Coasting Read online

  The ports of departure from which the four coasting voyagers set sail tell a good deal about the nature of the voyages themselves. MacGregor’s book starts in the slums of the East End; Middleton’s in Southampton; McMullen’s in Greenhithe, a thirty-minute railway journey from London Bridge and the Stock Exchange; Belloc’s in the tame tea-shop country of half-timbered Sussex. These lonely saltwater romances are all products of suburbia and the city; they are postindustrial dreams at heart, as urban in their own way as the glass-and-steel romances of St. Pancras Station and the Crystal Palace. In part, at least, they belong to the literature of national pathology. They express the simple claustrophobia of living in a country that has suddenly grown too small, too smoky, too intimate, too man-made and civilized for comfort. They show England as an overloaded, sinking ship, and they propose the obvious solution—to take to the lifeboats.

  For however thoroughly you may brick up the land, there’s nothing much that you can do to the sea except humbly chart it. You can fiddle about on its edge building groins and floodwalls and breakwaters, but the sea will not be civilized. Even the most household corridor of sea is a very wild place indeed. On the map of Europe the Dover Straits appear as a piddling canal bisecting industrial England and industrial France. But from a boat … Build in a warm wet wind from the southwest—not a full gale, just a stiffish, hang-on-to-your-hat sort of breeze. Add an incoming spring tide, sluicing into the straits from the North Sea at a speed no faster than that of a jogger in a park. The water bunches and crumples as it hits the wind head on. The breakers all around you are as angular and gray as boulders of granite. Where the sea collides with the submerged whalebacks of the Goodwin Sands, it explodes in forty-foot plumes of powdered white. Racing shallowly over the sands, it raises quills of spray as if a herd of aquatic porcupines was on the run. The boat rolls and plunges; the sky tips on its end. Heart in mouth, shaken about like dice in a cup, you hang on to the wheel for dear life. Here really are frightful appearances to the right and left, wild scenery, awful chasms, monstrous high hills with a kind of inhospitable terror in them. This is wilderness, and I cannot imagine a solitude more absolute than that of being in a small boat on a rough sea out of sight of land—or even in sight of it, for that matter. You are genuinely alone in nature, a creature of the weather and the tides, thrown back on fundamental skills like navigation and seamanship.

  It once used to puzzle me that in every corner newsagent’s in every English big city I visited, there would be a stack of yachting magazines. The man at the counter had never heard of the Times Literary Supplement, and didn’t think it worth his while (“There’s no demand”) to stock The Times itself. But between the garters, tits and bums, the custom cars and True Romances, there they invariably were—Yachting-this and Yachting-that, the touched-up pornography of the wide-open spaces. No one in the shop looked remotely like a yachtsman to me. Who bought these things? And why, if the man was prepared to cater to such eccentric tastes, could he not keep on hand a few copies of a paper with obvious mass appeal like the T. L. S.?

  There is no puzzle in it. In high-rise flats on Inkerman Streets everywhere, where the plane trees below are choked with blue exhaust fumes, where people live tight-packed as football crowds, someone is dreaming himself to sleep over stories of hurricanes, wet sleeping bags and sunsets in anchorages of idyllic, empty calm. His main halyard has gone. He’s under jury rig. An iceberg looms on the starboard beam like a gigantic nightmare wedding cake. With frozen fingers he thrusts the tiller to the lee. When people for whom no other wilderness remains dream of a ritual self-purification in heroic solitude, they dream of what John MacGregor called “the wholesome sea.”

  There’s no history in a wilderness. It just is. And because it has always been this way, a wilderness serves as an elemental point of continuity from which it’s possible to measure the pace of the civilization on its outer rim.

  A few weeks before I took to my own lifeboat, I came across a great, foxed, yellowed, torn and salt-stained book of charts in an antiquarian bookseller’s. Holding the heavy pages at an angle to the light, I saw that they were spotted with tiny punctures, where an eighteenth-century ship’s captain had been marking off his course with a pair of sharp compasses. Some of the charts had faded pencil lines ruled in along the deepwater channels. Pleased by this vivid, accidental connection with the anonymous dead sailor who had once gone exactly where I planned to go, I bought the book and lugged its deadweight home.

  Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot by Captain Greenville Collins was first published in 1693. Until that time British navigators had had to rely on Dutch charts of their own waters—charts which, after the outbreak of the Dutch Wars, were designed to wreck ships rather than lead them safely home. Charles II appointed Collins as Hydrographer to the King, equipped him with a yacht and sent him off on a seven-year survey of the British coast. His Pilot was used as a guidebook by professional coasters for more than a century.

  It is still usable now. Imagine trying to find one’s way about the landmass of Britain, or anywhere else, with a map three hundred years old—but this is a map of a perennial wilderness, and it works. Collins’ tide tables, based on the phases of the moon at “Full” and “Change,” are as reliable as they ever were, and you can still steer to his sailing directions.

  Directions for failing into Fowey or Foy.

  FOY lieth 4 Leagues NE from the Deadman, and two miles to the Weftward of a great Bay called St Blazey Bay, Predmouth Point being the weft-fide of the Bay. There lieth a Ledge of Rocks SE, about half a mile from the faid Point, called the Canneys, and fhew themfelves above water at half-Tide; there is but 7 and 8 foot Water within them at low water. From thefe Rocks to the going in to Foy the Shoar is bold. Keep the Deadman within the Winehead Rock, and it will carry you clear of the Canneys.

  Foy

  Foy may be very eafily known, lying in between two high-lands; on the weft-fide the going in, is an old Church and Caftle, and on the eaft-fide the Ruins of an old Church, as you may fee by the making of it in the Draught of Foy, N° 17. The going in is a Cable’s length over from fide to fide, and no danger; when you are in you may anchor before the Town, or run up above the Town. And whereas it hath been reported to be a Bar-Harbour, and that you cannot enter till half Tide, I do affure you that there is no lefs than 3 Fathoms at low-water at a Spring-tide: Here you may lie afloat to Wafh, Tallow, ftop Leeks …

  It is all exactly as described, and I have myself ftopped Leeks at Foy. Collins’ churches and castles are the same churches and castles that serve as landmarks on the latest Admiralty charts; his silhouettes of the major headlands are larger, more detailed and easier to decode than the diminished and foggy photographs used in modern Admiralty pilots; his soundings are mostly still sound, and so is his advice about negotiating the main tide races and overfalls. Some things have changed. Sandbars have shifted, but sandbars shift from gale to gale anyway. Buoys have been moved, removed and multiplied, though the majority of them have kept their names. A few new artificial harbors have been built; but otherwise the sailor’s view of Britain from the sea is just the same.

  Sailing around with Collins’ Pilot in the wheelhouse induces a kind of historical vertigo. On one hand the book is bang up to date. It is so accurate on the watery front that all subsequent additions to the landscape, from Georgian country houses and Martello towers to radio masts and nuclear power stations, look equally raw. If it’s not in Collins it must be new, and probably still only in its experimental phase. Yet here is a complete city, trailing a ragged crew of suburbs behind it over the hills, where not even a hamlet is shown on the chart. The smooth top of a Collins headland has sprouted towers and chimneys like the teeth of a broken comb. Staring, with some annoyance, at these upstart intrusions, you’d think they could be erased as easily as I could push a button and lift off this line of type.

  Possessed by the idea of making my own escape into this wilderness, I joined the moon-faced gang whose members loaf, hands
in pockets, on every English quayside, gazing innocently at water, floating fish crates, dead jellyfish and old boats, dreaming themselves away to sea. Working my way around the coast from the Wash to Cornwall, I spent all summer searching for a boat. I clambered awkwardly over decks full of meaningless rope and rusty pieces of marine ironmongery whose function appeared to be to bark a landsman’s shins. Economic recession meant that half the boats in England were up for sale. They lay unattended, their paintwork scabbed, their coach roofs marbled with gull shit, in picture-postcard fishing ports, in dull marinas, in seaside resorts where chip-papers swirled in the streets and the promenades buzzed with the chatter of electronic war games. These depressing trips were not entirely wasted. I learned what scantlings were, and rubbing strakes and stemposts. I bought a penknife, and pretended that I knew what I was doing when I shyly jabbed its point into the oak frames of the latest stranded hulk.

  I kept on meeting my double. He was living alone aboard his boat, which was posted for sale with a broker although the owner himself appeared to have no serious expectation of ever finding a buyer for it. He lived in jeans and torn jerseys. He rolled his own cigarettes and kept his tobacco in an Old Holborn tin which had worn down to the bare metal. He gave off the faint old-dog smell of the man who can’t quite put a date on his last bath.

  Wherever I met him—in Wells in Norfolk, in Maldon in Essex, in Newhaven in Sussex, in Falmouth in Cornwall—his story was very nearly the same. He’d been divorced—last year, or the year before, or the year before that. He’d been made redundant when the factory where he’d had a quiet desk job had closed down. Prematurely retired from the world at forty or thereabouts, he’d sold up his semidetached in the suburbs, settled the mortgage and put what was left into this ramshackle ark which he was now listlessly trying to sell to me.

  If we stood together in a salty puddle where the floor should have been it was: “You always expect to see a bit of water in the bilges in a boat like this. It’s a good sign. It means she’s able to breathe.”

  In just a year to two, my double had turned himself into a Robinson Crusoe of the foreshore. He gathered samphire and knew how to fry seaweed. At low tide he set crab pots; at high tide he fished from the veranda of his back room. Once a week he collected his dole money. His postal address was care of John, or Eric or Hattie, whoever was landlord of the Old Ship, the Fisherman’s Rest or the Anchor on the quay.

  “But what will you do when you sell the boat?”

  “Oh … friends, you know. I’ll have to look around. I was thinking of getting a catamaran. A catamaran’s a very stable boat at sea.”

  For now, my double tinkered his days away. He caulked the leaks in his home, not often to much visible effect. He sat with the Ashley Book of Knots open in front of him on the saloon table, plaiting the frayed ends of a piece of rope into a monkey’s fist. He laid in driftwood for the winter. He made plans.

  All my doubles had plans. Lodged like hippos in their mud berths, they lived on dreams. Aboard every boat I was shown charts—as if the charts themselves were voyages as good as made. Charts of the Azores, of the Caicos Islands, of the Baltic, of the Turkish coast, of the French canal route to Marseilles … Every one was marked out with compass courses, distances, the likely landmarks ringed in soft pencil, the ports of refuge carefully arrowed in.

  “If only this bloody weather would change. Suppose that Azores High drifts north a bit, into Shannon, say, I’d go next week.”

  “I’m just waiting for an alternator. It was meant to be here Tuesday.”

  “When my girlfriend stops working—”

  “My only trouble is the dog—”

  In the meantime they scraped at the layers of old varnish on their spars, messed with paintpots and reread their way through their soggy paperback libraries of adventures at sea. When September came and equinoctial gales tore chimney pots off houses and made boats groan and shiver on their moorings, and the holidaymakers all went home, the doubles were still there waiting for their breaks.

  The margins of England are lined with these men and their rotting boats. Redundant in many more senses than one, they have crossed the seawall that defines the outer limit of society and live in a tidal no-man’s-land—Huck Finns going to gray, all talking in the accent of the same minor public school. The men from the Income Tax department have long ago lost touch with them. They are beyond support orders, electricity bills, door-knocking clergy on their rounds, colored circulars, credit cards and all the other privileges and interferences of civilized life. Visiting them—by dinghy, or in gum boots over a hundred yards or so of soft and smelly mud—I listened to them all telling me solemnly that they were “free.” But it was a freedom which they had all, with whatever little enthusiam or real hope, put up for sale.

  In Fowey I found a boat. It wasn’t a romantic discovery. The tide had gone out, leaving the flats of the estuary gleaming dully and riddled with wormcasts. The boat was stranded, propped up between baulks of timber and secured to the ground with a dripping cat’s cradle of ropes and chains. With its masts gone elsewhere, its wheelhouse sticking up at the back and its high, bulbous front end, it looked in silhouette like a cracked army boot.

  Its owner had emigrated to Hong Kong, and for three years the boat had lain here untenanted and uncared-for. The local yard had given me keys and a warrant to view; and I slithered across the mud in city clothes, pushing past bait diggers forking worms into buckets. Each new footstep released another bubble of bad-egg air. The trees on the foreshore were speckled a dirty white with china-clay dust from the docks downriver and looked as if they had contracted a bad case of dandruff.

  There’s always something absurd and disproportionate about any boat seen out of the water. The most graceful craft go dowdy and frumpish when you see them in the nude. This one looked gross—a huge and flabby Amazon. Her bottom had come out in an eczematic rash of limpets. The blue paint on her superior parts was bleached and peeling. Scabby, trussed, leaning heavily on her crutches, she looked incapable of ever putting to sea again.

  My shadow scared a sunbathing family of fiddler crabs in the muddy pool which the boat had dug for herself as she grounded with the tide. They shuffled away across the pool floor and hid in the dark under her flounced bilges.

  I found a boarding ladder under a dusty tree and climbed ten feet up onto the deck, which was the usual jumble of anchors, buckets, boathooks, ropes and things. A herring gull was taking the usual leisurely crap on the wheelhouse roof, and the neat deck planking had gone a furry green with guano and disuse.

  Inside, the trapped air had a pleasant bruised-apple smell. The antique binnacle compass in the wheelhouse was locked on a course of 045°, northeast, bound for Devon, Somerset and the glum Midlands. The wheel itself was a proper ship’s wheel, brass-banded with varnished spokes of a size that demanded horny, capable seaman’s hands as big as dinner plates. I tried swinging it myself and heard heavy chains rumbling in the cellarage as the rudder ground on mud, stones and dead crabs.

  When I got below decks, I knew I’d found the right boat to run away to sea in. Brass oil lamps hung tilted in their gimbals. The dusty paneling of mahogany and teak, the red leather cushions on the settees, stuffed with odorous horsehair, the smoky overhead beams, the brass-bound charcoal stove, the rows of fiddled bookshelves (Hammond Innes next to Admiralty Sight Reduction Tables, Volume 3), made the place warm and clubbish. It was the Reform and the Travellers’ reduced to matchbox scale: a fine setting to go gaga in, to mutter reactionary nonsense over the port or snooze away the afternoon like a blubbery dugong in an easy chair. Secure behind its bolted portholes, one could remove one’s hearing aid, tell one’s old stories, live on one’s memories and be a ripe old bean.

  I bought it that afternoon, and all winter the boatyard men chiseled and painted it to rights: scraping off the barnacles until the bare wood showed as pink as ripening plums; hacking out unwanted bunks from the fo’c’s’le; doing oily, indescribable things down in the engin
e room. I didn’t want a yacht; I wanted a one-man floating house, with a study-bedsitter up in the front, complete with library and writing table, a comfortable paneled drawing room in the middle, a kitchen, a shade cramped but sufficient for my elementary cuisine, and a proper flush toilet and washroom.

  The boatyard took much the same attitude to my plans as R. T. McMullen might have done himself, had the sun’s rays ever shone on Polruan that winter. I put a long-haired sheepskin rug, bought years before in the Aleppo souk, down in the saloon.

  “He’ll stink, when he gets the saltwater in he.”

  “He won’t, because there’s not going to be any saltwater down there. I’m going to be a fair weather sailor.”

  An Olivetti typewriter was set up on the writing table.

  “He’ll go to rust.”

  A portable television set was screwed down among the bookshelves in the saloon.

  “He’s going to be off Land’s End, sick as a pig, watching Dallas.”

  But I wanted to coast, not to sever myself completely from the land. I wanted to keep up with whatever gossip was going. A television set was just as necessary as a suit of sails.

  I put pictures up on the walls: a Rowlandson cartoon called “Pleasures of Bath,” a nineteenth-century View of Damascus, a precious watercolor of Conway Castle by moonlight, framed photographs of friends and family, and another photograph, cut from a newspaper, of Margaret Thatcher in full and furious flood. With her clenched fist, her three strings of pearls, her chin thrust forward, her face cast in an expression of theatrical resoluteness under its wiry halo of swept-back hair, her eyes blazing with what might ambiguously be construed as either compassion or plain scorn, she was there as a reminder that this voyage wasn’t going to be a holiday from life. She glowered down from the paneling, England’s latest painted figurehead.

  Books went aboard in boxfuls, and my predecessors began to look increasingly ill at ease in the company they were keeping. Hilaire Belloc was bunked up with Saul Bellow. R. T. McMullen found himself next to the poems of Louis MacNeice, and John MacGregor was squashed between Ian MacEwan’s short stories and Machiavelli’s The Prince. Everything by Evelyn Waugh, even his unreadable life of Saint Helena, was signed on for the voyage, and so were the complete works of Laurence Sterne, in the ten-volume calf-bound 1780 edition. Novels by Trollope, Thackeray and Dickens … poems in fat, broken-backed anthologies … The arrival one morning of Valmouth and Prancing Nigger by Ronald Firbank drew identical scowls from the mariners.