The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail

CHAPTER 1

For more than twenty years I have lived beside the sea, in Cornwall, in a house with a square of grass in front of it, a hedge, a road, a low cliff and then a shingle beach sloping to the water. To the north and west, I can see the whitewashed cluster of cottages around the arm of the quay. Out towards the headland, the houses grow larger: a facade of homes built during the great age of sail by trader-captains who exchanged shifting decks for solid ground, prize-money for building-stone, ship-life for a safe contemplation of the horizon. Beyond these are the newer buildings, villas from the 1930s and the 1960s in their rescued patches of land, built also for sea-contemplation but by those who never knew the dog-watch nor the terror of working the tops. On the point itself, like a high-plains beast come down to drink, its silhouette magnificent against the evening sky, stands one of Henry VIII’s castles.

The headland opposite bears no buildings. A stand of pine covers its dipping entry into the sea. Gorse-spotted ground runs back from the point to a wood of holm and sessile oak. These two headlands, the one peopled and the other unpeopled, have been the borders of my life for two decades, open-ended, framing the vast-skied view from my studio window. Between them, stretching away into the distance, is the water.

During these years I have wasted weeks – months probably, when all added up – looking out at it. I have watched its constantly shifting shapes: the silvery slop after a blow, the sparkling mosaic in a winter sun, the slow swells of a southerly gale. I have listened to the rush of a week-long Atlantic storm, to the court of black-headed gulls, to the rummaging oystercatchers and roistering children. On windless nights, the air taut with expectation, I have woken to the rhythm of waves on the beach, each one hissing its message from centuries past, unintelligible and endlessly repeated. And during that time I have wondered this: what cumulative effect does such sea-proximity have? Does it offer anything more than a chance for idle gazing? Does it encourage a sense of restlessness, or complacency? Does it promote some spirit of equilibrium, a daily reminder that all things find their level? Or is its influence ultimately corrupting, creating the illusion of fulfilment always over the horizon, and in shipboard life an opportunity for living free from the constraints of the shore?

I have known this place since I was a child and although we came here for only a few weeks every year, it spurred an engagement with the world that nowhere inland could ever match. It was here that began a string of enthusiasms that filled my boyhood – first the beginnings of a rock collection (serpentine from the Lizard, quartzite pebbles from Samphire Island), then a passion for butterflies and moths (blues and commas and red admirals), birds, fishing and boats, always boats. Later, in my mid-twenties, in the wrong job and confounded by things I craved but could not name, I came here for a few weeks, to this house beside the Cornish sea, armed with one of those comforting and utterly useless phrases of intent – something like: to try to find the calm to work things out.

Calm! I remember the first morning. It was January. I had driven through the night and then watched dawn reshape the familiar form of the bay. I was used to it being full of boats, but there were none now. Instead the waters heaved in a grey easterly, bursting against the harbour wall and flopping back against the swells. Everything was in flux, the sea surface, the rushing clouds, the gulls flitting and arcing in the wind. By the next day, the sky was clear, the wind had gone and the sea was still. For weeks I wrote and walked and wallowed in the weather shifts and felt surprised by each one. But I was aware, too, of a growing sense of urgency, a sea-prompted rage against the rush of time. With the summer coming, I went off to East Africa before returning for another winter writing it up. That set up a pattern that continued for many years, a decade-long odyssey that followed its lone and dusty course through the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Sometimes I spent a whole year away, in Addis Ababa, Jerusalem and Moscow. But always I came back here, to this house beside the sea.

When I married, I thought it must be over, that solipsistic sea-life, but we stayed. We lived here for another ten years and now for various reasons we are moving inland (partly to do with a run-down farmhouse that has stolen our hearts). We are leaving this village, with its face turned to the water, and people say constantly: ‘You will miss the sea.’ And my instinct is to resist. I won’t miss it. But how can I know? If I haven’t been able to understand the presence of the sea, what chance is there of understanding its absence?

One October, in the brief decades between the wars, a young man arrived in this village. He was a Scot. With him was an English wife whose naval connections went back for generations, but it was he who was the yachtsman, he who hired the boat and took it out into the harbour – between the twin headlands. So struck was he by that day, by the village and by the little boat, that he came back the next year, and the year after that, and each year for the next half a century. He brought his children every summer, to sail a small gaff-rigged sloop named Ratona (‘female rat’ in Spanish) and each evening wrote up the day in a series of leather-bound logs; embossed on their plain covers was the single word Ratona. If it was a particularly good day, or the first sail for one of his grandchildren, he would carefully flush the blue ink from his fountain pen and replace it with red.

In one of these logs, from the early 1960s, is this red-letter entry: ‘Philip, two years old, left in the arms of his mother as we rowed aboard, wailed until we gave in.’ I was bundled with the storm-sails in the forepeak and although I do not remember that first time, I do recall the hours spent there later, half sleeping and half waking, looking up at the underside of the foredeck with its white gloss scattered with rosettes of black mould. I can still hear the lap of the water and smell the rough folds of the Egyptian cotton sail-cloth beneath me.

One golden evening when I was 9 or so, my grandfather and I were out alone in Ratona. He handed me the helm. As we beat back and forth across the Carrick Roads, heeling to one of those northerlies that often follows a hot day, he pointed up at the sails and for the first time explained the principle of sailing – the miracle of hull-shape and sail-set that enables a boat, obliquely, to sail towards the wind. I watched him in that moment, with his hand arced against the icing-white mainsail, describing the technique with a cracked softness in his voice that he used only when he spoke of certain people, and of certain periods in his life. I realised then, in a way I could not articulate, that this was as powerful as any human attachment, this love of the sea.

But I know, too, that ‘love of the sea’ is not strictly accurate. Mariners do not love the sea. Love for the sea is something you feel from the shore. You can admire the sea from a deck; you can be drawn to it, awed and terrified by it. If you are out on the water, your affection is not for the shifting mass all around the hull, but for the hull itself. What seamen feel for their vessel is something that elevates it high above the inanimate. It is, said Conrad, ‘profoundly different from the love that men feel for every other work of their hands’.

No other arena of human endeavour has proved quite so challenging as the ocean. It has driven individuals and whole nations to do remarkable things – innovative, courageous and brutal. I have seen plenty of men, and it is almost always men, who are ill at ease on land, dazed, whose shore life is a mess; but put them on a boat, and they are transformed. They become athletes, commanders, strategists, heroes. The skills needed on a boat are unlike any on land, because everything is different at sea.

Take the language. Many think that nautical language is some dialect generated by cultural divergence long ago, in an age when mariners and landsmen rarely came into contact with each other. They think the modern sailor perpetuates it like some quaint outdated code, the lexical equivalent of dressing in eighteenth-century costume. But each sea-term has no translation in land language, because there is no equivalent on land. Every strange force the sea exerts, every quirk of tidal stream and every reef and twist of shoreline, every tackle-snapping, deck-swamping, broaching, pooping, pitch-poling and sinking, and every lone drowning, booms out the same warning: you should not be out here!

Yet it was the ability to build ships for passage, for oceanic voyages, to transport commodities and people, to line their sides with cannon, that shaped the modern world. More than any other agent, ships spread political power, ideas, goods and technology. Naval dominance – achieved first by the Spanish, then the Dutch and the British – decided whose ships went furthest, and who brought the greatest wealth home.

The maritime states’ struggle was one of dominance on the ocean rather than of the ocean. Their success came not by taming the sea but by recognising its essential hostility, and working with its constraints. Basil Greenhill, chronicler of the end of wind-driven shipping, spoke of the age of sail as the ‘the age of collaboration’: the sailing ship represents ‘the height of [man’s] achievement in adapting the existing forces of nature … as opposed to the achievement of changing their direction and function’.

Sometimes reading the accounts of the sea battles of that time, the engagements involving privateers or ships-of-the-line, you have the sense less of the total war of the twentieth century than of some watery medieval tournament, a grand and deadly game in which each side, however pitiless, is bound by natural rules – the no-go areas to windward, the fatal advantage of the weather gage.

In the recent, post-industrial attraction to the wild, a yearning driven above all by the realisation of our distance from it, the sea is rarely mentioned. Yet it is perhaps the only true wilderness. You cannot manipulate the sea, you cannot cultivate it. Efforts to ‘farm’ its margins have in most cases proved disastrous. Fishermen are not agriculturalists; to find their equivalent on land you have to go back beyond written history, to hunter-gatherer groups of the Mesolithic age. The sea teaches the lesson every ecologist urges us to understand about the natural world: that it cares nothing for us, that it will survive us. Try to impose your will upon it and it will destroy you. Swim through it or pass over it in a boat, and you leave not a trace. In time it will, like sand over the works of Ozymandias, close over every brick, every avenue and every last relic of our civilisation.

That is the wisdom of the sea, its essential paradox. It quickens us, extends us, prompts feats of innovation and courage, then washes them all away. No trace remains; man and mountain yield to the levelling force of the sea. In its omnipotence, its beauty and its purity, the sea is the earthly manifestation of the divine. Building a vessel and crossing a body of water is a transcendent achievement, and afterwards nothing in this life quite compares.

During my first winter on the Fal estuary, my grandfather would telephone frequently from his home in Hampshire. He was now 90. He wanted to know exactly what the weather was doing, about the sea state, what ships had been going in and out of Falmouth. No detail was too trivial. Spring tides or neaps? Is the ferry running? He examined the weather maps and asked: has the wind backed yet down there? Has the cold front passed over you? He quizzed me about all those boats he knew, the people of the shore, the fishermen and part-time gardeners, the summer sailors and retired boat-builders. And then one storm-dark December afternoon, he rang and asked me: would I be kind enough to do something for him? Would I go up the river, have a look at Ratona?

In the dusk I walked through the cliff-top fields to where Ratona was wintering. She stood on legs at the rim of a tidal pool. Her bowsprit pushed up towards the serpentine roots of a group of Monterey pines; behind them was St Just churchyard, a mossy necropolis of slate and granite headstones. Two mooring warps looped out from Ratona’s stern, down into the ebbing tide. Twice a day the water rose and fell around her, keeping her boards tight with moisture. The church clock’s chimes rang out across the creek every quarter of an hour.

Climbing down to the muddy foreshore, I ran my hand along the curve of her waterline – the green topsides and scum-crusted red of her anti-fouling. I looked at the chain-plate, and the place where her mast should be and the winter cover stretched down tight over the ridge-pole, and was overwhelmed by a sense of the vanished past, of a hundred half-remembered scenes – squinting up the mast to check the lift of the cotton luff, gazing at the lee gunwale as the water rushed past it, rowing ashore in some hidden cove and looking at her at anchor, or lying again in the forepeak, cushioned by sail-cloth. With a squelch, I yanked my boots out of the mud, and climbed back up to the churchyard. The winter wind combed through the pines. It was almost dark.

I rang my grandfather that evening and told him Ratona was in fine shape. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s splendid …’ His words sounded distant. Just two weeks later, at his Hampshire home, he developed pneumonia and died.

When I was very young, I thought there were two grandfathers, one in Hampshire, in woollen tie and leather-elbowed jacket, listening to music in his book-lined study. The other one lived in Cornwall, and was wilder, and more adventurous, and more appealing to a young boy. He wore sea-boots and salt-crusted trousers; he draped sails from the banisters to dry; he tinkered with tackle and rope, rowed his dinghy standing up. The memorial service for the first took place in a flint-walled church near the River Test, a dark-suited parade of family and surviving friends. It was several weeks later when there was a ceremony for the other grandfather. His ashes were brought to St Just. Only three of us stood with the vicar at the graveside. The wind sighed in the Monterey pines. We placed his ashes among the roots. Just yards below him, as if he was some Norse hero buried with his boat, lay Ratona.

My grandfather.

CHAPTER 2

I have been away for a few weeks and now I go down to the water. Summer rain has left my upturned dinghy with green fur around the gunwales. I scrub it down, haul it to the beach and into the shallows. I sense the sudden lightness as the stern lifts and bobs free. The rowlocks clunk-clunk into the silence of the Percuil river. On the far side, beneath a flocculent strip of woods, lies the 21-foot harbour launch I bought some years ago with a friend. In the 1920s she was built as a liberty-boat, a solid workhorse of a naval craft, used to ferry men and supplies around Chatham harbour. Traditionally these launches took sailors ashore, from ship-bound service to shore-bound freedom – hence the name. For me, it has exactly the opposite meaning.

In the rounded clinker sides, the spade-like rudder, the steep and solid stem, I like to imagine centuries of maritime evolution. I picture the shipwright between the wars, circled by fresh-faced groms, instructing them in laying the keel, fixing the garboards, conjuring the lines outwards and upwards with each riveted strake, working as countless generations had before him, without plans, with no more than a practised eye and a couple of notions – to make the bilge a little deeper this time, the quarter a little fuller, and having the instinctive means to do it. A War Department registration is carved into the transom: WD 347. We call her Liberty.

Liberty’s stern.

She is the last moored boat, at the far edge of a forest of spars. Beyond is a crescent of wooded shoreline and beach that now, towards the bottom of the tide, dries to mud. One or two punts lie on their sides, the sag of their painters hung with fronds of channelled wrack and eel grass. I am always amazed by the stillness of this place. Even in a rising gale, with gusts racing down from the slopes to scurry across the water, with the halyards beating out warnings from the masts in the river, the pool retains a calm so intense that I often sit here long after I have packed away the gear, engulfed by its presence.

It is thought that this small inlet was among the earliest-used anchorages of the Fal, the natural refuge of a ship groping in from the storms of the Western Approaches, running for the lee of St Mawes harbour, round into the mouth of the Percuil, then round again to settle on its side in this muddy cul-de-sac – tin ships from the Gironde, Breton traders, and those who brought no worldly goods, who kept within them no thought of return to their native ports. Long before the estuary’s main shoreside settlements had appeared, monastic communities were measuring out their days here, with prayer and fishing and contemplation.

This then is how history begins on the shores of the Lower Fal, with groups of beehive huts and shaggy men half attached to the world, who immersed themselves up to the neck in the freezing water and pressed songs of devotion from their chattering lips. They were holy sea-wanderers, peregrini, who in the name of Christ took to the open water in the post-Roman centuries, trusting less to the rigours of seamanship than to divine providence. The sea was their desert, a blank alternative to the troubled world, and retreating to it an enactment of the reckless example of St Anthony. But the waters of north-western Europe are a harsher place by far than the wastes of Egypt. How many perished, drowned or starved in the great flat-horizoned emptiness, we shall never know. In the Fal, salvation was a labyrinth of wooded creeks, tidal waterways that pushed up far into the hinterland. They left their names in a series of creek-side churches. The one here is St Anthony’s – the dedication honouring not the father of Christian monasticism, but the Cornish royal martyr, Entenius.

I work the mooring-chain over the samson post and watch it splash into the water. The weight of the chain as it sinks tugs the mooring buoy away from the boat. It is always a moment of anxiety, the severing of attachment. At the same time, Liberty’s bows are caught by the wind and blown further from the retreating buoy, down towards the shore. I jump inboard, jab the engine into gear, and head out of the river.

It is a bright day. A brisk westerly is driving gun-puffs of cloud across a clear sky. The water is flecked white, with short wind-turned seas that set up a barrelling motion in the boat. I lean back against the tiller. I can feel it in the small of my back. I can correct the lurch of the bows with the slightest movement. The village looks different from the water; all these years here and I’m still surprised by that: how seeing the land from the sea transforms it so completely.

Beyond St Mawes Castle, the estuary opens out, running several miles inland. I can see distant woods and fields and a few dot-clusters of white houses. Between them stretches the wide basin of the Carrick Roads, agreed by all who have written about it for hundreds of years to be one of the finest natural harbours in the world. I bring Liberty in past the town of Falmouth. The early sun lights up the town’s terraces, each one following its own contour-line along the slopes, a stadium crowd of a thousand windows. Against the outer arm of the docks lies a rusting stone-barge named Charlie Rock. Towering over it is a Monrovia-registered tanker waiting for repairs. High up on the rail, a tiny figure raises its hand to wave down at me. As I pass in under the stern, the dock opens out. So close to the houses, the ships look out of scale.

Until as late as the seventeenth century, there was no town here. There was nothing – no docks, no quays. Where the wharves are were shingle beaches and mudflats. A sandbar enclosed a swampy lagoon where the National Maritime Museum Cornwall now stands. The slopes above the low cliff were open country, copsed and dotted with furze. The town centre itself was a bog. (It is still known as ‘the Moor’, a place where swampy land meets the tide.)

Yet within a century and a half, Falmouth was one of the great ports of the fast-expanding world – a global thoroughfare of war-news and innovation, whispered espionage and gold bullion, its quayside crowded with footsore explorers, high-worded gospellers bound for the New World. The view from the wharves was a pitch-pine, hempen jungle of yards and sheets, masts and ratlines. The decks were so numerous, it was said, that you could walk from one side of the harbour to the other on them.

The steep arc of Falmouth’s growth reflects that of the era of sail, those ship-driven centuries that followed the Middle Ages. From the periphery of Europe, England emerged as a maritime power with such suddenness that it surprised her own people as much as it did her enemies. In the far south-west of the British Isles, Falmouth sprang from its bog with the same brash assurance. The Reformation prompted technical, political and cosmological changes that revolutionised mobility and fostered the restless urge to seek far-off lands. Falmouth itself was like a colony, an empty shoreline without a past, where the rootless and the hopeful could settle as equals.

Until that time, the Fal estuary had three ports. Each lay at the top of a long, tidal reach. Any settlement further downstream attracted the marauders who peopled the open seas and liked to burn the places they visited. Of the three, the most exposed was Penryn, a couple of miles up river from the site of Falmouth, where a chain could be stretched across the creek to repel incomers.

It is approaching high water when, later that day, I round the last bend in the Penryn river and see the ancient coinage town spread out over two valleys. Weekend yachts, day trawlers, houseboats and punts bob at the fringes of the creek. Alongside them lie semi-submerged hulks and wrecks, and the project-hulls of would be ocean-crossers, part-completed or long abandoned. I leave Liberty at Exchequer Quay and in sea-boots go up to the main road, standing to wait for the beep-beep-beep of the pedestrian lights before crossing. I follow the Antre river through the lower town and with the sun low find myself standing in the middle of an empty municipal field. The grass has just been cut. The trimmings lie in stripes at my feet, matted by the morning’s rain.

In the thirteenth century the Bishop of Exeter was visited in a dream by Thomas à Becket. Come to this place, he was told, to the marsh known as Polthesow, Cornish for ‘arrow-pool’, so named because hunted beasts would flee into its waters and disappear. Build an altar there and in that place ‘marvellous things’ shall be seen. The bishop drained the swamp and raised Glasney church based on his cathedral at Exeter and a full two-thirds of its size. It helped that the land at Penryn, its woods and pastures, for some way inland and for miles south along the shore towards the open sea, belonged to the diocese of Exeter, as did all the money-spinning rights of the coast – the fundus, oysterage, shrim-page and right of wreck.

A college was established, and a constitution drawn up, a wise and prudent document that proposed a presiding council of ‘13 discreet persons of the more substantial sort’. Thereafter at night, and ‘testified by the neighbours’, a heavenly light was often seen at Glasney glowing high above the heads of the holy men of the college gathered to praise the name of God. Marvellous things indeed.

Glasney College was soon one of the largest ecclesiastical centres of Cornwall. As the English state pressed westwards, on the tide of its own language, the college became a great promoter of Cornish. Around it, the port of Penryn prospered. Tin and stone were loaded on its strand. Hogsheads of salted pilchard left for the Continent. The fortified walls of the college offered protection from the sea, as did the barrage of stakes and stone and chain put across the river.

Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as sea trade increased around the coast, and as the coastal peoples of Atlantic Europe became more restless, so Penryn grew into one of the busiest ports in Cornwall. It was a frequent point of refuge. In 1506 King Philip and Queen Juana of Castile sheltered there for several weeks: ‘We are in a very wild place,’ wrote the nervous Venetian ambassador with them, ‘in the midst of a most barbarous race.’ Yet even in the Middle Ages, the sea had produced a cosmopolitan settlement. In 1327, half of Penryn’s population was described as ‘foreign’, Breton for the most part. As a language, English was the third or fourth most used. The college and the port complemented each other perfectly – ships coming to the Fal for shelter were drawn to Glasney, while their victualling needs produced a thriving commercial centre.

Glasney College.

But in time something of the worldly success of Penryn appeared to seep into Glasney College’s inner rooms. By the sixteenth century its officials were being described as ‘men of great pleasures, more like temporal men than spiritual’. The provost had little time for his ministry, preferring to ‘drink and joust’. Henry VIII’s Star Chamber was told how he ‘doth slay and kill with his spaniels, some days two sheep, some days three and divers times five in a day’. The college’s shoreside position, which had helped it to grow, now counted against it: ‘By reason of the open standynge of the same on the sea,’ gloated the Crown Commissioners shortly after Henry VIII’s death, ‘by tempest of weather felle into suche decaye.’

Yet it was Henry and not the weather that was to blame. Glasney College survived the dissolution of the monasteries, but was prey a few years later to the same covetous forces. Lead was peeled from its vaulted roofs and shipped to the Isles of Scilly to use in fortifications. Piece by piece the buildings were broken up. The bells were sold off. The stone was removed. For generations, vestments and treasures had been bequeathed to the college by wealthy men hoping for prayers in perpetuity. Now copes of green and crimson velvet were bundled up and taken off, as were bolts of cloth-of-gold, albs and chasubles, six altar-cloths of black, gold, green, blue and red velvet, and one of ivory satin, embroidered with images of roses and Our Lady, a bell with a handle of gold and red silk, breviaries, tabernacles and missals, and a piece of paper painted with the five wounds of the Saviour.

Standing alone in that playing field, I look around for traces of the college buildings. A panel-board shows the points at which archaeologists have recently conducted a series of digs. The dotted lines of their trenches are set against a plan of the church, and I am struck by its great size. Glancing away from the board, I picture the nave and aisles peopled by tiny figures, raising their heads and whispering – the grateful storm-survivors, passengers and merchants from the Low Countries, from France and Spain and Portugal.

Glasney was a part of that network of ports and havens and anchorages which for thousands of years had been not so much on the land-fringes of European countries, as on the edge of a loose nation linked by the sea. As they grew, sovereign states superseded many of those maritime links. Of centuries of ship-voyages, little evidence remains. Glasney’s archaeological digs turned up floors and tiles and fragments of worked stone. But the digs themselves have now been covered up, the portable finds removed, and there is nothing on this late summer day, not a bump or hollow or mound, to break the green of the empty acre.

Afternoon is sliding into evening. I return to Liberty and head out into the river. The tide has turned, and with it the moored boats have swung round to face the ebb. Somewhere here – between the wharves and warehouses to starboard, the woods to port – stretched the barrier that had protected Penryn and Glasney. It was the chain, and the narrow approach to Penryn, that enabled its rise during the Middle Ages, but it was the chain too, the closing out of the sea, that helped shut Penryn off from the bold and expansive age that was coming.

CHAPTER 3