The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden

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СКАЧАТЬ although I do not remember that first time, I do recall the hours spent there later, half sleeping and half waking, looking up at the underside of the foredeck with its white gloss scattered with rosettes of black mould. I can still hear the lap of the water and smell the rough folds of the Egyptian cotton sail-cloth beneath me.

      One golden evening when I was 9 or so, my grandfather and I were out alone in Ratona. He handed me the helm. As we beat back and forth across the Carrick Roads, heeling to one of those northerlies that often follows a hot day, he pointed up at the sails and for the first time explained the principle of sailing – the miracle of hull-shape and sail-set that enables a boat, obliquely, to sail towards the wind. I watched him in that moment, with his hand arced against the icing-white mainsail, describing the technique with a cracked softness in his voice that he used only when he spoke of certain people, and of certain periods in his life. I realised then, in a way I could not articulate, that this was as powerful as any human attachment, this love of the sea.

      But I know, too, that ‘love of the sea’ is not strictly accurate. Mariners do not love the sea. Love for the sea is something you feel from the shore. You can admire the sea from a deck; you can be drawn to it, awed and terrified by it. If you are out on the water, your affection is not for the shifting mass all around the hull, but for the hull itself. What seamen feel for their vessel is something that elevates it high above the inanimate. It is, said Conrad, ‘profoundly different from the love that men feel for every other work of their hands’.

      No other arena of human endeavour has proved quite so challenging as the ocean. It has driven individuals and whole nations to do remarkable things – innovative, courageous and brutal. I have seen plenty of men, and it is almost always men, who are ill at ease on land, dazed, whose shore life is a mess; but put them on a boat, and they are transformed. They become athletes, commanders, strategists, heroes. The skills needed on a boat are unlike any on land, because everything is different at sea.

      Take the language. Many think that nautical language is some dialect generated by cultural divergence long ago, in an age when mariners and landsmen rarely came into contact with each other. They think the modern sailor perpetuates it like some quaint outdated code, the lexical equivalent of dressing in eighteenth-century costume. But each sea-term has no translation in land language, because there is no equivalent on land. Every strange force the sea exerts, every quirk of tidal stream and every reef and twist of shoreline, every tackle-snapping, deck-swamping, broaching, pooping, pitch-poling and sinking, and every lone drowning, booms out the same warning: you should not be out here!

      Yet it was the ability to build ships for passage, for oceanic voyages, to transport commodities and people, to line their sides with cannon, that shaped the modern world. More than any other agent, ships spread political power, ideas, goods and technology. Naval dominance – achieved first by the Spanish, then the Dutch and the British – decided whose ships went furthest, and who brought the greatest wealth home.

      The maritime states’ struggle was one of dominance on the ocean rather than of the ocean. Their success came not by taming the sea but by recognising its essential hostility, and working with its constraints. Basil Greenhill, chronicler of the end of wind-driven shipping, spoke of the age of sail as the ‘the age of collaboration’: the sailing ship represents ‘the height of [man’s] achievement in adapting the existing forces of nature … as opposed to the achievement of changing their direction and function’.

      Sometimes reading the accounts of the sea battles of that time, the engagements involving privateers or ships-of-the-line, you have the sense less of the total war of the twentieth century than of some watery medieval tournament, a grand and deadly game in which each side, however pitiless, is bound by natural rules – the no-go areas to windward, the fatal advantage of the weather gage.

      In the recent, post-industrial attraction to the wild, a yearning driven above all by the realisation of our distance from it, the sea is rarely mentioned. Yet it is perhaps the only true wilderness. You cannot manipulate the sea, you cannot cultivate it. Efforts to ‘farm’ its margins have in most cases proved disastrous. Fishermen are not agriculturalists; to find their equivalent on land you have to go back beyond written history, to hunter-gatherer groups of the Mesolithic age. The sea teaches the lesson every ecologist urges us to understand about the natural world: that it cares nothing for us, that it will survive us. Try to impose your will upon it and it will destroy you. Swim through it or pass over it in a boat, and you leave not a trace. In time it will, like sand over the works of Ozymandias, close over every brick, every avenue and every last relic of our civilisation.

      That is the wisdom of the sea, its essential paradox. It quickens us, extends us, prompts feats of innovation and courage, then washes them all away. No trace remains; man and mountain yield to the levelling force of the sea. In its omnipotence, its beauty and its purity, the sea is the earthly manifestation of the divine. Building a vessel and crossing a body of water is a transcendent achievement, and afterwards nothing in this life quite compares.

      During my first winter on the Fal estuary, my grandfather would telephone frequently from his home in Hampshire. He was now 90. He wanted to know exactly what the weather was doing, about the sea state, what ships had been going in and out of Falmouth. No detail was too trivial. Spring tides or neaps? Is the ferry running? He examined the weather maps and asked: has the wind backed yet down there? Has the cold front passed over you? He quizzed me about all those boats he knew, the people of the shore, the fishermen and part-time gardeners, the summer sailors and retired boat-builders. And then one storm-dark December afternoon, he rang and asked me: would I be kind enough to do something for him? Would I go up the river, have a look at Ratona?

      In the dusk I walked through the cliff-top fields to where Ratona was wintering. She stood on legs at the rim of a tidal pool. Her bowsprit pushed up towards the serpentine roots of a group of Monterey pines; behind them was St Just churchyard, a mossy necropolis of slate and granite headstones. Two mooring warps looped out from Ratona’s stern, down into the ebbing tide. Twice a day the water rose and fell around her, keeping her boards tight with moisture. The church clock’s chimes rang out across the creek every quarter of an hour.

      Climbing down to the muddy foreshore, I ran my hand along the curve of her waterline – the green topsides and scum-crusted red of her anti-fouling. I looked at the chain-plate, and the place where her mast should be and the winter cover stretched down tight over the ridge-pole, and was overwhelmed by a sense of the vanished past, of a hundred half-remembered scenes – squinting up the mast to check the lift of the cotton luff, gazing at the lee gunwale as the water rushed past it, rowing ashore in some hidden cove and looking at her at anchor, or lying again in the forepeak, cushioned by sail-cloth. With a squelch, I yanked my boots out of the mud, and climbed back up to the churchyard. The winter wind combed through the pines. It was almost dark.

      I rang my grandfather that evening and told him Ratona was in fine shape. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s splendid …’ His words sounded distant. Just two weeks later, at his Hampshire home, he developed pneumonia and died.

      When I was very young, I thought there were two grandfathers, one in Hampshire, in woollen tie and leather-elbowed jacket, listening to music in his book-lined study. The other one lived in Cornwall, and was wilder, and more adventurous, and more appealing to a young boy. He wore sea-boots and salt-crusted trousers; he draped sails from the banisters to dry; he tinkered with tackle and rope, rowed his dinghy standing up. The memorial service for the first took place in a flint-walled church near the River Test, a dark-suited parade of family and surviving friends. It was several weeks later when there was a ceremony for the other grandfather. His ashes were brought to St Just. Only three of us stood with the vicar at the graveside. The wind sighed in the Monterey pines. We placed his ashes among the roots. Just yards below him, as if he was some Norse hero buried with his boat, lay Ratona.

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