Coasting

by Jonathan Raban

  Middleton’s habit of continually asking himself questions and immediately answering them makes it miserably clear that no one else ever asked him the questions whose answers he was burning to expound. His aggrieved loneliness stares so vividly through his writing that The Cruise of The Kate deserves a place among the classic psychiatric case histories.

  He wasn’t built for society. Yet as long as he remained offshore, his mortally bruised ego did find some measure of comfort. The sea—huge, empty, frightening and unpredictable—provided a kind of objective correlative for Middleton’s gross inner solitude, and he found himself more at home at sea than he had ever been on land. The sea never ridiculed him. Alone in The Kate, like a cross baby adrift in a cradle, he was secure for the first time in his adult life. When passing fishermen threw him a few herrings to cook on the hob of his dangerous coal fire, or shouted helpful directions to him across the water, he even found a kind of human companionship that had evaded him on shore.

  Middleton was, perhaps, not quite so alone as he believed himself to be. Among his contemporaries there was at least one other subscriber to his theory that Heaven was situated in the sun—the London stockbroker and yachtsman R. T. McMullen, whose book Down Channel is still read by amateur sailors as the best-known personal account of coasting in British waters. McMullen’s continuing appeal certainly can’t be explained by his talent as a writer, which was rudimentary. His surly record of courses sailed, weather encountered and ports entered would set no one’s imagination alight—unless there was something in the character of the man himself that found an answering chime in the character of his seagoing readers.

  McMullen was above all else a tidy man. He hated messiness and excess. Catholicism, with its ripe symbolism and its unseemly pandering to the sensations with candles, vestments, incense and the rest, revolted him. He was the author of a choleric pamphlet called “Priestly Pretensions and God’s Work,” in which he detected Romans under the beds of half the vicarages and rectories of the Church of England. In social matters, too, he abhorred the least hint of disorder. Trades unionists were members of The Idler’s Union; and those passages of Down Channel which are most nearly vivid are the bits where he is abominating the smell, laziness and general scurrility of the lower classes. Paid hands, fishermen, harbor employees are treated by McMullen with testy condescension.

  His book is governed by a single sentence: “In language too mild to express my real sentiments, I dislike a sloven; a slovenly reef, a slovenly furl and a dirty mast look disgraceful on a yacht of any pretensions.” The Church was a slack ship—Gladstone’s England was a slack ship—but McMullen ran a succession of tight ships; ships offered as exemplary models of the social order as it might be in an ideal world, every line coiled just so, every shroud taut, every paid hand set firmly in his proper place in the fo’c’s’le. At sea, McMullen put England to shame.

  This cold stockbroker’s utopia found a large and approving audience. His Protestant authoritarianism has gone down very well with the men’s men who prop up yacht club bars. He is himself the model of a certain kind of Englishman, with his contempt for clutter and show, his philistine certainties about how things should be run and his chauvinist attitude toward women. At the beginning of Down Channel he does tersely vouchsafe the existence of a “Mrs McMullen”—that, indeed, she shared some of his voyages, or was, at least, to be found in the galley during the course of them. She is never mentioned thereafter.

  The most memorable thing about McMullen, and his outstanding qualification as a sterling English hero, was the way he died. On June 14, 1891, he was sailing alone in his 27-foot yawl, Perseus, somewhere in the English Channel, when a heart attack killed him. Two days later, Perseus was spotted by a fishing boat off Cherbourg. It was maintaining a steady westward course, its sails tight and filled with wind. The dead man, his limbs locked in rigor mortis, was keeping a firm grip on the tiller. If a member of the French lower orders (a category which had given McMullen no end of trouble during his life) had not unsportingly intervened, he might well be still sailing today.

  McMullen, prematurely conducted to his paradise in the sun, must have blazed with pure rage when he saw Hilaire Belloc, a generation later, out in the Nona. Belloc was a Catholic, and ran his boat in a state of happy catholic disorder. In The Cruise of the Nona he exhorted his readers, McMullen fashion, to Get everything shipshape and, so far as you can, keep everything shipshape. Then he confessed.

  My own boat has usually come into port more like the disturbed nest of a dormouse than like the spick and span arrangement which I advise. Half the blocks will be jammed, the anchor will be caught under the bows, and as like as not, the fluke of it hooked over one of the whiskers. The falls will be all tangled up together. The warping ropes will be mixed up with the anchor chain in the fo’c’s’le, so that there is no getting at the one, or paying out the other. She will perhaps be coming in under three reefs with hardly enough wind to move her, because it has been blowing a few hours ago, and I have been too lazy to shake them out. Her jib will be slack, her cabin light broken where I have put my heel through it …

  But the amiable sloppiness which reigned on Belloc’s boat did not—unfortunately—correspond to his vision of how things should be managed in society. Of all the lone sailors who have coasted round Britain and used the sea as a place of meditative exile, Belloc is much the most frightening.

  He took to the Nona in pessimism and bereavement. His young wife had died (Belloc wore black for the rest of his life); his brief political career, as Liberal member for Salford, was over. The Nona, of which he writes with a tenderness more suited to a lover than to a boat, was his chief remaining refuge. Lying at anchor on the water in the domestic snuggery of the Nona’s lamplit cabin, Belloc was able to come close to re-creating the whispered confidences of the marriage bed. The Cruise of the Nona reads like pillow talk, with Belloc telling secrets about himself—and more disturbing secrets about England.

  Half of the book is entrancing. Belloc loved, feared and respected the sea, and he wrote about it with more accuracy and conviction than anyone else in English bar Melville and Conrad. The sea brought out the best in the essentially theological tenor of his mind:

  Sailing the sea, we play every part of life: control, direction, effort, fate; and there we can test ourselves and know our state. All that which concerns the sea is profound and final. The sea provides visions, darknesses, revelations—

  Or (in a passage which I later pinned up in the cabin of my own boat and saw as the defining motto for this voyage, this book):

  The cruising of a boat here and there is very much what happens to the soul of a man in a larger way.… 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 no whither, and yet is alive with discovery, emotion, adventure, peril and repose.

  In Belloc, too, the sea is a place—or rather, a huge and rich assortment of particular places—as solid, real and recognizable as the individual landscapes of a continent. When he writes about the neck of sea between Bardsey Island and the Lleyn Peninsula in a high gale, or about the great tide races of Portland Bill and St. Albans Head, or the luminous, mirrorlike entry to Port Madoc on a still summer evening, he does for water what landscape painters do for trees and rocks and architecture; he gives it unforgettable body and life.

  For every page about the sea there is another about the land, and when Belloc looks back at the shore from which he has sailed, his pillow talk takes a dirty turn. The freedom of the sea, the lapse of a few nautical miles between himself and the British coast, released in Belloc a flood of confidences which were better not told.

  All his embitterment came tumbling out as he looked back at England. Belloc had failed as a parliamentarian, and so he despised parliaments, despised democracy itself. He talked of “the vomit” of parliamentary rule. The House of Commons he characterized
as “the slime of the Lobbies. ”

  There is no form of parliamentary activity which is not deplorable, save in aristocracies.

  For, in aristocracies, which are, of their nature, governments of a clique, a Parliament—which is a clique—can be normal and natural. In communities based on the idea of equality, and of action by the public will, they are cancers, under which such nations always sicken and may die.

  For Belloc, England’s treason was her return to the rule of Parliament at the end of the First World War, instead of “continuing the rule of soldiers as [she] should have done.”

  It is like listening to the rambling unconscious mind of a profoundly disappointed man whose sense of hurt has turned to poisonous spite. Belloc, with his copious fluency of language, makes the bluff irritations of plainer men like Middleton and McMullen seem trifling and beside the point. When Belloc hates, he hates with spine-chilling articulacy. At Clovelly, he sees some tourists, innocently debouching from a line of sightseeing coaches for a day at the seaside.

  We heard a murmur like that of bees swarming. As we came nearer it was a confused clamour of human beings, and as we came nearer still we saw the dreadful thing in its entirety.

  The day-trippers are “black ants”—“lost souls”—“dark clothed mortality”—“an immense mass”—“this mob”—“like black pressed German caviare, the acid stuff which is sold for the destruction of the race.” Tourists, politicians, Jews, (“Eh, Rosenheim? Eh, Guildenstern?”), pacifists, atheists, journalists are all lumped together in the same nightmare ball. They are the horrible Modern England from which the Nona is sailing away under as much linguistic canvas as she can carry.

  Belloc sees one glimmer of hope on the European horizon—Mussolini, who had risen to power in Italy in 1922, three years before The Cruise of the Nona was published.

  What a strong critical sense Italy has shown! What intelligence in rejection of sophistry, and what virility in execution! May it last!

  The word “virility” crops up again and again in Belloc’s book. To be out in the open air, sailing a small boat on a rough sea, was a “virile” thing to do—unlike the indoor, pallid, unmanly occupations of people in coach parties, or Jews or Members of Parliament. In Mussolini, Belloc met a man of his own stamp—exactly the right sort of hearty, Catholic fellow with whom he could comfortably quaff ale in the cockpit of the Nona.

  What a contrast with the sly and shifty talk of your parliamentarian! What a sense of decision, of sincerity, of serving the nation, and of serving it towards a known end with a definite will! Meeting [Mussolini] after talking with the parliamentarians in other countries was like meeting with some athletic friend of one’s boyhood after an afternoon with racing touts; or it was like coming upon good wine in a Pyrenean village after compulsory draughts of marsh water in the mosses of the moors above, during some long day’s travel over the range.

  Belloc manages to insinuate that if you fall for the virile maritime romance of Yachting Monthly, you may be guided by divine providence to the politics of Mein Kampf. The strangest thing of all about his strange book was the way it was received in England. The London Observer said that Belloc “has never perhaps written better”; the London Mercury came purring up to Belloc, saying “The Cruise of the Nona is certainly the most companionable, possibly the most beautiful, of his books.”

  This, then, is the band of men which I was about to join as a raw recruit. They are a desperate bunch. Despair, or something very close to it, shows through their aggressive, bottle-nosed politics and aggressive, bottle-nosed religion. Even in ripe middle age, they are still neurotically anxious to prove their manliness, and the rigid authoritarian streak which fissures all their personalities looks like the symptom of some serious inner weakness. They are all lonely men—stiff and out of kilter with their times; and, as lonely men do, they see themselves as heroic prophetic outcasts. For each of them the sea is the prophet’s necessary wilderness in which he must spend his ritual forty days and forty nights before coming home and enlightening the world with his awful news.

  The Rob Roy, The Kate, Perseus and the Nona are a lot more than mere yachts. Loaded down on their marks with testaments, theories, dogmas and solutions, they are like arks of the Covenant; holy vessels bearing sacred texts. Jesus Christ … Aristotle … Malthus … Mussolini … each of the lone sailors puts to sea with a ghostly first mate. And the boats themselves are miniature ships of state, their trim style of domestic economy set side by side with the ramshackle and disordered house of England across the water.

  Reading the books, I can feel their authors bristling irritably at me from behind their black masks of print. I’m not their sort of man at all: my politics are soft and wet, my tastes indulgently urban, my home a dishevelment of unopened bills and untidied clothes. I am not shipshape. I am irreligious and a physical coward. Fear of getting hurt has kept me clear of dentists for a decade. The tips of my fingers go white at the first nip of cold. Among the objects generally thought to be desirable on voyages, I fall clearly into the same category as umbrellas and wheelbarrows.

  I would no more try to stow away with MacGregor, Middleton, McMullen, Belloc, or the rest of the hearty gang, than I would have volunteered for service in the Ton-tons Macoute. Yet here we are, assembled at the same dockside, our boats jostling together in the water as we load up with provisions and brush against each other at the counter of the ship chandler’s. We’re much of an age. Well past the point where life still seems unrationed, we are all beginning to run short of teeth, hair, wind and options. What unites us more deeply is a compulsive itch for the escape valve of a wilderness, an open frontier, and our common discovery that even now Britain does have a last frontier, in the sea.

  For there’s an obvious reason why this sudden craze for solitary coasting should have started when it did, in the 1860s. It is not so long since Britain had its own internal wildernesses—places into which people in search of solitude and some danger could literally disappear. In 1726, Defoe wrote of a visit to the Lake District in his Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. He was much shaken by what he saw.

  Here, among the mountains, our curiosity was frequently moved to enquire what high hill this was, or that. Indeed, they were, in my thoughts, monstrous high; but in a country all mountainous and full of innumerable high hills, it was not easy for a traveller to judge which was highest.

  Nor were these hills high and formidable only, but they had a kind of an unhospitable terror in them. Here were no rich pleasant valleys between them, as among the Alps; no lead mines and veins of rich ore, as in the Peaks; no coal pits, as in the hills about Halifax, much less gold, as in the Andes, but all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to man or beast …

  Here we entered Westmoreland, a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren and frightful of any that I have passed over in England, or even in Wales itself.…

  The “unpassable hills”, the “frightful appearances to the right and left,” made Defoe beat a fast retreat to civilization. In Westmoreland he had seen a landscape just as savage as anything to be found on the American Frontier. It’s not hard to imagine a Donner Party, or an Alferd Packer (the man who is reputed to have eaten five of the seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, Colorado), in Defoe’s aghast vision of the English Lakes.

  Within a very few years no one could possibly have seen Cumberland and Westmoreland in Defoe’s terms. The eighteenth-century vogue for the paintings of Claude Lorraine, and the importation, late in the century, of German romanticism, turned wild savagery into the merely picturesque. When Wordsworth (in 1799) wrote of “a huge peak, black and huge,” striding after him in his “little boat” on Lake Windermere, he was fairly promptly ridiculed by Byron (in 1819) for—among a multitude of other things—the overblown grandeur of his conception of his own solitude in Nature.

  We learn from Horace, Homer sometimes sleeps;

  We feel without him Wordsworth sometimes wakes,

  T
o show with what complacency he creeps

  With his dear Waggoners around his lakes.

  He wishes for ‘a boat’ to sail the deeps.

  Of Ocean? No, of air. And then he makes

  Another outcry for ‘a little boat’

  And drivels seas to set it well afloat …

  By 1850, when Wordsworth died, the craggy English wilderness of leech gatherers and terrified small boys in little boats had become (largely by Wordsworth’s own agency) a tourist resort. The mighty mountains were dotted with hikers. Horse-drawn carriages were transporting more sedentary holidaymakers to see Wordsworth’s houses at Rydal Mount and Dove Cottage. Easels and sketchbooks were pitched on every convenient rock, so that Sunday painters could catch the prettiness of Defoe’s “frightful appearances.” The Lake District had turned into Britain’s first theme park.

  In 1867, when John MacGregor cast off to sea in the Rob Roy, there was no domestic wilderness left. There were the colonies, of course. There were keepered grouse moors, whose appearance of desolation hid the fact they they were in reality artfully husbanded for the pleasure of the sporting gentry. In 1862, George Borrow had just managed to find some remaining wilderness in Wild Wales, whose chapter headings (“Wild Scenery—Awful Chasm—The Robbers’ Cavern—An Adventure—The Gloomy Valley—A Native of Aberystwyth”) nicely give the frontier flavor of the book. But the railways were rapidly taking care of that. Aberystwyth itself, the capital of wildest, deepest mid-Wales, was being transformed into Birmingham’s main holiday resort, with a pier, a promenade and a stucco quarter-moon of boardinghouses and hotels. In the 1860s England (if not quite Scotland and not quite Wales) was so thickly peopled, so intensively farmed, so industrialized, so citified, that there was nowhere to go to be truly alone or to have Borrow-style Adventures, except to sea.