eternal; not its aspect. Everything on earth is being perpetually moulded by death: even extra-hu
man monuments, even granite. Everything changes shape, even the shapeless. Edifices built by the sea crumble like any other. The sea, which has built them up, also demolishes them.

  In fifteen hundred years, between the mouth of the Elbe and the mouth of the Rhine alone, seven islands out of twenty-three have foundered. They must be looked for under the sea. The sea created the Zuider Zee in the thirteenth century; in the fifteenth century it created the bay of Bies-Bosch, destroying twenty-two villages; and in the sixteenth century it improvised the Dollart gulf, swallowing up Torum. A hundred years ago, off Bourg-d'Ault, now perched atop a sheer cliff in Normandy, the church tower of the old village of Bourg-d'Ault could still be seen under the sea. It is said that on Ecrehou you can sometimes see under the water at low tide the trees of a druidical forest that was drowned in the eighth century. Guernsey was once attached to Herm, Herm to Sark, Sark to Jersey, and Jersey to France. A child could straddle the strait between France and Jersey. When the bishop of Coutances passed that way a bundle of sticks was thrown into the gap so that he should not wet his feet.

  The sea builds up and demolishes; and man helps the sea, not in building up but in destroying. Of all the teeth of time the one that works hardest is man's pickax. Man is a rodent. Everything is modified or changed at his hand, either for the better or for the worse. Here he disfigures, there he transfigures. The Breche de Roland64 is not so fabulous as it seems; man can carve up nature. The scar of human work can be seen on the work of God.

  It seems that a certain power of achievement is granted to man. He appropriates the creation to humanity. Such is his function. He has the necessary boldness; one might also say the necessary impiety. This collaboration with nature is sometimes offensive. Man, a short-lived being who is perpetually dying, takes on the infinite. Against all the ebb and flow of nature, against elements seeking to communicate with other elements, against the vast navigation of forces in the depths man declares a blockade. He, too, can say: "Thus far and no farther." He has his idea of fitness, and the universe must accept it. Besides, has he not a universe of his own? He intends to make of it whatever he thinks fit. A universe is a mass of raw material. The world, which is God's work, is man's canvas.

  Everything limits man, but nothing stops him. He responds to limits by jumping over them. The impossible is a frontier that is perpetually receding.

  A geological formation that has at its base the mud of the Deluge and at its summit the eternal snows is, for man, a wall like any other: he cuts through it and continues beyond. He slashes an isthmus, subdues a volcano, cuts away a cliff, mines the rock for minerals, breaks up a promontory into small pieces. Once upon a time he did all this work for Xerxes;65 nowadays, less foolish, he does it for himself. This diminution of foolishness is called progress. Man works on his house, and his house is the earth. He disarranges, displaces, suppresses, knocks down, levels, mines, undermines, digs, excavates, breaks up, pulverizes, effaces this, abolishes that, and rebuilds with what he has destroyed. Nothing makes him hesitate--no mass, no blockage, no obstacle, no consideration for splendid material, no majesty of nature. If the enormities of creation are within his reach he tears them down. This aspect of God that can be ruined tempts him, and he mounts an assault on immensity, hammer in hand. Globe, let this ant of yours have his way.

  A child, breaking a toy, seems to be looking for its soul. Man, too, seems to be looking for the soul of the earth.

  Let us not, however, exaggerate our power. Whatever man does, the great lines of creation persist; the supreme mass does not depend on man. He has power over the detail, not over the whole. And it is right that this should be so. The Whole is providential. Its laws pass over our head. What we do goes no farther than the surface. Man clothes or unclothes the earth; clearing a forest is like taking off a garment. But to slow down the rotation of the globe on its axis, to accelerate the course of the globe on its orbit, to add or subtract a fathom on the earth's daily journey of 718,000 leagues around the sun, to modify the precession of the equinoxes, to eliminate one drop of rain--never! What is on high remains on high. Man can change the climate, but not the seasons. Just try and make the moon revolve anywhere but in the ecliptic!

  Dreamers, some of them illustrious, have dreamed of restoring perpetual spring to the earth. The extreme seasons, summer and winter, are produced by the excess of the inclination of the earth's axis over the plane of the ecliptic of which we have just spoken. In order to eliminate the seasons it would be necessary only to straighten this axis. Nothing could be simpler. Just plant a stake on the Pole and drive it in to the center of the globe; attach a chain to it; find a base outside the earth; have 10 billion teams, each of 10 billion horses, and get them to pull. The axis will straighten up, and you will have your spring. As you can see, an easy task.

  We must look elsewhere for Eden. Spring is good; but freedom and justice are better. Eden is moral, not material.

  To be free and just depends on ourselves.

  Serenity is internal. Our perpetual spring is within us.

  XXIII

  POWER OF THE STONE BREAKERS

  Guernsey is a Trinacria.66 The queen of Trinacrias is Sicily. Sicily belongs to Neptune, and each of its three angles was dedicated to one of the three prongs of his trident. On its three capes were three temples, one dedicated to Dextra, another to Dubia, and the third to Sinistra. Dextra was the cape of rivers, Sinistra the cape of the sea, Dubia the cape of rain. In spite of the threat by Pharaoh Psammetichus to Thrasydaeus, king of Agrigentum, to make Sicily "as round as a discus," these Trinacrias are immune to reshaping by man, and will keep their three promontories until the deluge that made them unmakes them. Sicily will always have its Cape Peloros facing Italy, its Cape Pachynos facing Greece, and its Cape Lilybaion facing Africa, and Guernsey will always have its L'Ancresse Point in the north, its Pleinmont Point to the southwest, and its Jerbourg Point to the southeast.

  Apart from this, the island of Guernsey is in course of demolition. This granite is good: who wants it? All its cliffs are up for auction. The inhabitants are selling the island by retail. The curiously shaped Roque-au-Diable has recently been sold off for a few pounds sterling. When the huge quarry of La Ville-Baudue has been worked out they will move on to another.

  This stone is in demand all over England. For the embankments being built along the Thames alone two hundred thousand tons will be needed. Loyal citizens who like their royal statues to be solid were upset that the pedestal of the bronze figure of Prince Albert, which is in Cheesering granite, was not made of good Guernsey stone. However that may be, the coasts of Guernsey are falling to the pickax. In St. Peter Port, under the windows of the inhabitants of La Falue, a mountain has disappeared in four years.

  And this is happening in America as well as in Europe. At the present time Valparaiso is engaged in selling to stone merchants by auction the magnificent and venerable hills that earned it its name of Paradise Valley.

  Old Guernsey people no longer recognize their island. They would be tempted to say: "They have changed my native place." Wellington said this of Waterloo, which was his native place.

  Add to this the fact that Guernsey, which used to speak French, now speaks English: another demolition.

  Until about 1805 Guernsey was divided into two islands. An inlet cut across it from side to side, from the eastern Mount Crevel to the western Mount Crevel. This arm of the sea debouched at the west end opposite the Fruquiers and the two Sauts Roquiers. There were also bays reaching quite far inland, one of them going as far as Salterns; this arm of the sea was called the Braye du Valle. Last century St. Sampson had moorings for boats on both sides of an ocean street--a narrow and winding street. In the same way as the Dutch have drained the Haarlemmer Meer, making it a not very attractive plain, the people of Guernsey have filled in the Braye du Valle, which is now meadowland. The street has become a blind alley: the harbor of St. Sampson.

  XXIV

  KINDNESS OF THE PEOPLE OF THE ARCHIPELAGO

&
nbsp; Those who have seen the Norman archipelago love it; those who have lived there esteem it. The inhabitants are a noble little people, great of soul. They have the soul of the sea. These men of the Channel Islands are a race apart. They maintain a certain supremacy over the grand'terre, the mainland, and take a high line with the English, who are sometimes disposed to disdain "these three or four flowerpots in the pond." Jersey and Guernsey retort: "We are Normans, and it is we who conquered England." You may smile, but you can also admire. The day will come when Paris will make these islands the fashion and make their fortune; and they deserve it. A constantly increasing prosperity awaits them when they are known. They have the singular attraction of combining a climate made for idleness and a population made for work. This eclogue is also a workshop. The Norman archipelago has less sunshine than the Cyclades, but more greenery; it has as much greenery as the Orkneys, but more sun. It has no temple like the one at Astypalaea, but it has the cromlechs; it has no Fingal's Cave, but it has Sark. Moulin Huet is as good as Le Treport; the beach at Azette is as good as Trouville; Plemont is as good as Etretat. The landscape of the archipelago is beautiful; its people are kind; it has a proud history. It has an apostle, Saint Helier; a poet, Robert Wace; a hero, Pierson. 67 Several of England's best admirals and generals were born in the archipelago. These poor fishermen are magnificent when the occasion calls for it; when collections were made to help the victims of flooding in Lyons and famine in Manchester, Jersey and Guernsey gave more, proportionately, than either France or England.2 These peoples have preserved from their earlier activities as smugglers a proud liking for risk and danger. They go everywhere. They send out swarms. The Norman archipelago nowadays establishes colonies, as the Greek archipelago used to do. That is their glory. There are Jerseymen and Guernseymen in Australia, in California, in Ceylon. North America has its New Jersey and its New Guernsey, which is in Ohio. These Anglo-Normans, though a little hampered by their sects, have an incorruptible appetite for progress. A plenitude of superstitions, no doubt, but also a plenitude of good sense. Was not France once a land of brigands? Was not England once given to cannibalism? Let us be modest and remember our tattooed ancestors.