TIME was when I agreed with the popular, and the guide-book, verdict that the Orwell is the finest estuary in these parts; but now that I know it better, I unhesitatingly give the palm to the Blackwater. It is a nobler stream, a true arm of the sea; its moods are more various, its banks wilder, and its atmospheric effects much grander. The defect of it is that it does not gracefully curve. The season for cruising on the Blackwater is September, when the village regattas take place, and the sunrises over leagues of marsh are made wonderful by strange mists.
Last September the Velsa came early into Mersea Quarters for Mersea Regatta. The Quarters is the name given to the lake-like creek that is sheltered between the mainland and Mersea Island—which is an island only during certain hours of the day. Crowds of small yachts have their home in the Quarters, and the regatta is democratic, a concourse or medley of craft ranging from sailing dinghies up through five-tonners to fishing-smacks, trading-barges converted into barge-yachts, real barge-yachts like ourselves, and an elegant schooner of a hundred tons or so, fully “dressed,” and carrying ladies in bright-colored jerseys, to preside over all. The principal events occur in the estuary, but the intimate and amusing events, together with all the river gossip and scandal, are reserved for the seclusion of the Quarters, where a long lane of boats watch the silver-gray, gleaming sky, and wait for the tide to cover the illimitable mud, and listen to the excessively primitive band which has stationed itself on a barge in the middle of the lane.
We managed to get on the mud, but we did that on purpose, to save the trouble of anchoring. Many yachts and even smacks do it not on purpose, and at the wrong state of the tide, too. A genuine yachtsman paid us a visit—one of those men who live solely for yachting, who sail their own yachts in all weathers, and whose foible is to dress like a sailor before the mast or like a longshore loafer—and told us a tale of an amateur who had bought a yacht that had Inhabited Mersea Quarters all her life. When the amateur returned from his first cruise in her, he lost his nerve at the entrance to the Quarters, and yelled to a fisherman at anchor in a dinghy, “Which is the channel?” The fisherman, seeing a yacht whose lines had been familiar to him for twenty years, imagined that he was being made fun of. He drawled out, “You know.” In response to appeals more and more excited he continued to drawl out, “You know.” At length the truth was conveyed to him, whereupon he drawlingly advised: “Let the old wench alone. Let her alone. She ’ll find her way in all right.” Regattas like the Mersea are full of tidal stories, because the time has to be passed somehow while the water rises. There was a tale of a smuggler on the mud-flats, pursued in the dead of night by a coast-guardsman. Suddenly the flying smuggler turned round to face the coast-guardsman. “Look here,” said he to the coast-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any further. You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers nowadays.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark st-guardsman with warning persuasiveness, “you’d better not come any further. You do see such ‘wonderful queer things in the newspapers nowadays.” The coast-guardsman, rapidly reflecting upon the truth of this dark saying, accepted the advice, and went home.
The mud-flats have now disappeared, guns begin to go off, and presently the regatta is in full activity. The estuary is dotted far and wide with white, and the din of orchestra and cheering and chatter within the lane of boats in the Quarters is terrific. In these affairs, at a given moment in the afternoon, a pause ensues, when the minor low-comedy events are finished, and before the yachts and smacks competing in the long races have come back. During this pause we escaped out of the Quarters, and proceeded up the river, past Brad-well Creek, where Thames barges lie, and past Tollesbury, with its long pier, while the high tide was still slack. We could not reach Maldon, which is the Mecca of the Blackwater, and we anchored a few miles below that municipal survival, in the wildest part of the river, and watched the sun disappear over vast, flat expanses of water as smooth as oil, with low banks whose distances were enormously enhanced by the customary optical delusions of English weather. Close to us was Osea Island, where an establishment for the reformation of drunkards adds to the weird scene an artistic touch of the sinister. From the private jetty of Osea Island two drunkards in process of being reformed gazed at us steadily in the deepening gloom. Then an attendant came down the jetty and lighted its solitary red eye, which joined its stare to that of the inebriates.
0313
Of all the estuary towns, Maldon, at the head of the Blackwater, is the pearl. Its situation on a hill, with a tine tidal lake in front of it, is superb, and the strange thing in its history is that it should not have been honored by the brush of Turner. A thoroughly bad railway service has left Maldon in the eighteenth century for the delight of yachtsmen who are content to see a town decay if only the spectacle affords esthetic pleasure.
There is a lock in the river just below Maldon, leading to the Chelmsford Canal. We used this lock, and found a lock-keeper and lock-house steeped in tradition and the spirit of history. Beyond the lock was a basin in which were hidden two beautiful Scandinavian schooners discharging timber and all the romance of the North. The prospect was so alluring that we decided to voyage on the canal, at any rate as far as the next lock, and we asked the lock-keeper how far off the next lock was. He said curtly:
“Ye can’t go up to the next lock.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s only two feet of water in this canal. There never was any more.”
We animadverted upon the absurdity of a commercial canal, leading to a county town, having a depth of only two feet.
He sharply defended his canal.
“Well,” he ended caustically, “it’s been going on now for a hundred or a hundred and twenty year like that, and I think it may last another day or two.”
We had forgotten that we were within the influences of Maldon, and we apologized..
Later—it was a Sunday of glorious weather—we rowed in the dinghy through the tidal lake into the town. The leisured population of Maldon was afoot in the meadows skirting the lake. A few boats were flitting about. The sole organized amusement was public excursions in open sailing-boats. There was a bathing-establishment, but the day being Sunday and the weather hot and everybody anxious to bathe, the place was naturally closed. There ought to have been an open-air concert, but there was not. Upon this scene of a population endeavoring not to be bored, the ancient borough of Maldon looked grandly down from its church-topped hill.
Amid the waterways of the town were spacious timber-yards; and eighteenth-century wharves with wharfinger’s residence all complete, as in the antique days, inhabited still, but rotting to pieces; plenty of barges; and one steamer. We thought of Sneek, the restless and indefatigable. I have not yet visited in the Velsa any Continental port that did not abound in motor-barges, but in all the East Anglian estuaries together I have so far seen only one motor-barge, and that was at Harwich. English bargemen no doubt find it more dignified to lie in wait for a wind than to go puffing to and fro regardless of wind. Assuredly a Thames barge—said to be the largest craft in the world sailed by a man and a boy—in full course on the Blackwater is a noble vision full of beauty, but it does not utter the final word of enterprise in transport.
The next morning at sunrise we dropped slowly down the river in company with a fleet of fishing-smacks. The misty dawn was incomparable. The distances seemed enormous. The faintest southeast breeze stirred the atmosphere, but not the mirror of the water. All the tints of the pearl were mingled in the dreaming landscape. No prospect anywhere that was not flawlessly beautiful, enchanted with expectation of the day. The unmeasured mud-flats steamed as primevally as they must have steamed two thousand years ago, and herons stood sentry on them as they must have stood then. Incredibly far away, a flash of pure glittering white, a sea-gull! The whole picture was ideal.
At seven o’clock we had reached Goldhanger Creek, beset with curving water-weeds. And the creek appeared to lead into the very arcana of the mist. We anchored, and I rowed to its mouth. A boat sailed in, scarcely moving, scarcely rippling the water, and it was in charge of two old white-haired fishermen. They greeted me.
“Is this creek long?” I asked. A pause. They both gazed at the creek with the beautiful name, into which they were sailing, as though they had never seen it before.
“Aye, it’s long.”
“How long is it? Is it a mile?”
“Aye, it’s a mile.”
“Is there anything up there?” Another pause. The boat was drawing away from me.
“Aye, there’s oysters up there.” The boat and the men withdrew imperceptibly into the silver haze. I returned to the yacht. Just below, at Tollesbury pier, preparations were in progress for another village regatta; and an ineffable melancholy seemed to distil out of the extreme beauty of the estuary, for this was the last regatta, and this our last cruise, of the season.
0320
THE END
