I never sail the sea but I wonder what makes a people take to it and then leave it again. Nor have I ever seen an explanation of this; therefore it is that the speculation is of value, for it is one of those which go round and round upon themselves and never come to an end, and so give entertainment to the mind.

When you read in books that such-and-such a nation took to the sea you are usually given a very pretty little explanation of a material kind, as is the modern fashion. They took to the sea because they were situated at such-and-such a point, because the sea they lived on was sheltered, or because they had very good harbours.

It is all nonsense. Those who write like that cannot themselves have sailed the sea. To sail the sea is an occupation at once repulsive and attractive. It is repulsive because it is dangerous, horribly uncomfortable, cramped and unnatural: for man is a land animal. It is attractive because it brings adventure and novelty at every moment, and because, looking back upon it, a man feels a certain pride both in danger overcome and in experience. But it is also attractive in another and much more powerful fashion. It is attractive by a sort of appetite. A man having sailed the sea and the habit having bitten into him, he will always return to it: why, he cannot tell you. It is what modern people call a "lure" or a "call." He has got it in him and it will not let him rest.

That, I think, is the best answer in the long run to the question I put myself whenever I come back from sailing the sea.

The question, why did such-and-such nations take to the sea and why for so long a time, and then again abandon it for so long a time, I can answer in no other way.

It is a beckoning from powers outside mankind.

It is not even the establishment of commerce by sea which takes a people to sea. Nothing more likely than for a nation to become a nation of transport and yet to see its crews gradually becoming foreign, as its own people grew to dislike the nasty but mysteriously summoning business of wet decks and thumping. It certainly is not proximity to the sea that does the trick. You have all over the world great lumps of population, millions and millions, right on to the sea, who never take to it, but leave a fringe of foreigners to do their sailing. Witness the Slavs. And though, of course, it is true that inland nations are not seafaring nations, the real reason is much more that they choose to be inland than that they happen to be inland.

I have asked myself often enough why the old Egyptians did not take to the sea. Perhaps they did very long ago, but at any rate the memory of it has died out. The other people who traded with them from the North have not even legends of Egyptians coming to them. We have no stories or inscriptions of Egyptians common in the harbours of the Mediterranean. And yet they had a great river going straight out to sea and a coast that for thousands of years, in the height of their power, invited them. They had ships, no doubt, which were sea-going. We know of fleets, but we are not always certain that they were Egyptian fleets, even when they were fleets under the command of the Egyptian king. What we have not got is an Egyptian maritime legend or tradition.

On the other hand, you find an enormous, volcanic, seafaring energy just where it should not be—on the harbourless coast of the Levant. And it seems certain, to me reading, that those seafarers who kept it up for centuries, the people of Tyre and Sidon, were driven by masterful instinct. It seems possible or even probable that they started from some little islands in the Persian Gulf, and that, for some reason, they came all this way across desert land and began again from other little islands hundreds of miles away upon another sea. Once they had started from the Levantine coast they did everything that the sea makes one do. They explored, and they named. They must have felt the fun of the thing. Commerce can only have been their second motive, though naturally it is the motive we put first to-day.

A learned member of the University of Paris has shown that most of the inexplicable Greek names of the Mediterranean were but Phoenician names transformed, and they even went out of the tideless sea into the huge unknown swell of the ocean. And they reached, according to one story, those tin-mines which were either off the Spanish coast or in some part of Britain—perhaps Cornwall.

But remark that these people had everything against them. It is silly to say that they were driven to commerce by their geographical position between East and West. It was just the other way. Their geographical position was the worst possible. The splendid harbours which lay some days' sail to the west of them they knew nothing of. They were on a coast less suited for the shelter of vessels than any in the whole Mediterranean, unless it be the eastern coast of Barbary. They went to sea because a passion seized them for it, because it was in their blood.

I notice again that this passion for the sea does not go, as one would think it ought to, with a particular physical type, nor even with a particular mental type. It certainly goes with a love of adventure, but not with mere vigour, nor even with mere imagination. And the same race will appear, for generations, inhabited by this haunting of the sea, and then will suddenly drop it again.

This island is an example. It was seafaring all during the Roman centuries. Then after the robber raids of the Saxons, Angles, Irish, Frisians, Franks, and the rest, it lost all idea of the sea. When England had become a welter of little districts Pagan and Christian all fighting each other in the sixth and seventh centuries, England no longer went to sea. It got cut off; and when, a little later, seafaring men from Scandinavia attacked it, it could not defend itself. It lay passive. It was not till Alfred's time, more than four hundred years after the catastrophe of the first pirate raids in Britain, that there was something of a reluctant seafaring again; and even then it was for more than a hundred years easier to hire Scandinavian crews than to get Englishmen aboard.

But all this while the Irish and the people of the Far West, the Welsh, Southern and Northern, and the Cornish, were filling their legends with the sea.

Then, after a few centuries, the English woke up again to the sea most furiously, in the turn of the Middle Ages. The sea moves them less and less later on. They half forget it. And again, 350 years ago, it catches them again, and they became great captains and have so remained, the English.

This makes me think of another thing, which is the difference in the way the sea has affected the literature of one seafaring nation and another. And there again I can find no explanation. The poems of Homer (which were not, if I may humbly suggest it, written by a committee, but by one man, for it is a rare and individual thing to write a good poem, and these poems are good) are not so much influenced by the sea as are themselves the sea. The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics of the sea—yes, not only the Odyssey, but the Iliad too. The sea comes in all the time and mixes up with the story in a way it does with no other story, not even with the story of Tristan. The moment a word or two on the sea comes into the Iliad the phrase wakes up and moves, and, what is more, there you get exact physical description, physical description by a man who has sailed. In most of Homer what is vivid is either a knowledge of what was in men's minds, or a thing told to the writer by others, or the gentle contemplation of some art of which he was himself ignorant and which seemed to him marvellous. But in the matter of the sea it is quite another thing. The names of the Nereids, of the "Nereids as many as there are in the depths of the salt," from the thirty-eighth to the forty-eighth line, those ten lines of marvel, are the names of waves, and of waves seen by the eye of a man. They are not at second hand. They are all the aspects and all the revelations of the wave.

I am told also that the poet Hesiod gave a complete catalogue of these same ladies, but did it rather less well. Homer has a heavenly roll-call of them, and the best of their names, in my unfortunate judgment, is "Limnoreia," "the wave that runs along the shore." For I also have seen Her, gently running in easy weather along the half-ebb glistening sand, a distant shore. But all their names are at once beautiful and true.

Then also, how exact are his words for the noise of a boat speaking through the depths of the water! And what an epithet for the sea is "cloud-shadowed," or, for the matter of that, "wine dark," though it is true the same word is granted to oxen.

But the thing is not to be argued. You feel it or you do not. I think that conception of horses running on wave-tops was written by a man who had often sailed the sea.

I am tempted to go on with the theme. But if I went further I should be tedious, and perhaps I am so already, for all I know.

To continue, therefore (for if you are being tedious you cannot let go, any more than a tired horse can stop running lest it fall); there are cities made for the sea, and yet they allow themselves to be visited, and do not themselves attempt the sea at all. While there are other cities which you would think long fate and suffering would cure of desperate attempts to use the sea, and yet they use it in the teeth of fate; among which last I count—though they are not cities at all, but only little towns—my own small harbours of the Channel.

These holes in the land are for the most part quite unsuited to the business of navigation. But how gallantly they keep it up! I know one of them where there forms with regularity every few weeks an enormous island of shingle right in the fairway. It is a harbour out of which no man can come (without a tug) except once in twelve hours on the top of the tide. And even so that huge mass of shingle is piled up plumb in the mouth of it by the south-west wind after every gale, and the gales come every week in winter. Yet do these hearty people dredge that shingle away year after year, and they have done so, I suppose, for two thousand years, rather than forego their occupation of the sea.

What sort of people do you suppose were those fellows of the Morbihan who produced vast ships rigged with iron chains, and boasting leathern sails, yet having nowhere, you would say, whither they could trade? The indomitable Romans defeated them at last in their own waters a little north of St. Nazaire, under Quiberon; but what a fight they put up! I think they must have gone to sea for the mere love of it, these men of the Morbihan, as do their descendants to this day. For they are all poor men and get little from their occupation beyond dreams and death.

I know a town also with which the name of Columbus is associated, and some even say (falsely) that his family came from there. It is a town about a day's march north of Vigo, on the Galician coast, and is called "The Green Port," lying at the head of a land-locked bay. One would have thought that Vigo close by, with its incomparable harbour, would have killed it. But, on the contrary, it flourishes because it is in love with the sea. It is the neatest, whitest little town in the world.

But when it comes to daring, there is nothing we can show, with our modern ease of appliance, like the things that those men did, and not only they, but all the early unrecorded heroes of our race. When the Roman poet wondered at the courage of those who first set out to sea at all, he was right. But what must have been the courage of those who went out until they had long lost sight of land in an adventure as enormous as that of death and who chanced a land-fall after a day or twenty days? If you go across the Atlantic now, for instance, in any one of our ships that are like towns, and look at the size of the seas in a storm, you may ask yourself how men must have felt in that same water upon a craft of, say, three hundred tons, and with no knowledge at all of what lay beyond or whether they should ever see land again.

It is curious that those same historians who belittle the past (and most modern historians do that) will not admit at least that our fathers could build good ships. I have said "three hundred tons" modestly, but your modern historian will, as a rule, reduce the tonnage of the past to the most ridiculous cockle-shells. He wants to believe that nothing big in the way of a ship was made until the time of people who thought like himself—that is, who had his own religion. Yet in spreading this falsehood our modern historians do but increase our admiration of our fathers' courage. They do not diminish the great past by this particular lie. It is clear that both antiquity and the Middle Ages had large ships: not large compared with the monsters of to-day, but much larger than modern history allows. I have had arguments on this both in print and by word of mouth. For by some fatality the modern historian, who is ignorant of most things (such as ploughing or riding on horses or the length of a day's march), is particularly ignorant of the sea.

When such people tell you, for instance, that the fleet of William the Conqueror was made up of ships like fishing-smacks, ask him how that invader carried his horses; and carry their horses they certainly did, because within a day or two of landing they were there armed and mounted in great numbers. Or ask him, also, for that matter, how they carried their provisions and all the accompaniment of an army.

I seem to remember making a note somewhere of a ship that was built in Bayonne in the Middle Ages, the keel of which, apart from the overhang, was well over 100 ft. long. I was going to say 190, but as it is only a memory, and I have not the notes by me, I may be wrong if I say that. It was certainly well over 100, and the record was exact. After all, there is no reason why men who could build a wooden ship at all—I mean a ship to hold the sea—could not build one up to a thousand tons or more. The limit is rather a limit of handling sails than of building. For what made our sudden modern increase in the size of ships was the use of a new motive power.

But one thing was certainly true of all those old ships, and remained true until quite modern times, and that was their light draught. They were all flat; and this is the more remarkable when one considers their high free-board. I have no doubt that those who study these things, which I do not, and who are experts in them, can explain the affair: it has always puzzled me badly. In very old pictures, miniatures, sculptures, or later engravings and drawings and paintings, the first thing that strikes me is this excess of free-board. I think it must strike the most casual observer who goes down to Portsmouth and looks at the modern low lines of the great men-of-war and contrasts them with the huge wall of the "Victory" size for size. One would think that so much free-board would have made the old craft top-heavy.

In the earlier ships we note regularly great structures forward and astern, poops and forecastles, which look as though they would give a most dangerous purchase to a beam wind, let alone lifting the centre of gravity of the boat too high. Yet they carried these easily, for all their light draught. How very light that draught was until quite modern times, we know by the nature of the harbours they entered, and we also know it from their habit of beaching boats. You read often enough of shipwreck, but very rarely indeed of shipwreck through capsizing. That may be because in earlier times they did not take the wind abeam. But I doubt it.

I imagine the common judgment that sailing into the wind is a recent art to be false. The old ships may not have sailed close to the wind; they certainly did not sail as close to the wind as we do; but that they could sail with the wind a little forward of the beam seems to me common sense. No one can sail a boat of the simplest rig—a boat with a mere balance sail or catrig—without finding that she can go into the wind. And a boat that could not go into the wind at all could never be certain of harbour. It is true they waited for a fair wind, as for that matter would most sailing-boats to-day if they had the time, and as do all sailing-boats when the wind is too much against them. No man, for instance, could beat out of Rye. There is no room. And in any modern week you may see sailing craft anchored in the Downs, or west of Dungeness, or in any one of the Roads of the Channel, waiting for a favourable wind to take them up or down. But that the ships our forefathers used could not sail into the wind at all seems to me nonsense. Being flat, however, they must have made a lot of leeway, and that is perhaps why it was not worth their while to try and beat for any distance against a strong breeze.

"Leeway!" Why did the devices for overcoming that drawback arrive so late in history? They are deep keels—which is a waste of space and a forbidding of harbours, so that antiquity apparently never adopted them—lee boards and centre boards.

Now lee boards I take to be an invention of the Dutch, who also gave us, if I am not mistaken, the origin of that admirable rig, perfected in the Thames, the London barge. But why did people take such a very long time to think of lee boards? I cannot pretend to the required scholarship and I may be wrong, but surely there is no example of a lee board in antiquity, nor even in any picture remaining to us of the Middle Ages? I take it that the lee board was one of those thousand things quietly invented, unspoken of, between the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, and that the people of the Low Countries were its authors.

As for the centre board, we know that it is a thing of yesterday. If I am not mistaken, the Americans first sailed on it. I can understand why the centre board should have come so late. It wants great skill in fitting. It seems to invite a leak. It cannot be fitted upon any very large craft easily—and so on. But why did it take humanity such a very long time to think of lee boards, and why, when they came, did they come in this particular corner of Europe?

There is nothing more fascinating than this guess-work upon the origin of little human tricks and the observation of the long and great effect of routine.

To this day the Mediterranean shortens sail along the yard of a lateen—why, I have never got any one to explain to me. It would seem the obvious thing to take in a reef from the deck, to put your craft up into the wind, lower your sail somewhat, and then take your reef along the foot of it. Indeed, it would be much easier to take in a reef in this fashion on a lateen sail than it is to take one along the boom in an ordinary fore-and-aft rig. You need no ear-ring, and the thing could be done in a moment. Instead of which the swarthy men prefer to lower away the whole contraption. I do not understand the reason at all. Perhaps there is no reason—or, again, perhaps I am wrong and therefore there is no problem at all.

These are the two delightful ways of meeting all the problems which upset mankind, from that of free will to fascinating discussions on the currency, now so much in vogue.

And a blessing I wish you all.