East Anglia, including North Essex, is as English as any part of England, and more English than most. Angles took possession of it very early in history, and many of their descendants, full of the original Anglian ideas, still powerfully exist in the counties. And probably no place is more Anglian than Brightlingsea, the principal yachting center on the east coast, and the home port of the Velsa. Theoretically and officially, Harwich is the home port of the Velsa, but not in practice: we are in England, and it would never do for the theory to accord with the fact. Brightlingsea is not pronounced Brightlingsea, except at railway stations, but Brigglesea or Bricklesea. There is some excuse for this uncertainty, as Dr.
Edward Percival Dickin, the historian of the town, has found 193 different spellings of the name.
Brightlingsea is proud of itself, because it was “a member of the Cinque Ports.” Not one of the Cinque Ports, of which characteristically there were seven, but a member. A “member” was subordinate, and Brightlingsea was subordinate to Sandwich, Heaven knows why. But it shared in the responsibilities of the Cinque. It helped to provide fifty-seven ships for the king’s service every year. In return it shared in the privilege of carrying a canopy over the king at the coronation, and in a few useful exemptions. After it had been a member of the Cinque for many decades and perhaps even centuries, it began to doubt whether, after all, it was a member, and demanded a charter in proof. This was in 1442. The charter was granted, and it leads off with these words: “To all the faithful in Christ, to whom these present letters shall come, the Mayors and Bailiffs of the Cinque Ports, Greeting in the Lord Everlasting.” By this time ships had already grown rather large. They carried four masts, of which the aftermost went by the magnificent title of the “bonaventure mizen”; in addition they had a mast with a square sail at the extremity of the bow-sprit. They also carried an astrolabe, for the purposes of navigation.
Later, smuggling was an important industry at Brightlingsea, and to suppress it laws were passed making it illegal to construct fast rowing- or sailing-boats. In the same English, and human, way, it was suggested at the beginning of the twentieth century that since fast motor-cars kicked up dust on the roads, the construction of motor-cars capable of traveling fast should be made illegal. There are no four-masted ships now at Brightlingsea; no bowsprit carries a mast; no ship puts to sea with an astrolabe; the “bonaventure mizen” is no more; smuggling is unfashionable; fast craft are encouraged.
Nevertheless, on a summer’s morning I have left the Velsa in the dinghy and rowed up the St. Osyih Creek out of Brightlingsea, and in ten minutes have been lost all alone between slimy mud banks with a border of pale grass at the top, and the gray English sky overhead, and the whole visible world was exactly as it must have been when the original Angles first rowed up that creek. At low water the entire Christian era is reduced to nothing, in many a creek of the Colne, the Black water, and the Stour; England is not inhabited; naught has been done; the pristine reigns as perfectly as in the African jungle. And the charm of the scene is indescribable. But to appreciate it one must know what to look for. I was telling an Essex friend of mine about the dreadful flatness of Schleswig-Holstein. He protested. “But aren’t you educated up to flats?” he asked. I said I was. He persisted. “But are you educated up to mud, the lovely colors on a mud-flat?” He was a true connoisseur of Essex. The man who is incapable of being ravished by a thin, shallow tidal stream running between two wide, shimmering mud banks that curve through a strictly horizontal marsh, without a tree, without a shrub, without a bird, save an eccentric sea-gull, ought not to go yachting in Essex estuaries.
Brightlingsea is one of the great centers of oyster-fishing, and it catches more sprats than any other port in the island, namely, about fifteen hundred tons of them per annum. But its most spectacular industry has to do with yachting, It began to be a yachting resort only yesterday; that is to say, a mere seventy-five years ago. It has, however, steadily progressed, until now, despite every natural disadvantage and every negligence, it can count a hundred and twenty yachts and some eight hundred men employed therewith. A yacht cannot get into Brightlingsea at all from the high sea without feeling her way among sand-banks,—in old days before bell-buoys and gas-buoys, the inhabitants made a profitable specialty of salving wrecks,—and when a yacht has successfully come down Brightlingsea Reach, which is really the estuary of the River Colne, and has arrived at the mouth of Brightlingsea Creek, her difficulties will multiply.
In the first place, she will always discover that the mouth of the creek is obstructed by barges at anchor. She may easily run aground at the mouth, and when she is in the creek, she may, and probably will, mistake the channel, and pile herself up on a bank known as the Cinders, or the Cindery. Farther in, she may fail to understand that at one spot there is no sufficiency of water except at about a yard and a half from the shore, which has the appearance of being flat. Escaping all these perils, she will almost certainly run into something, or something will run into her, or she may entangle herself in the oyster preserves. Yachts, barges, smacks, and floating objects without a name are anchored anywhere and anyhow. There is no order, and no rule, except that a smack always deems a yacht to be a lawful target. The yacht drops her anchor somewhere, and asks for the harbormaster. No harbor-master exists or ever has existed or ever will. Historical tradition—sacred! All craft do as they like, and the craft with the thinnest sides must look to its sides.