The Paradoxal Compass

by Horatio Morpurgo

  In late May, a gap in the hedge opens onto a blaze of buttercups and the atmosphere is heady with quickthorn in flower. A blackcap is singing and the hogweed is waist-deep. The path ends where the River Torridge, full from its long loop south and then north through mid-Devon, empties into the shipping lanes and fishing grounds of the Bristol Channel. To anyone who knows about Borough, this looks like a landscape designed with the production of navigators in mind.

  But very few people here do know about him. The first biography appeared only ten years ago, written by a medical professional retired to the area after a life of university teaching. He lives on the road which leads to that footpath, walking his dog up and down it most days. One of the things I want to ask, when I go to meet him, is why does he think the village makes so little of this story?

  He has already asked more questions than most interviewees ever do. He’s well-travelled himself, the room is book-lined and he’s curious about what I’m doing. But he pauses now, weighing his words. ‘If we were in Russia or China,’ he says, ‘I suppose the local children would all be taught to recite a list of his achievements …’

  I think I know where he’s going: ‘And there’d be a hideous statue of him in the main square,’ I put in.

  ‘Exactly,’ he agrees, laughing. ‘As it is, it’s mostly incomers, people like me, who take an interest.’

  He seems to be saying he prefers it this way and I share his doubts about hero-worship. I prefer it like this, too. Stephen Borough lingers as a scarcely detectable trace round the edges of what is now a bedroom suburb and part of me likes him all the more for it. He and his like do their spiriting so gently most people are unaware they’re doing it at all.

  The absence of any memorial to Borough in Northam might appeal to reticent types who enjoy their country walks. But really nothing? Where would be the harm in some discreet signposting for those who might like to know more? Even his erasure from the scene – and from the popular story of 16th-century discovery more generally – is itself a story worth telling. His absence here goes back a long way and is directly traceable to a statue that was put up, and which overlooks the Torridge to this day, just a mile or two upstream.

  Charles Kingsley, an Anglican patriarch in marble vestments, still muses upon his plinth on the water front at Bideford. He stands at the entrance to a car park these days, just part of the urban scene, but Kingsley was an un-ignorable public figure once. The nearby holiday resort of Westward Ho! gets its strange name from the title of his 1855 novel. When Captain Yeo built a mansion on the site of Borough’s birthplace five years later, Kingsley’s story, set in the Age of Discovery, would have had everything to do with it.

  Half of the first chapter takes place in Northam, in what is obviously Borough’s home, and the story repeatedly returns to it. Yet the novel’s six-hundredodd pages include not one solitary mention of Borough himself. Kingsley grew up in Devon and was a Professor of History at Cambridge. He would have known everything there was to know about Borough. His novel is full of maritime heroes brought to life: his recreations of Grenville, Drake and Oxenham, for example, are successful. He was well able to do it when he wished to.

  So why didn’t he wish to in this case? Borough Farm is bumped up to ‘Burrough Court’ and becomes in the novel the childhood home of one Amyas Leigh, the tale’s hero. Leigh is a kind of Hooray Henry: landed gentry, a downright countryman, a Spain-hater through and through, ‘grossly ignorant’ of science and religion. After knocking his schoolteacher unconscious, he is spirited away via aristocratic contacts and takes ship with Drake, sailing around the world as a gentleman adventurer, thereby acquiring the reflex anti-Catholicism of the age.

  Kingsley would have known that the Boroughs were above all super-competent artisans. They were not swaggering sea-dog material. The family contact that counted for Stephen was an experienced Bristol-based shipmaster, which is to say a technician. As we’ll see, Borough was very far from ignorant of science or religion and he would have been no Spain-hater either. His first expedition carried letters from Edward VI, but the Protestant boy king was too weak to join in the send-off at Greenwich. He was already ill and would be dead in a matter of weeks. The England to which the Edward Bonaventura returned was Catholic once more, ruled over now by Queen Mary and her husband, Philip of Spain. Indeed, one of the ships in the follow-up expedition, two years later, was even called the Philip and Mary.

  Upon his return from this second voyage, Borough was invited to the Casa de Contratación in Seville, the headquarters of Spanish maritime enterprise. He brought back a copy of Martin Cortes’ Compendio della Sphera e del Arte de Navigar. This was translated by a friend of his as The Art of Navigation and remained the standard scientific manual for navigators for the rest of the century. Spain-hater? Despiser of book learning?

  Kingsley needed a vehicle for his own (vehement) anti-Catholicism and his very mid-Victorian brand of muscular Christianity. So he elevated his boy from Northam into the landed gentry and then supplied him with views and behavioural issues which the young Stephen would have found very puzzling indeed. This substitution, together with the mansion which still occupies the site of his birthplace, effectively removed Stephen Borough from popular consciousness. He was disappeared by an act of posthumous gentrification.

  There is, in other words, more than meets the eye in the curious absence of Stephen Borough from his own birthplace. The real Borough would have been conversant with, and riven by, the many conflicts through which his society was passing. He and his kind were long ago switched with the Sir Amyas Leighs in the story we have told about modern England’s founding moment. Nothing obliges us to keep passing this on. There is indeed no reason to drill schoolchildren or raise hideous statues, but it might well be time to see what has been left out of this story. Other surprises await us in Devon’s less trendy corners.

  For what is true of this village is true of the region as a whole. It presents visitors and residents alike with a contradiction. It is both a rural heartland and the point of many famous departures. The south west peninsula was the first English province to globalise but it remains in the popular imagination closely associated with the contrary, too, with English life at its most settled. Shot through with this paradox, the West Country inspires great loyalty. Its landscape retains unusual magnetic properties, especially for people who grew up there.

  A NEW START OUT WEST

  We went to live in Devon in the mid-Seventies. Suddenly my bedroom overlooked changes in the atmosphere pulling Dartmoor in and out of focus. I attended the local school and played football with new friends. I went on swapping one hobby for the next, much as I had in our previous home. Stamps for a bit, then coins: I collected all kinds of junk. In an old atlas, for example, a certain ragged archipelago was still busy spraying the world pink with its shipping lanes. My personal favourite among our many possessions was a ‘North Devon Island’ in the Canadian Arctic. This was, apparently, the largest uninhabited island in the world.

  Mains electricity had arrived in the village less than ten years earlier, so that older, more self-reliant way of living which we had come in search of was still a recent memory. My mother bought an old paraffin lamp and a new roll of thick cotton wick, polished up the metal parts and got it working again. When the outside world did occasionally reach us, in the form of power cuts, it found us prepared. The soft, adjustable light on uneven cob walls was a sign of our resistance.

  If the view by day was Dartmoor, at night it was a scatter of farmyard lights in the rural blackout. I forget what age I was when I first ran a pair of binoculars through the stars above our back gate. That place was as close as you could still get to pre-Edison England. Nostalgic? Escapist? With hindsight, maybe, but hindsight can be overrated. I loved it.

  You might ask, as I later did, of course, whether severing oneself and one’s off-spring from the present in this way, or trying to, isn’t a rather extreme programme. But consider the context: these were the days of
oil shock and looming nuclear catastrophe. The Vietnam War had only just ended. I forget now whether I understood at the time what all those power cuts were about. Or what I thought at first of the military jets on their exercises.

  Then why not take to the hills? And why not take to self-reliance and paraffin lamps while you’re about it? The move came also, for my parents, after a series of unsatisfactory teaching jobs. Here they could put into practise the kind of open-air classroom in which they actually believed. They went into partnership with a local farming family to organise visits for inner city children.

  To say we were ‘severed from the present’ implies, firstly, that such a thing is possible, but also that time only passes in one way and we all know which that way is. But do we? There were so many different forms of time here. The time of history continued, on news programmes we saw fewer of these days, but we knew it was there. Cattle went under cover for the winter or in summer were let out into the fields, where I learnt not to be afraid of them as I wandered further and further from home.

  There was the time, too, in which my father’s books were conceived and written and the time it takes to swap one hobby for another. There was the time it takes for fashions in music to change, too – a kind of time from which my brother, in particular, refused point blank to be separated. So many different kinds of time to disagree with each other, then make it up, then disagree again. For there was family time, here, too.

  At night, even in that first summer, in the worst drought for decades, you could always hear water. A sprightlier Torridge than the one which ebbs and flows at Northam ran past the end of our lane and somewhere at the back of everything here was the riversound. Louder than the nearest road, that background murmur worked tirelessly, connecting up our lives to what always had been here and always would be.

  I discovered Proud Heritage shortly after we arrived, in a stone shed attached to the end of the cottage. A fragile anthology of national heroes, left behind by the previous occupants, it was held together with badly rusted spiral binding. It was, even when I found it, in an advanced state of decay. But here was my personal gift from the new home. The back pages had crumbled away with the damp, possibly helped along by mice. Charles Dickens was the last of the fully legible heroes and even he was breaking up.

  It had been printed for the coronation of George VI. Wycliffe, Chaucer and Shakespeare qualified for rather stilted portraits, each opposite his bio note. Milton and Newton and Wilberforce. Michael Faraday and John Constable and Charles Darwin: staring past you, features aglow, transfigured by their part in the glorious story.

  I added my name in a bold scrawl to the two already present on the title page and applied various bandages. Then I read the book again, right here, in the same house where it had been read before by my predecessors and against the same background of river-sound.

  The bandages I applied then are by now sorely in need of bandaging themselves. To my present taste, an air of post-Victorian taxidermy hovers about those portraits, an odour of congealed moral grandeur. But I’m still glad I salvaged them. It’s little more than a bound collection of out-size cigarette cards. Thirties ephemera. The heritage to be proud of in those days was boy-sey, so to speak, and somewhat ‘monochrome’.

  Say, though, just for the sake of argument, that we forgive 1937 for not being 2017. Say we look at this coronation souvenir as reflecting how a certain culture saw itself. We don’t, for the purposes of this exercise, even have to think of it as our own.

  Very few people, then as now, would claim to know much about Henry II or George Fox or Elizabeth Fry, let alone all three. You can hardly read it at all now without damaging it, but such a booklet expressed an aspiration. I do still occasionally pick through its pages and as I do so, even as it sheds a few more papery crumbs, I’m still struck by how much I do not know. The personages collected there would have disagreed pretty severely about a lot. Together, though, they suggest the possibility of a conversation to which this booklet was a kind of welcome.

  When someone evokes a more harmonious past, a more rural one perhaps, when we shared assumptions, we are surely entitled to ask who ‘we’ are and which past that was? Was this the Reformation, perhaps? What was it precisely that the martyrs and their executioners agreed on? Was it the Civil War, rather? Or the decades of struggle for religious tolerance which followed? Was it the small matter of enclosure about which ‘we’ all saw eye to eye? Or the campaign to end slavery? Or the other one, to abolish child labour? When was it that we all agreed about so much? When exactly did we English jog so merrily together along the leafy tow-path of history?

  But if Proud Heritage is any guide to how the English saw themselves in 1937, I’d say they were better prepared than they knew for what was about to happen. True, there are very few women and no blacks or browns. No reference to Lollards or Levellers or Chartists and I know, now, that this is not an accident. But the aspiration to know more has to begin somewhere and it has to begin with the realisation that you actually know very little. This isn’t a flattering message at any age. What we long to hear is, on the contrary, that we know quite enough by now, thank you very much. That we’ve heard everything we need to hear and understand ‘only too well.’

  But I still think that unwelcome, slightly daunted feeling is the one to trust. It is the price of admission. Because in the long run, being better informed, or even just wishing you were, tends to build immunity against kitsch. This is what the crumbling pages of that booklet say to me now. Ours is a world capable of producing a Henry VIII or a John Bunyan. The moment you start wondering how, you automatically enrol in a kind of immunisation programme against cultural and political kitsch. It doesn’t matter where you start. So long as you do start.

  THE ACCIDENTAL DISCOVERY OF THE SCILLY ISLES

  During squally weather in June 1585, two small vessels put in at the Isles of Scilly. Most of the crew stayed on board and the men who went ashore for fresh water said little, only that they had already been penned in Falmouth for five days by the same strong wind which had now forced them to take shelter here. The wind was blowing out of the north-west, so it followed that their business lay that way. The next day dawned clear, with warmer air from the south. The ships were gone again at first light.

  Both they and the foul weather returned the following day, however, the wind having once more swung round contrary. When the vessels docked at New Grimsby this time, the main harbour on Tresco, the islanders’ curiosity was still further piqued. They would have had keen eyes for such ‘low profile’ comings and goings. They did not look like fishing boats and it was too late in the season for those anyway. The larger of the ships was of fifty tonnes perhaps, the smaller of about thirty. It was difficult to find out more. The crew was kept very busy.

  Cornwall generally, and especially Falmouth, was a well-known pirate base. And to anyone who knows the Scilly Isles, New Grimsby was, even then, an unusual choice of mooring. Tresco was described only a few years earlier as ‘a bushment of briars and a refuge for all the pirates that ranged.’ It was bandit country. The difficulty of defending livestock and other possessions against marauders had dramatically thinned out the island’s population.

  But the position of this archipelago, at the entrance to the Channel, also made it strategically indispensable. A Spanish plan to occupy and use it as a naval base and advance post had come to nothing only ten years earlier. Any country wishing to control sea traffic in the Western Approaches had to control the Scillies. It could be assumed that Spain still had the islands under close watch.

  It was true the ships had been detained in Falmouth but they had in fact sailed from Dartmouth, John Davis’ home port. He was captain of the larger of the two vessels, the Sunneshine, and the leader of the expedition. And he had a plan.

  Davis had that rare quality among great explorers: he seems to have been likeable. This might explain why the last biography appeared a hundred and something years ago. He was probably born in a farmhouse a
t Sandridge just upstream from Dartmouth, now a high-end holiday-let, on which there is no plaque. Of the original unpretentious dwelling only the basement (possibly) survives. Little is known of his career up to this point: no Oxford or Cambridge for him. As with Borough, all we know of his education is what we can infer from his having grown up close to a busy port. What we do know is that in 1585 he was in his mid-thirties, had been at sea for twenty years already and that his interest in the new science was proven. He would write books about it one day. But though he became one of the foremost navigators of his age, he was never a rich man. Sir Francis Drake definitely earned himself a page in Proud Heritage. John Davis Esq. did not.

  Those two ships which put in at New Grimsby, the Sunneshine of London and the Mooneshine of Dartmouth, made up his first command. The expedition had not got off to a flying start but his solution was in character. From onshore, their behaviour must have seemed perplexing indeed. Every morning, the ship’s boat was launched, rough weather notwithstanding. It set its course each day for a different corner of the island-group. It was seen to remain stationary for long periods as soundings were taken and observations of the coastline made.

  Davis took this opportunity, in other words, to draw up the first detailed chart of the Scilly Isles ever made. In Elizabethan English, if you ‘discover’ something to someone else, you reveal or show it to them, you make that visible which was formerly concealed. The islands had never, until June 1585, merited anything more than a guesswork of island-shapes, loosely assembled thirty-odd miles west of Land’s End. No doubt Davis undertook this task partly to guard against his crew’s boredom, to prevent any doubts from taking root during this early set-back. Keeping the men occupied would also reduce the risk of any loose talk with locals.