CHAPTER XIX—THE INCOMPARABLE BLACKWATER
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.
