‘The sun,
Closing his benediction,
Sinks, and the darkening air
Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night—
Night with her train of stars
And her great gift of sleep.’
A particular pleasure of ours was to see the fishermen return. First the fleet of bawleys would anchor in the Ray a mile away, and as soon as the sails were stowed the men would put their catch in the boats to sail home to the creek. Two or three boats, perhaps, would detach themselves before the others like early ice-floes breaking away from the pack. Then groups would shove away from the fleet and tail out into a long procession as they raced for home. In the distance one could see the tide creeping over the flats, but long before it reached us there was water in the creek, so that only the sails of the boats showed moving between the banks of sand. The next fleet to look out for after the bawleys was the fleet of cockle-boats, and they would work the creek or come over the flats according to the tide. Lastly, close on high water, came the loaded barges.
From the time the young flood came up the creek to the time the tide ebbed off the flats there was always something happening. One never woke at night and peered out but one saw the unceasing life of the sea, from the mustering of the humble bawleys in the dark to go shrimping to the passing of the liner, shining from stem to stern, perhaps carrying a Viceroy to the East. Often I said to myself: ‘Here I am on deck in the night, and I ought to be asleep. But it is worth it. Just think; I might be sleepless in a house in a town, and have to look out upon a gas-lamp in a street.’
And then the entrancing variations of the tides! What is the secret of this curiosity that compels me to come frequently on deck even in the night to see whether the tide is higher or lower than it ought to be? It is the uncertainty of what will happen, and one’s partial ignorance of the causes of whatever does happen. Nautical almanacs give you their explanations of abnormalities, but they add instances of peculiar tides which are in contradiction of all their explanations. Any encyclopædia tells you that the sun and moon govern the tides; that the moon’s influence is two and a quarter times that of the sun; that spring tides occur just after full moon and the change of the moon, and rise higher and fall lower than neap tides, which occur at the moon’s quarters. But when you know that, how little you know! The very next step takes you into one of the least accurate of sciences.
In his famous ‘Wrinkle’ Captain Lecky says that we must wait for a genius to elucidate some of the mysteries. In the accounts of tides and tidal streams in nautical almanacs or the Admiralty Tide Tables one comes across phenomena about which the best authorities can say only: ‘These peculiarities are probably due to....’ Of the double low water at Weymouth Captain Lecky writes that it is not to be explained, but adds characteristically that someone has ‘had a shot at it’ in the Admiralty Tide Tables. The double high water at Southampton, the twelve-foot rise to the westward of the Bristol Channel, which increases to twenty-seven feet at Lundy Island and forty feet at Bristol, and the Severn bore, are easy to understand from the shape of the land. But that there should be only a six to seven foot rise on the English coast by the Isle of Wight, while there is a sixteen to seventeen foot rise on the French coast opposite, is not so simple.