Coasting
Authors: Jonathan Raban
JONATHAN RABAN
COASTING
Jonathan Raban is the author of
Soft City, Arabia, Foreign Land, Old Glory, For Love and Money, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land
, and
Passage to Juneau;
he has also edited
The Oxford Book of the Sea
. Raban has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (for
Bad Land
), the Heinemann Award for Literature, the Thomas Cook Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington, and the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, among others. Raban lives in Seattle, with his daughter.
Soft City
Arabia
Foreign Land
Old Glory
For Love and Money
God, Man, and Mrs. Thatcher
Hunting Mister Heartbreak
The Oxford Book of the Sea
(editor)
Bad Land
Passage to Juneau
FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, FEBRUARY 2003
Copyright
©
1987 by Foreign Land Ltd
.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1987.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following:
Lyrics from “It Doesn’t Matter Any More” by Paul Anka. Copyright © 1958, 1974 by Spanka Music Corp./Management Agency and Music Publishing, Inc. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
Excerpt from “The Old Fools” from
High Windows
by Philip Larkin.
Copyright © 1974 by Philip Larkin. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.
Excerpts from “Dockery and Son” and “For Sidney Bechet” from
The Whitsun Weddings
by Philip Larkin, copyright © 1964.
Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raban, Jonathan.
Coasting / Jonathan Raban.
p. cm.
Originally published: London : Collins Harvill, 1986.
eISBN: 978-0-307-51771-5
1. Great Britain—Description and travel. 2. Coasts—Great Britain.
3. National characteristics, British.
4. Raban, Jonathan—Journeys—Great Britain. I. Title.
DA632 .R33 2003
914.104’85—dc21
2002069044
Author photograph
©
Marion Ettlinger
v3.1
To Caroline
,
and another, shared, voyage
There is in this aspect of land from the sea I know not what of continual discovery and adventure, and therefore of youth, or, if you prefer a more mystical term, of resurrection. That which you thought you knew so well is quite transformed, and as you gaze you begin to think of the people inhabiting the firm earth beyond that line of sand as some unknown and happy people; or, if you remember their arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they seem not tragic but comic to you, thus isolated as you are on the waters and free from it all. You think of landsmen as on a stage. And, again, the majesty of the Land itself takes its true place and properly lessens the mere interest in one’s fellows. Nowhere does England take on personality so strongly as from the sea
.
—Hilaire Belloc, “Off Exmouth”
COASTINGThe Marriner having left the vast Ocean, and brought his Ship into Soundings near the Land, amongst Tides or Streams, his Art now must be laid aside, and Pilottage taken in hand, the nearer the Land the greater the Danger, therefore your care ought to be the more
.
Being in Tides-ways, narrow Channels, Rocks and Sands, I hope the ingenious Mariner will not take it amiss in recommending this to your care, your Tides, Courses, Soundings, and the goodness of your Compasses
.
Captain Greenville Collins,
Great Britain’s Coasting Pilot
, 1693
A
ll morning the sea has been gray with rain under a sky so low that the masts of the boat have seemed to puncture the soft banks of cloud overhead. The water is listless, with just enough wind to make the wavelets peak and dribble dully down their fronts. Sails
hang in loose bundles from their spars as the boat trudges on under engine, dragging its wake behind it like a long skirt.
The engine, the engine. Its thump and clatter, all mixed up with the smell of diesel oil and the continuous slight motion of the sea, is so regular and monotonous that you keep on hearing voices in it. Sometimes, when the revs are low, there’s a man under the boards reciting poems that you vaguely remember in a resonant bass. Sometimes the noise rises to the bright nonsense of a cocktail party in the flat downstairs. At present, though, you’re stuck with your usual cruising companion at sixteen hundred revs, an indignant old fool grumbling in the cellar.
Where’d I put it? Can’t remember. Gerroff, you, blast and damn you. Where’d I put it? Can’t remember. Sodding thingummy. Where’d I put it? Can’t remember
.
Way out in front, England shows as a dark smear between the sea and the sky like the track of a grubby finger across a windowpane—a distant, northern land. We’re crossing into the cold fifties of latitude, as far from the warm middle of the world as Labrador at one end of it and the Falklands at the other. The light is frugal, watery, and it always falls aslant, even in high summer. The sun, when it manages to find a break in the cloud, fills the land with shadows. It’s no wonder that England, seen from the sea, looks so withdrawn, preoccupied and inward—a gloomy house, all its shutters drawn, its eaves dripping, its fringe of garden posted against trespassers.
All the pilot books warn one of the dangers of an English landfall. The
Admiralty Pilot
cautions all those who sail up from the south: “Fogs, bad weather and the long nights of winter frequently render it impossible to obtain a position … under such circumstances the course steered, the log, lead and nature of bottom are the seaman’s only guides.” The first signs of England aren’t very encouraging either:
The edge of soundings may generally be recognised in fine weather by the numerous ripplings in its vicinity; and in boisterous weather by a turbulent sea
and by the sudden alteration in the colour of the water from dark blue to a disturbed green.
The sea is never still. Even when it’s calm, the tides sweep at speed along the English coast, racing round headlands and throwing up acres of churning white water—water so violent and unnavigable that even big cargo boats have been lost in these rapids and overfalls.
There are ledges of submerged rock designed to rip your floor out from under you, hidden shoals of gluey mud, and such a lacework of sandbars and narrow channels that even Her Majesty’s chartmakers get into a helpless tangle about what is properly England and what is properly Ocean. This serpentine and tricky coast is ringed around with devices to scare ships off, back into the deep water where they’re safe. Bell buoys clang, lights flash. On console screens in wheelhouses and on ships’ bridges, radar beacons paint their warnings like fat white exclamation marks, glowing and fading, glowing and fading. When the fog comes down (and it’s never long before the fog
does
come down) the diaphones in all the lighthouses along the shore begin to moo, making a noise so bottomless and sinister that you’d think it could be heard only in a nightmare. England’s message to every ship that gets near to her coast could hardly be clearer: D
ANGER
—K
EEP
O
UT
.