The Cruise of the Nona

It was late in May, near midnight, the air being very warm and still, and the sky not covered but somewhat dim, with no moon, when I took the Nona out from Holyhead Harbour, having on board one companion to help me work the boat, and a local man who could speak Welsh for me in whatever places I might make along the coast.

The very slight breeze, which had barely moved us through the water after we had got up the anchor, died away long before we reached the end of the breakwater, and it was necessary to pull her out with the dinghy in order to fetch round the end of the stonework and get to sea. There was at that time of the tide a little current running towards the Stack, which would slightly help us on our way once we were outside, and with this we drifted a full hour and more, aided now and then by faint breaths of air, which rose and died again like memories. So came we, with the turn of the night, under the glare of the lighthouse at last, and then put the nose of the little ship round for the point of Carnarvonshire and the strait between the mainland and Bardsey Island, which is called Bardsey Sound.

You may guess what that did to a boat in our straits! It made the helm almost impossible to hold with the violent gripe of the mainsail, half our head canvas being gone; and at the same time it stopped our way. We drifted back again into the worst of the water, and lost in five minutes what it had taken us more than an hour to make. The danger was real and serious. The man that was with us expressed his fears aloud; my companion, though new to the sea, took it all with great calm. As to what happened to myself, I will record it though it is a little detailed and personal: I will record it for the sake of the experience, of which others may make what they will.

I looked at the Carnarvonshire coast there close at hand, the sinking lines of the mountains as they fell into the sea, and I discovered myself to be for the first time in my life entirely indifferent to my fate. It was a very odd sensation indeed, like the sensation I fancy a man must have to find he is paralysed. Once, under the influence of a drug during an illness, some such indifference had pervaded me, but here it was in the broad daylight and the sun well up above the mountains, with a clear sky, in the grip of a tremendous gale and of an angry countering sea, ravening like a pack of hounds. Yet I could only look with indifference on the sea and at the land.

Eh, Rosenheim? Eh, Guilderstern?

As we watched that abuse of nature, a fine great rock of granite, half murdered by man and looking like Sunday evening’s loaf, an aged mariner came up to us in a boat of many years and chucked in his painter to us without a word of permission, then nodded to me to make it fast.

I did as he desired, for it is a rule in this world always to do what you are told if there is no apparent loss in doing it. What the old man wanted was to be towed and to save himself the trouble of rowing. But when we had done him this favour, and the Nona was taking him up without fatigue to his dear home, he spoke not a word, but sat there gloomily, smoking a pipe and considering, I suppose, the dim stories of the ancients: the bards, and the chieftains of Wales.

Wearied with this insolent silence, I leant over the rail and asked him what we should make for and where we had best lie in Pwllheli. He pulled the pipe out of his mouth and cursed Pwllheli loudly, in English, but in English so Welsh that it reminded me of the famous story of the man who said, “There will be folk in London today: one hundred and twenty are coming from Pwllheli.” I said to him, therefore, desiring to soften his mood, “I see that you are not from Pwllheli yourself.”

So it is with this awful parade of the great mountains standing on guard over the northern corner of Cardigan Bay, seen from the silence and the flat of ocean, towering above its glass; and all that late afternoon and evening I adored them until, with the last of the light, and a westerly air which was but the suggestion of a breeze, we groped north anxiously for the opening to Port Madoc channel. How I should make it, even upon the flood, in the darkness, I knew not; for the sands there are miles wide, and this channel (which I had never yet made) shifts continually. But God sent me a pilot.

He hailed us out of the half-darkness from a small boat, and asked us in the dialect which I will call “Anglo-Welsh” (after Anglo-Catholic, Anglo-German, Anglo-Indian, Anglo-African, and the rest), “Whether we would not have a pilot, ah?”

Nor was he a pilot, as the event shall show; but at any rate he belonged to that shore, and would have more knowledge than I. So I gave him the helm, and went up forward to look out over the bows, as the Nona glided slowly along the flood into the channel which they call “The Water of the Smooth Lake” (“Afon Glaslyn”). For half an hour of that very slow gliding all went well. The darkness had quite fallen. There was no moon.

The gliding stopped; there was a slight thrill. She had hit Wales: an underwater, advance guard of Wales. The man at the helm was not apologetic, he was not humble, but he was at least subdued; and he said, “Her will float soon, so her will!” I forbore to reproach him, not from kindness, but from cowardice.

We had just rounded the Start at dawn. My companion went below to sleep. I watched, over the quarter, the Start Light flashing pale and white in the broadening day, and at last extinguished. Then the sun rose, as I have said. Immediately after its rising a sort of light haze filled the air to eastward. It was denser than it seemed to be, for it did not obscure the low disc of the sun, nor redden it, but, as you will read in a moment, it performed a mystery. The little ship slipped on, up past the Skerries Bank, and I could see far off the headland which bounds Dart Bay. There was no sail in sight. I was alone upon the sea; and the breeze, neither freshening nor lowering, but giving a hearty line of course (along which we slipped, perhaps, five knots or six), made the water speak merrily upon the bows and along the run of our low sides. In this loneliness and content, as I sailed northward, I chanced to look, after an hour’s steering or so, eastward again towards the open sea⁠—and then it was that there passed me the vision I shall remember forever, or for so long as the longest life may last.

Like ghosts, like things themselves made of mist, there passed between me and the newly risen sun a procession of great forms, all in line, hastening eastward. It was the Fleet recalled.