Perhaps the reason why Portland Race does not take the beetling place it should in the literature of England is that those who turn out the literature of England by the acre today never go through it, save in craft as big as towns—liners and the rest. Even these have been taught respect. During the war Portland Race sank a ship of fourteen thousand tons, loaded with machinery, and if you were to make a list of all the things which Portland Race has swallowed up, it would rival Orcus. Portland Race is the master terror of the world.
And here I can imagine any man who had sailed saying to me that there are many other races abominable in their various degrees. I have not been through Alderney Race since the nineties, but I suppose it is still going strong. The Wild Goose Race you have already heard of—a very considerable thing. The Skerries also—I mean the one off Anglesey—is worthy to be saluted. And even little Saint Alban’s, though it is a toy compared with Portland, is a nuisance in any wind.
But the reason Portland deserves the master name which it has never achieved, the reason I write so strongly of the ignorance of England toward this chief English thing, the reason that Portland Race makes me seriously consider whether literary gents be not, after all, the guardians of greatness, and whether their neglect be not, after all, the doom of the neglected, is that this incredible thing lies to everybody’s hand, and yet has no place in the English mind. The Saxon and Danish pirates of the Dark Ages must have gone through it (and—please God—foundered). Everyone making Dorset from France for two thousand years must have risked it. Today the straight course of innumerable ships out of Southampton, making for the Start and the Lizard to the ocean, leads them right past it—yet I know nothing of it in our Letters, unless it be one allusion of Mr. Hardy’s to the ghosts which wander above it. But there is no ghost so full of beef as to wander above Portland Race!
It is, perhaps, in that word “Southampton” that I have struck the cause. Until Southampton became the port for the Americas the Race lay off the track. No man running down-Channel from the Thames need touch the Race: no man running up. Even beating down or up-Channel you are free to go about before you touch the broken water; running, you need not go near it. And steam need have nothing to do with it—except all that steam which, during the last thirty years, has begun to use again more and more our one inland water of the south inside the Isle of Wight.
There is a great deal more I had intended to write about Portland Race. I had intended to talk about the folly of the Bill challenging the sea, and how it ought to be an island, as it was for centuries. I had intended to say something of that canal between Portland Roads and the West Bay which ought to have been dug long ago, and which some day people will wish they had dug, when it is too late. I had intended to give rules for getting round by the narrow smooth. I had intended to curse the absurd arrangement whereby the tide, instead of behaving like a reasonable human tide, and running six hours either way, runs southerly nine hours out of the twelve from both sides of the Bay, leaving only three for the dodge round. I had intended to add much more.
But I cannot. Let me end with this piece of advice.
Never trust any man unless he has gone round Portland Bill in something under ten tons. Never allow any man to occupy any position of import to the state until he has gone round Portland Bill under his own sail in something under ten tons. But most of all, never believe any man—no, not even if you see it printed on this page—who says that he himself has done the thing.
After Portland Race, as you run down that coast, there comes only one other patch of sea (for you will avoid the Shambles), which is a nuisance, and that is Saint Alban’s Race. When you have just been through Portland you hardly notice Saint Alban’s, but if you are going westward, so that Saint Alban’s comes first, you notice it more than a little. For all the way down England, from the North Sea and the Straits onwards, you will have come across nothing of this kind. Everything to the east is more or less reasonable. If the sea rises, it is because there is a wind. If you are checked, it is through a known tide. But off Saint Alban’s Head you run into a piece of water which has no rules.
You are first suspicious of something odd by an inability to follow the rhythm of the seas. So far you have been going well, say, with a south wind, luffing regularly to every sea and paying off again in the hollows; the regular beat of the successive ridges has become companionable; when all of a sudden a little sea from nowhere jumps up on your beam, and catches you a smack, and immediately you are in a tumble of water without rhyme or reason—nothing perilous, but intolerably inconsequential. You will suddenly find the helm pulling hard for no reason, and then as suddenly losing grip; and with all this, there is no guessing the rate at which your stream will move. I have been half a night passing Saint Alban’s with a leading wind—light, it is true, but sufficient; and that only just after the neaps, when the flood should be running slack. I have watched there in the darkness hour after hour the blacker line of cliffs against the blackness of the sky,
