Atlantic Britain: The Story of the Sea a Man and a Ship. Adam Nicolson
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The Lizard light loomed through the thickening dark. We stayed a mile off the headland but still the sea was roughened by the tide, full of huge barn-door breakers. They were coming at us, the whole of the bow plunging into them, burying the bowsprit up to its socket, and the bulk of water driving back along the deck. The spray was lit in the nav lights on either side in huge green arcs of red and green water. There was no sprayhood and every second or two the water burst and rattled on to our waterproofs as the boat plunged on. ‘Brave’ George called her then. The night was clear and phosphorescence was sprinkled down to leeward like a reflection of the stars. The Auk was passing her exam.
‘Go down,’ George said to me and I slunk down into the safety of the bunk, away from this, sleep instant and deep. No thought for the man on deck and the rattling of the seas as they came over him. Just the warmth and welcome of my own private, down-filled harbour. George was simply going to be there for four hours, as I was to be for another four hours in four hours’ time. In a way, the sea sets too much of a test to reveal the intricacies of character. I, of course, know George ashore, the subtle and layered interactions of his strengths and weaknesses, the certainties and uncertainties, the withdrawals and generosities that make up any man. But at sea, particularly a demanding sea as it was that night, that internal play of the self does not appear. It is a simplified world and the sea only asks the simple question: are you on or are you off? Can you do this or can you not? It doesn’t care why, or even how. It only expects a yes or a no.
At one in the morning, George woke me. I came up, he gave me the bearing, handed me the torch, and I took his place at the wheel. The stars were coming and going through the clouds. Our course was to leave Scilly to port and then bear away for the Irish coast. The Lizard light had sunk below the horizon but the light on the Longships reef at Land’s End was still clear behind me to the east. The lightship on the Seven Stones, the rocks that sank the Torrey Canyon, was winking to the north of me. In the south, the arm of the Wolf ranged across the night. Ahead, Round Island light, to the north of St Martin’s in Scilly, led me onwards. Beyond it, the loom of the Bishop swept out across the open expanses of the Atlantic. These names were like the constellations of the sea.
I was well that night, happy to be out here in the cold. Seasickness, as George had said to me, is a kind of fear, and like any fear can be held at bay and suppressed, can be told to get down like a dog. You can feel seasickness coming on and, as George had taught me, you can deny it. I tried it that night and although from time to time I was still being sick over the side, watching the supper I had eaten spewing out among the phosphorescence below the lee rail, it was not the sort of seasickness I had before. It didn’t make me think I was about to die or my character a waste of shame. I was simply being sick every hour or so, in the way that exhaust comes out of the back of a car. Nelson was seasick until the year he died. The fear it represents doesn’t need to send you to hell. And I wasn’t in hell; I was in a sort of cold windy heaven.
The course for Scilly was 280 magnetic, the wind just behind the beam. One by one the quartering seas kicked under us, picking up the Auk first at the stern, travelling the length of her, and then dropping the bow in the trough behind. As each one came under, I held the helm against it, a door pressed shut, as George had told me, against the beast pressing in from the other side; and then, as the beast relaxed, I relaxed, taking the pressure off the wheel and waiting for the beast to try his luck again. It was a long, twice-a-minute rhythm, on and off, on and off, the wide, strong Auk surging into the dark.
At times like this, alone in a wide dark sea, with your companion asleep below, you can feel the wonder of a boat. Of course a boat is not a natural thing. She is the most cultural of things, the way she works dependent on a line of thought that goes back to the Bronze Age: the form of the hull and the weighted keel; the lift and drive given by a sail; the way four sails like ours can be trimmed to lead each other on; the ingenuity of blocks and tackles, strops, sheets, halyards and warps, the sheer cleverness of knots. The knowledge that is gathered in a boat is a great human inheritance, especially valuable because it is not material but intangible, a legacy made only of understanding.
You can see the boat, in other words, as our great symbol, the embodiment of what we might be. In her fineness, strength, and robustness; in the many intricate, interlocking details of her overall scheme; even in the bowing to nature of her wing-like sails and the auk- or seal-like curves of her body: in all this, she is a great act of civility. The sea is an ‘it’, the boat a ‘she’, and the courage of that confrontation is why people love the boats they know. Boats are us against it, what we can do despite the world. Each sailing hull is a precious thought, buoyant, purposeful, moving on, afloat in the sea that cares nothing for it. From the deck of a boat, out of sight of land, as Auden wrote in ‘The Sea and the Mirror’, his great poem on art and consciousness, ‘All we are not stares back at what we are.’
There is another side to that. It is no coincidence that some of the earliest known depictions of sails, from Bronze Age Crete nearly 4,000 years ago, are exactly contemporary with the story of Icarus and Daedalus. Daedalus is the great designer of intricacies, the father of all boatwrights, the man who ‘fettles’ and fiddles and makes perfect an arrangement of rope and timber, who is entranced with the mimicking of nature by machine. The wings he makes for Icarus are feathered sails. When their wax fixings melt in the sun, it is a step too far, and the boy falls to his death, as the story says, in the sea. This is, at heart, not an air story but a sea story, fuelled by the recognition that the beautiful, made thing, which the winged creature of a boat represents, can fail too and bring sea-disaster on those who have trusted it. Daedalus was still in the yard at Tregatreath; I wondered, in our growing exhaustion, if we were now the Icaruses of this story.
Sometime, in the dark early hours, we came into the shelter of Scilly. I kept the boat a mile or two offshore and although the wind didn’t drop, the sea went still in the islands’ lee. The smell of land came wafting across the night, thick and fleshy; a warm, musty, vegetable fug, like a soup, floated out to us over the Atlantic air. I bore away on to 325 magnetic, eased the sheets, and made for Ireland. Wonderful Auk\ Wonderful sea-surging Auk\
A change of watch then and again in the grey-green dawn, the grey of the sea the colour of battleships, and then again at nine or ten in the morning. On my watches, I was drifting off to sleep. George’s face was creased and worn, but we were making progress. The Auk would look after us. We were at home, however tired we were. All day, we alternated, spending half an hour or so together on deck each time, a little talk, something to eat, a cup of tea. The swells were mountainous out here, mid-passage. The whole extent of this sunlit sea was the deep, royal blue of the ocean.
On the wheel, time slid away. The sky was clear and endless, the rhythm of the boat lullingly repetitive, the sunshine bright in the eyes. Mid-afternoon, a little more than halfway across, a fulmar swung between the shrouds and the mainmast. An hour later, a swallow circled the boat, surveyed it, and without warning flew down through the companionway hatch, circling inside the cabin, cheeping, prospecting for a nest. On the way from Africa, it had found, miraculously, an almost empty, very suitable, if slightly small barn, 125 miles short of where it expected to find land. The swallow flew out again without touching timber, rope or canvas and away, its dipping, curving flight just held above the seas. Ten minutes later it returned, with another. The two of them flew down into the cabin again, not landing, cheeping in excited, quivering calls. They came out and back three more times. Surely a perfect site for a nest? Surely not: no mud or straw with which to build a home. They left again for the fourth and last time, as the Auk plunged on for Ireland.
If the wind had stayed good for us, we could have slid into a harbour that night as sleepily and dreamily as this day had passed. We were lulled. We could have sleepwalked home. Our exhaustion didn’t matter because the Auk would take us on. We were her passengers.
It didn’t happen like that. Late that afternoon, a weather front came through and winds veer on fronts. You could see it ranged above us, a curving wall of cloud, its leading edge quiffed up and back in wisps. The southwesterly wind that had been wafting us to Ireland shifted through thirty, forty, fifty, seventy degrees in the space of an hour. We were headed. Rain hammered down. Night was coming on again, the wind was now in the northwest, which was exactly where we wanted to