Coasting (5 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.