The Toilers of the Sea (4 page)

IX

JERSEY, ALDERNEY, SARK

The Channel Islands are fragments of France that have fallen into the sea and been picked up by England. Hence their complex nationality. The people of Jersey and Guernsey are certainly not English against their will, but they are also French without knowing it. If they do know it, they make a point of forgetting it. Some indication of this is given by the French they speak. The archipelago consists of four islands— two large ones, Jersey and Guernsey, and two small ones, Alderney and Sark—together with various islets: Ortach, the Casquets, Herm, Jethou, and so on. The names of the islets and reefs in this old Gaul frequently contain the term
hou.
Alderney has Burhou, Sark has Brecqhou, Guernsey has Lihou and Jethou, Jersey has Les Écrehou, Granville has Le Pirhou. There are La Hougue Point, La Hougue Bie, La Hougue des Pommiers, the Houmets, etc. There are the island of Chousey, the Chouas reef, etc. This remarkable radical of the primitive language of the region,
hou,
is found everywhere: in the words
houle
(entrance to a rabbit's burrow),
huée
(booing),
hure
(promontory),
hourque
(a Dutch cargo vessel),
houre
(an old word for scaffold),
houx
(holly),
houperon
(shark),
hurlement
(howling),
hulotte
(brown owl), and chouette (screech owl), from which is derived Chouan,
¹⁸
etc.; and it can be detected in two words that express the indefinite,
unda
and
unde.
It is also found in two words expressing doubt, ou and où.
¹⁹

Sark is half the size of Alderney, Alderney is a quarter the size of Guernsey, and Guernsey is two-thirds the size of Jersey. The whole of the island of Jersey is exactly the same size as the city of London. It would take twenty-seven hundred Jerseys to make up the area of France. According to the calculations of Charassin, an excellent practical agronomist, France, if it were as well cultivated as Jersey, could feed a population of 270 million—the whole of Europe. Of the four islands Sark, the smallest, is the most beautiful; Jersey, the largest, is the prettiest; and Guernsey, both wild and smiling, has the qualities of both. Sark has a silver mine that is not worked because it yields so little. Jersey has fifty-six thousand inhabitants, Guernsey thirty thousand, Alderney forty-five hundred, Sark six hundred, Lihou one. The distance between these islands, between Alderney and Guernsey and between Guernsey and Jersey, is the stride of a seven-league boot. The arm of the sea between Guernsey and Herm is called the Little Russel, that between Herm and Sark the Great Russel. The nearest point in France is Cape Flamanville. On Guernsey you can hear the cannon of Cherbourg; in Cherbourg you can hear the thunder of Guernsey. The storms in the archipelago of the Channel, as we have said, are terrible. Archipelagos are abodes of the winds. Between the various islands there is a corridor that acts as a bellows—a law that is bad for the sea and good for the land. The wind carries away miasmas and brings about shipwrecks. This law applies to the Channel Islands as it does to other archipelagos. Cholera has spared Jersey and Guernsey; but there was such a violent epidemic on Guernsey in the Middle Ages that the bailiff burned the archives to destroy the plague. In France these islands are generally known as the English islands, in England as the Norman islands. The Channel Islands coin their own money, though only coppers. A Roman road, which can still be seen, ran between Coutances in Normandy and Jersey. As we have seen, Jersey was detached from France by the ocean in 709, when twelve parishes were engulfed. There are families living today in Normandy that still have the lordship of these parishes. Their divine right is now under water: such is sometimes the fate of divine rights.

X

HISTORY, LEGEND, RELIGION

The original six parishes of Guernsey belonged to a single seigneur, Néel, viscount of Cotentin, who was defeated in the Battle of the Dunes in 1047. At that time, according to Dumaresq, there was a volcano in the Channel Islands. The date of the twelve parishes of Jersey is inscribed in the Black Book of Coutances Cathedral. The seigneur of Briquebec had the style of baron of Guernsey. Alderney was a fief held by Henri l'Artisan. Jersey was ruled by two thieves, Caesar and Rollo.
²⁰
Haro
²¹
is an appeal to the duke (“Ha! Rollo!”); or perhaps it comes from the Saxon
haran,
to cry. The cry
haro
was repeated three times, kneeling on the highway, and all work ceased in the area until justice had been done. Before Rollo, duke of the Normans, the archipelago had been ruled by Solomon, king of the Bretons. As a result there is much of Normandy in Jersey and much of Brittany in Guernsey. On these islands nature reflects history: Jersey has more meadowland, Guernsey more rocks; Jersey is greener, Guernsey harsher. The islands were covered with noble mansions. The earl of Essex left a ruin on Alderney, Essex Castle. Jersey has Mont Orgueil; Guernsey has Castle Cornet. Castle Cornet stands on a rock that was once a holm, that is, a helmet. The same metaphor is found in the Casquets (
casques
= helmets). Castle Cornet was besieged by the Picard pirate Eustache, Mont Orgueil by Du Guesclin
²²
; fortresses, like women, boast of their besiegers when they are illustrious. In the fifteenth century a pope declared Jersey and Guernsey neutral. He was thinking of war, not of schism. Calvinism, preached on Jersey by Pierre Morice and on Guernsey by Nicolas Baudouin, arrived in the Norman archipelago in 1563. Calvin's doctrines have prospered there, as have Luther's, though nowadays much troubled by Wesleyanism, an offshoot of Protestantism that now contains the future of England. Churches abound in the archipelago. It is worth considering them in detail. Everywhere there are Protestant churches; Catholicism has been left behind. Any given area on Jersey or Guernsey has more chapels than any area of the same size in Spain or Italy. Methodists proper, Primitive Methodists, other Methodist sects, Independent Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Millenarians, Quakers, Bible Christians, Plymouth Brethren, Non-Sectarians, etc.; add also the episcopal Anglican church and the papist Roman church. On Jersey there is a Mormon chapel.

In St. George's Fountain, at Le Câtel, girls see the image of their future husband. Another spring, in St. Andrew's, I think, compels liars who have been unfortunate enough to drink from it to tell the truth. If a woman scrapes a stone in a dolmen, mixes the resultant powder, known as
pérelle,
into water, and drinks it, she is sure to have sturdy children. The wall of a church can be scraped with similar success. In every bay there lives an elf who, if a child gives him a cake, will in due course, according to sex, give the little girl a dowry when she reaches marriageable age and the boy, when he becomes a man, a fully rigged boat. There are two giants: the giant Longis, father of Gayoffe, father of Bolivorax, father of Pantagruel,
²³
and the giant Bodu, who has now been transformed into a black dog, having been punished by the fairies for his dalliance with a princess. This black dog, Bodu, competes in old wives' tales with a white dog, who is Gaultier de la Salle, the bailiff who was hanged. Connoisseurs of phantoms have all sorts of varieties to study in the Channel Islands:
drées
are not the same as
alleurs; alleurs
are not the same as
auxcriniers; auxcriniers
are not the same as
cucuches.
In these parts anyone encountering a black hen at nightfall feels some apprehension.

In certain parishes there has been something of a return to Catholicism. At present crosses are beginning to grow on the tips of church spires. It is a sign of Puseyism.
²⁴
The organ is now heard in churches, and even in chapels, which would have aroused John Knox's indignation. Saintly persons now abound; some of them possess to a very remarkable degree a horror of “miscreants.” In many people this horror seems innate. Protestantism excels, no less than Catholicism, in promoting it. A woman of the highest society in London is famous for her ability to faint in houses where there is a copy of Dr. Colenso's book.
²⁵
She enters a house and cries: “The book is here!” and then swoons. A search is carried out and the book is found. This is a very valuable kind of faculty.

Orthodox Bibles are distinguished by their spelling of Satan without a capital, “satan.” They are quite right.

Speaking of Satan, they hate Voltaire. The word
Voltaire,
it seems, is one of the pronunciations of the name of Satan. When it is a question of Voltaire all dissidences are forgotten; Mormon and Anglican views coincide; there is general agreement in anger; and all sects are united in hatred. The anathema directed against Voltaire is the point of intersection of all varieties of Protestantism. It is a remarkable fact that Catholicism detests Voltaire and Protestantism execrates him. Geneva outbids Rome. There is a crescendo in malediction. Calas, Sirven, and so many eloquent pages against the dragonnades count for nothing.
²⁶

Voltaire denied a dogma: that is enough. He defended Protestants but he wounded Protestantism; and the Protestants pursue him with a very orthodox ingratitude. A man who had occasion to speak in public in St. Helier to gain support for a good cause was warned that if he mentioned Voltaire in his speech
²⁷
the collection would be a failure. So long as the past has breath enough to make itself heard, Voltaire will be rejected. Listen to all these voices: he has neither genius nor talent nor wit. In his old age he was insulted; after his death he is proscribed. He is eternally “discussed”: in this his glory consists. Is it possible to speak of Voltaire calmly and with justice? When a man dominates an age and incarnates progress, he cannot expect criticism: only hatred.

XI

OLD HAUNTS AND OLD SAINTS

The Cyclades form a circle; the archipelago of the Channel forms a triangle. When you look at a map, which is a bird's-eye view for man, the Channel Islands, a triangular segment of sea, are bounded by three culminating points: Alderney to the north, Guernsey to the west, and Jersey to the south. Each of these three mother islands has around it what might be called its chickens, a series of islets. Alderney has Burhou, Ortach, and the Casquets; Guernsey has Herm, Jethou, and Lihou; Jersey has on the side facing France the semicircle of St. Aubin's Bay, toward which the two groups, scattered but distinct, of the Grelets and the Minquiers seem to be hastening, like two swarms of bees heading for the doorway of the hive, in the blue of the water, which, like the sky, is azure. In the center of the archipelago is Sark, with its associated Brecqhou and Goat Island, which provides a link between Guernsey and Jersey. The comparison between the Cyclades and the Channel Islands would certainly have struck the mystical and mythical school that, under the Restoration, was centered on de Maistre by way of d'Eckstein
²⁸
and would have served it as a symbol: the rounded archipelago of Hellas (
ore rotundo,
harmonious in style), the archipelago of the Channel sharp, bristling, aggressive, angular; the one in the image of harmony, the other of dispute. It is not for nothing that one is Greek and the other Norman.

Once, in prehistoric times, these islands in the Channel were wild. The first islanders were probably some of those primitive men of whom specimens were found at Moulin-Quignon,
²⁹
who belonged to the race with receding jaws. For half the year they lived on fish and shellfish, for the other half on what they could pick up from wrecks. Pillaging their coasts was their main resource. They recognized only two seasons in the year, the fishing season and the shipwreck season, just as the Greenlanders call summer the “reindeer hunt” and winter the “seal hunt.” All these islands, which later became Norman, were expanses of thistles and brambles, wild beasts' dens and pirates' lairs. An old local chronicler refers, energetically, to “rat traps” and “pirate traps.” The Romans came, and probably brought about only a moderate advance toward probity: they crucified the pirates and celebrated the Furrinalia, the rogues' festival. This festival is still celebrated in some of our villages on July 25 and in our towns throughout the year.

Jersey, Sark, and Guernsey were formerly called Ange, Sarge, and Bissarge; Alderney is Redana, or perhaps Thanet. There is a legend that on Rat Island,
insula rattorum,
the promiscuity of male rabbits and female rats gave rise to the guinea pig.

According to Furetière,
³⁰
abbot of Chalivoy, who reproached La Fontaine with being ignorant of the difference between
bois en grume
(hewn timber with its bark on) and
bois marmenteau
(ornamental timber), it was a long time before France noticed the existence of Alderney off its coasts. And indeed Alderney plays only an imperceptible part in the history of Normandy. Rabelais, however, knew the Norman archipelago; he names Herm and Sark, which he calls Cercq. “I assure you that this land is the same that I have formerly seen, the islands of Cercq and Herm, between Brittany and England” (edition of 1558, Lyons, p. 423).

The Casquets are a redoubtable place for shipwrecks. Two hundred years ago the English ran a trade in the fishing up of cannon there. One of these cannon, covered with oysters and mussels, is now in the museum in Valognes.
³¹
Herm is an eremos.
³²
Saint Tugdual, a friend of Saint Sampson, prayed on Herm, just as Saint Magloire (Maglorius) prayed on Sark. There were hermits' haloes on all these rocky points. Helier prayed on Jersey and Marculf amid the rocks of Calvados. This was the time when the hermit Eparchius was becoming Saint Cybard in the caverns of Angoulême and when the anchorite Crescentius, in the depths of the forests around Trier, caused a temple of Diana to fall down by staring fixedly at it for five years. It was on Sark, which was his sanctuary, his
ionad naomh,
that Magloire composed the hymn for All Saints, later rewritten by Santeuil,
Coelo quos eadem gloria consecrat.
It was from there, too, that he threw stones at the Saxons, whose raiding fleets twice disturbed his prayers. The archipelago was also somewhat troubled at this period by the amwarydour, the chieftain of the Celtic settlement. From time to time Magloire crossed the water to consult with the mactierne (vassal prince) of Guernsey, Nivou, who was a prophet. One day Magloire, after performing a miracle, made a vow never to eat fish again. In addition, in order to promote good behavior among the dogs and preserve the monks from guilty thoughts, he banished bitches from the island of Sark—a law that still subsists. Saint Magloire performed other services for the archipelago. He went to Jersey to bring to their senses the people of the island, who had the bad habit on Christmas Day of changing themselves into all kinds of animals in honor of Mithras. Saint Magloire put an end to this misbehavior. In the reign of Nominoe, a feudatory of Charles the Bold, his relics were stolen by the monks of Lehon-lès-Dinan. All these facts are proved by the Bollandists, the “Acta Sancti Marculphi,” etc., and Abbé Trigan's “Ecclesiastical History.” Victricius of Rouen, a friend of Martin of Tours, had his cave on Sark, which in the eleventh century was a dependency of the abbey of Montebourg. Nowadays Sark is a fief immobilized between forty tenants.