boat I would have been happier if the brewer had chosen
Mon Repos, Laburnams
, or
Dunroamin
.
It is famously unlucky to change a boat’s name: you are pretty well guaranteed an early death by drowning. But it is permissible, as far as I know, to switch the letters about. Chuck GOSFIELD MAID into the air, let the pieces fall where they will, and they come out as DIE, DISMAL FOG. As mottoes for British voyages go,
Die, Dismal Fog
will do well.
CHAPTER 2
IN THE ARCHIPELAGO
F or four years now,
Gosfield Maid
has been slowly circling round the British Isles. When she first rumbled down the slipway into the Fowey Estuary, I had never taken charge of a boat at sea in my life. A retired naval commander let me play the role of an elderly midshipman, and in a fortnight taught me how to raise sails, drop anchor, steer a compass course and bleed a diesel engine. In the evenings I taught myself navigation out of books, with the watery yellow lamplight dodging all over the cabin as the boat wallowed in the wakes of passing china-clay coasters. On April Fools’ Day I left Fowey alone and nervously picked my way out into the English Channel. I had hardly set my course and made my first penciled cross on the chart before the land faded into the haze. First there was Captain Mitchell’s Californian ranch-style house on the hill, and the Coastguard lookout, and the striped beacon on Gribben Head; then an indecipherable gray scribble across the horizon; then just the intimidating whiteness of the blank page.
The voyage turned into the usual epical-pastoral-tragical-comical-historical-amorous and lonely story—of innocence lost, ritual tests and trials, the holy terrors, funny interludes, romances caught on the wing, lightning strikes of wisdom and dim
longueurs
. It yielded calms, storms, sunsets, fogs, mirrored landscapes, welcoming ports glistering in the twilight under auroras of blown gulls, enormous skies, waves green as jade: all the set pieces in the marine painter’s repertoire.
In an unscheduled gale off the coast of Sussex, the collected works of Laurence Sterne took flight in the saloon and flapped about like doves escaping from a magician’s hat: hellfire sermons colliding in midair with three panic-stricken volumes of
Tristram Shandy
, and
A Sentimental Journey
making a break for it through the galley and up into the wheelhouse. Clinging on to the wheel, too busy trying to angle the bow of the boat into the next wave to be frightened, I thought coldly that death looked as if it was definitely in the cards. There were other times when the sea was as dull and gray as an infinity of lukewarm porridge, with ports extending a welcome no friendlier than the litter of bills which always lies in wait for one behind the front door.
The difficulty with a circular voyage is that once you have gone on past your original point of departure (as
Gosfield Maid
did, a little more than a year after setting out), it has no destination and no ending—at least not until it’s too late to tell the tale. It would be handy to contrive a McMullen-like finale, the helmsman a bag of bleached bones held together by a rotting pea jacket and the boat surviving to sail off into the blue. But this voyage goes on. For as long as the book continues to be written, the helmsman’s still alive. However, for those who insist on traveling in a more orderly sequence and demand a strict and conventional economy of literary means, here goes—
I got drunk in Torquay, had a fit of memoirs in Portsmouth, turned lyrical in Brighton and philosophical off Beachy Head, was affronted in Dover, ill in Harwich, happy in Grimsby, maudlin in Bridlington, was pleased with myself on Holy Island, got drunk again in Leith, was superiorin Inverness, fell in love in Oban and out of love by Stranraer, was at my wits’ end in Dublin, said some very clever things in Fishguard, lost my temper off Land’s End and summed things up pretty neatly in Falmouth. THE END.
53°47’
Mon Repos, Laburnams
, or
Dunroamin
.
It is famously unlucky to change a boat’s name: you are pretty well guaranteed an early death by drowning. But it is permissible, as far as I know, to switch the letters about. Chuck GOSFIELD MAID into the air, let the pieces fall where they will, and they come out as DIE, DISMAL FOG. As mottoes for British voyages go,
Die, Dismal Fog
will do well.
CHAPTER 2
IN THE ARCHIPELAGO
F or four years now,
Gosfield Maid
has been slowly circling round the British Isles. When she first rumbled down the slipway into the Fowey Estuary, I had never taken charge of a boat at sea in my life. A retired naval commander let me play the role of an elderly midshipman, and in a fortnight taught me how to raise sails, drop anchor, steer a compass course and bleed a diesel engine. In the evenings I taught myself navigation out of books, with the watery yellow lamplight dodging all over the cabin as the boat wallowed in the wakes of passing china-clay coasters. On April Fools’ Day I left Fowey alone and nervously picked my way out into the English Channel. I had hardly set my course and made my first penciled cross on the chart before the land faded into the haze. First there was Captain Mitchell’s Californian ranch-style house on the hill, and the Coastguard lookout, and the striped beacon on Gribben Head; then an indecipherable gray scribble across the horizon; then just the intimidating whiteness of the blank page.
The voyage turned into the usual epical-pastoral-tragical-comical-historical-amorous and lonely story—of innocence lost, ritual tests and trials, the holy terrors, funny interludes, romances caught on the wing, lightning strikes of wisdom and dim
longueurs
. It yielded calms, storms, sunsets, fogs, mirrored landscapes, welcoming ports glistering in the twilight under auroras of blown gulls, enormous skies, waves green as jade: all the set pieces in the marine painter’s repertoire.
In an unscheduled gale off the coast of Sussex, the collected works of Laurence Sterne took flight in the saloon and flapped about like doves escaping from a magician’s hat: hellfire sermons colliding in midair with three panic-stricken volumes of
Tristram Shandy
, and
A Sentimental Journey
making a break for it through the galley and up into the wheelhouse. Clinging on to the wheel, too busy trying to angle the bow of the boat into the next wave to be frightened, I thought coldly that death looked as if it was definitely in the cards. There were other times when the sea was as dull and gray as an infinity of lukewarm porridge, with ports extending a welcome no friendlier than the litter of bills which always lies in wait for one behind the front door.
The difficulty with a circular voyage is that once you have gone on past your original point of departure (as
Gosfield Maid
did, a little more than a year after setting out), it has no destination and no ending—at least not until it’s too late to tell the tale. It would be handy to contrive a McMullen-like finale, the helmsman a bag of bleached bones held together by a rotting pea jacket and the boat surviving to sail off into the blue. But this voyage goes on. For as long as the book continues to be written, the helmsman’s still alive. However, for those who insist on traveling in a more orderly sequence and demand a strict and conventional economy of literary means, here goes—
I got drunk in Torquay, had a fit of memoirs in Portsmouth, turned lyrical in Brighton and philosophical off Beachy Head, was affronted in Dover, ill in Harwich, happy in Grimsby, maudlin in Bridlington, was pleased with myself on Holy Island, got drunk again in Leith, was superiorin Inverness, fell in love in Oban and out of love by Stranraer, was at my wits’ end in Dublin, said some very clever things in Fishguard, lost my temper off Land’s End and summed things up pretty neatly in Falmouth. THE END.
53°47’
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