I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. “I offer you a draw,” I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that. “Accepted,” he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was “Land in sight!” And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.

For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious when he said he was “disappointed with the Atlantic.” But now I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception of the sea because “we have in us the glance of the universe.” But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.

The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have “a drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.” You conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs over the sides.

For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.

But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense—in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations—sewermen, lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on—I shall henceforth include ships' stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, “Land in sight!”

It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and however familiar it may be.

The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example. Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively, comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination. Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal little company of the Mayflower caught sight of the land where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the ages.

But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English eyes as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this sunny morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the sight there is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself heaving with a hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders. I have a fleeting vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling down there amid a glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to sea, and standing on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home to the Ark that is for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.

I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is a rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his hills hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager comes from, whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic from the Cape, or round the Cape from Australia, or through the Mediterranean from India, this is the first glimpse of the homeland that greets him, carrying his mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the journey's end. And that vision links him up with the great pageant of history. Drake, sailing in from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and knew he was once more in his Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck beside me with a wisp of hair, curled and questioning, on his baldish forehead, and I mark the shine in his eyes....

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