Coasting (3 page)

So I looked at my father with his campaign ribbons, his priestly vocation, his pipe, his English reticence, and knew I’d never make the grade. Maybe there was some run-down South American republic where I might have passed myself off as an averagely respectable type, but it wouldn’t wash in England—at least, not in the dutiful, constrained, genteel 1950s England that I knew. The schoolmasters were unarguably right when they dismissed me as a hopeless coaster.

The dictionary does the word proud. To coast is to proceed without great effort, to move by momentum or force of gravity, to march on the flank of, to skirt, to sail from port to port of the same country, to explore or scour, to bicycle downhill without pedaling, and to slide down a slope on a sled. The coaster—as my school report pointed out in no uncertain terms—is someone who uses the minimum of effort to go down a slippery slope on the margin of things.

The coaster never stays in one berth longer than he can help. He’ll take on any cargo for a short distance—coal, scrap iron, timber, day-old chicks. He doesn’t quite belong either to the land or to the ocean. He is a betwixt-and-between man, neither exactly a citizen nor exactly a foreigner. Choosing to live on the shifting frontier where the land meets the water and the water shades into the land, he has to make himself the master of a specialized kind of knowledge not taught in English public schools. Admiral Smyth’s
The Sailor’s Word Book
of 1867 puts it nicely:

It makes a happy metaphor for a life on the fringe. For years I coasted, from job to job, place to place, person to person. At the first hint of adverse weather I hauled up my anchor and moved on with the tide, letting the reigning winds take care of the direction of the voyage. In writing I found a good coaster’s occupation, unloading my mixed cargoes at one port after another. The writer, sitting alone in a room, watching society go past his window and trying to re-create it by playing with words on a page, has his own kind of sea distance … a sense of pushing up-Channel on a lumpy swell while the men and women on the shore go comfortably about their business, caring nothing about the pitch and roll and flap of the solitary small vessel on the horizon.

It was only a matter of time before the metaphor insisted on making itself actual. I was nearly forty, a little older than my father, when I bought a real boat, fitted it up as a floating house and set out to sail alone around the British Isles. It was rather late in the day to run away to sea (thirteen is supposed to be the standard age for that chronically English escapade) but I wasn’t going to let ordinary caution or common sense get in the way of this imperious compulsion.
I was besotted by the idea. Britain still seemed to be somehow more my father’s land than my own—and home is always the hardest place to get into sharp focus. If only it could be
encompassed
 … by a slow, stopping, circular voyage … if only one could go back to all the stages and places of one’s own life, as a stranger, out of the blue … couldn’t one emerge at the end as a domestic Columbus, the true discoverer of a doorstep empire? With all the ardent solemnity of a thirteen-year-old, at thirty-nine I saw my trip as a test, a reckoning, a voyage of territorial conquest, a homecoming.

I was not alone. I was bringing up the rear of a long queue of certifiable obsessives. This notion of taking to a boat and grandly coming to terms with one’s native land is one that regularly presents itself to a certain dubious brand of Englishman, and I should have felt more disturbed than I was by the company I found myself keeping.

John MacGregor stood at the head of the line; and MacGregor’s book,
The Voyage Alone in the Yawl “Rob Roy,”
started a national craze for solitary coastal voyaging when it came out in 1867. MacGregor had a lot to live up to and a lot to prove: his father was a famous general, and when the infant John was plucked safely from a shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay at the age of five weeks, the incident was held by the MacGregor family to be a clear case of Divine Intervention, in the same category, if not quite of the same rank, as the Virgin Birth.

MacGregor grew up to be a crashingly hearty Victorian bachelor. In an age untainted by suspicions fed on Freud and Krafft-Ebbing, he was able, as an evangelical philanthropist, to devote his life to Boys. His mission was to rescue street arabs from the London slums for Christ and the open-air life. He worked for the Ragged Schools, to which all his fees as a lecturer and royalties as an author were donated. He set up the Shoeblack Brigade (whose battalions of small boys, each equipped with brushes and polish, used to assemble every morning in the Strand at
seven, to sing hymns and say prayers under MacGregor’s enthusiastic conductorship), and was a co-founder of the
Boy’s Own Paper
.

His adventures at sea started with the
Rob Roy
canoe, a craft he designed himself so that his boys could paddle their way to piety at weekends. He held Sunday rallies on the Thames, half regattas and half prayer meetings, in which every time a canoe capsized another boy was simultaneously cleansed of his London dirt and washed in the blood of the Lamb.

After a series of canoeing adventures in the Holy Land and Scandinavia, MacGregor built himself a new boat, a 21-foot yawl planked in Honduras mahogany, with a cabin, a galley and a half-decked cockpit that looked as it if were closely modeled on a preacher’s pulpit. He took on a cargo of “several boxes of Testaments, books, pictures, and interesting papers, in different tongues,” and set sail for Paris by way of the Thames Estuary, the South coast of England and the Seine. “Truly,” he wrote, “there is a sea-mission yet to be worked. Good news was told on the water long ago, and by the Great Preacher from a boat.” Wherever he docked he handed out Bibles and “interesting papers” to passing tourists, fishermen, bargees and longshoremen. “The distribution of these was a constant pleasure to me. Permanent and positive good may have been done by the reading of their contents.”

He supplied his own illustrations, and on page 18 of
The Voyage Alone
he treated his readers to a flattering portrait of the Author At Home, in which MacGregor reclines majestically against a bolster in his pulpit-cockpit, his mustaches waxed to icicle-like points, his eyes hard and bright as a pair of chipped flints as he gazes out to sea. His finely sculpted head is turbaned against the sun, and he appears to be tippling from a mug, but the prominent teapot on the deck beside him is there to reassure you that MacGregor’s liquor is definitely nontoxic. Investigation of the crosshatching with a magnifying glass reveals an open bible propped against the gunwale.

Here is exactly the sort of Englishman that Thomas Arnold’s
Rugby was created to manufacture. You could trust the colonization of Africa, or the management of the Sheffield steel industry, to this sturdy open-necked figure who exudes the Victorian virtues of Temperance, Probity, Resolution and Independence. Setting himself up as the very type of the hero of the age, MacGregor shows a well-built athlete sailing westward in the service of God and Queen.

Out at sea, MacGregor meditated on the condition of England:

From the long-distance perspective afforded by
Rob Roy
running before the wind off Southsea, the answers to the nation’s problems came pat: what was needed was “strong Tory government” and a great Christian crusade.

The Voyage Alone
became a Victorian best-seller, not for its religious or political content but because it managed to glorify yachting as much more than a mere sport. MacGregor turned sailing a small boat into a species of high moral endeavor. He wrote infectiously of the pleasures of the business.
Rob Roy
was, he said, “my floating freehold,” and the water was “my road, my home, my very world.” His somewhat embroidered adventures at sea were conveyed in the elementary heroic prose which was to become the standard note of the
Boy’s Own Paper
. Yet simple adventure and simple pleasure weren’t enough in themselves. What was needed was a sense of uplift; and when MacGregor saw yachts, he didn’t see a collection of rich men’s toys, about
which they ought to feel a stab of Christian guilt as they left the office on Friday for a long weekend’s messing about on the water, but rather—

If MacGregor was an ace at flattering himself, he was also very clever at buttering up his readers. It was from MacGregor that the amateur sailor learned that he wasn’t just indulging himself in a hobby, he was sailing for Victoria, England and Saint George.

One contemporary reader of the book was Empson Edward Middleton, a disgruntled ex-officer in the Indian army, a man whose head was peppered with stings from the swarm of bees that he kept in his bonnet. He was the first man to sail singlehanded round the British Isles, and in
The Cruise of The Kate
he explained how his own voyage started:

He commissioned an enlarged replica of
Rob Roy
, and had his boat personally inspected by MacGregor before he put
to sea.
The Kate
, also a yawl, was 25 feet long (according to
Lloyd’s Register
) or 23 feet (according to Middleton, who was probably foreshortening it for heroism’s sake). The big difference between the two boats—and the two voyages they made—was in their cargoes.

Middleton loaded
The Kate
with his own discontents. He was a misunderstood genius whose inner nobility had gone unrecognized. He had proved conclusively that the earth was—not quite flat, exactly, but bowl- or saucer-shaped. This important discovery had not been taken up by the Royal Geographical Society or the British Academy with anything like the excitement it deserved. He had also worked out that Heaven was located in the Sun whose rays were emitted by the combined souls of the blessed—another theory in which no one seemed to be at all interested. At the time of his voyage he was “engaged in the production of an arduous literary labour,” the verse translation to end all verse translations of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, of which several samples were smuggled into
The Cruise of The Kate:

No eager publisher came forward with a contract, and Middleton smelled the London literary conspiracy at work. One surefire best-seller—a translation of Aristotle’s
Ethics
, “in large print, for the poor to read”—had already been rejected. Middleton was making the unoriginal discovery that publishers are astonishingly stupid and shortsighted and are in the business only of promoting their friends.

So he went to a vanity press and had privately printed a fat pamphlet called
The World of Wonders
—a digest of his Latin translations, his scientific theories, his quarrels with various authorities, his cures for rheumatism and gout. The after-locker of
The Kate
was packed solid with copies, which he proposed to distribute round Britain on the model of MacGregor and his tracts and bibles. Like MacGregor’s,
Middleton’s voyage was a sea mission, a crusade of enlightenment. Brave, cranky and in deadly earnest, he taught himself to sail in a week on the Solent, and set out to conquer his native land.

The Cruise of The Kate
is a solemn chronicle. Wherever he stepped ashore, Middleton came face to face with the insolence and cupidity of his fellowmen. The builders were lazy and failed to finish his boat on schedule. Pilots overcharged him. Navigational aids, like buoys and lighthouses, were deliberately put in the wrong places, in order to tempt Middleton to shipwreck. Hoteliers refused to cash his checks. He saw himself as a stoned martyr in a naughty world, and stubbornly went on telling the good news. “
The World of Wonders Magazine
made me numberless friends.”

The dominant tone of the book is pained and blustery. Middleton’s voice is that of the well-spoken bore with a gigantic chip on his shoulder: