It is unreasonable, but those stretches of coastwise sea in which one has had good fortune remain in the mind exceptional, and carry with them a sort of false air of security, as though they were always so. Men must have had the terror of their lives time and again off that coast; but to me it always seems, when it returns as a picture in my mind, sunlit, and framed in vigorous small seas, with the attendance of a noble and a sufficient breeze. With what pleasure have I not noted the speed she made as she passed the measured mile by Polperro, and how pleasant to see Rame Head growing perpetually before one, until the Nona opened the majestic breadth of Plymouth Sound.
As for Plymouth, I fear there is some evil of perversion about that mood which makes so many men (and I am one of them) disgruntled with exaggerated fame. Modern legend has got a way of selecting a few abiding places of its own, and there trampling down the grass and all around with such a multitude of repetition and exaggeration and ready-made phrase as corresponds, in the things of the mind, to the most intolerable mud in the things of the soil. Is it print which has done this, and steam—newspapers and the railway? No! So much evil could not have come from material things: its real source was in the degraded modern mind. What with Drake and the Armada, and the Bowls, and the Rock upon the other side of the sea which failed to land upon the Puritans, and the perpetual reiteration of all these things, I would rather see Plymouth breakwater from the Sound, and so sail past, than look on the Sound from the Hoe. But I admit that this mood is evil, and that it is something of a perversion to feel such irritation against mere wearisome repetitions. One has only to leave them alone.
It is a heavenly piece of coast, all this southern bulge of Devon, with its little secret rivers and untainted towns. The people are good and the land. So, with reservations, is its sea even beyond the Sound. Though once, indeed, I did suffer off Bolt Head one of the two most abominable spills of wind I ever suffered—and the first was off Beachy Head by Birdling Gap on Whit-Tuesday, 1902, a day ever to be remembered.
For the air fell off Birdling Gap just like water out of a bucket, and nearly blew the Nona flat upon her beam. I let go the sheet with a run, but as it was she dipped, perhaps, a third of her mainsail, and nearly broke her lover’s heart with fear. It is so sometimes with these high lands. The wind does not run true. It blows over them, and curls through a depression upon their edges, and curves, splashing down solid, in a bolt, on to the deep below. For, on that day by Beachy, all those years ago, the true wind was but just enough northerly to let me keep a course for Newhaven, hauled very close and saving every inch. But that gust came suddenly right on the weather beam, from far east of north, and nearly settled my then young craft and him that cherished and still cherishes her.
As for the spill off Bolt Head, it fell after a clear midnight, since the War, and it was more than a spill; for it blew steadily for the best part of an hour and then ceased. But, like its younger brother off Beachy, it was peculiar to the high land; for it came due northerly, whereas the main wind had east in it. I was watching the morning star burning like a sacred furnace on the edges of the black hills when Satan sent that wind and tried to drown three men. But we reefed in time—there were three of us, one for the helm and two to the reef; and when dawn broke, and the blessed colours of the east renewed the day, strange!—one end of the boom had three reefs down, and the other only two!
A coast of good memories: may it stand forever in spite of petrol and every other evil thing. There might be no London at all, so kindly and so well guarded are all the men and women of its little harbour towns, and so uncrowded its hills. The Erne and the Avon I have never entered, but the Yealm I know: a difficult river in which to anchor, on account of innumerable moorings, a winding water in a wooded gorge, difficult also for wind. And Salcombe I have sailed in and out of—I suppose the happiest harbour in the world. It has many little beaches of its own, the homes of men standing separate upon them, far inland creeks, not too strong a tide, a bar somewhat shoal but always deep enough for the Nona, and a clear fairway to be fetched from within and from without, I take it, upon any wind; for the harbour opens well inside the narrows, and the seaward shores open well outside them.
Upon this piece of coast, setting out once from Plymouth, there came to me an experience of no particular moment as history, but of powerful effect upon my mind. It marked, in a sort of mysterious omen way, or, perhaps, I should say in a sort of visionary way, the unleashing of the
