OTHER SKETCHES
XXI
‘HOVELLING’[2]
What particular law of etymology has been evoked to produce the queer word standing at the head of this paper I am unable to imagine. Like Topsy, I “’spects it growed,” but my own private opinion is that it is the Kentish coast way of pronouncing the word “hovering,” since the hovellers are certainly more often occupied in hovering than in doing anything more satisfactory to themselves.
However strange the word may sound in a landsman’s ears, it is one of the most familiar to British seamen, especially among our coasters, although the particular form of bread-winning that it is used to designate is practically confined to the Kent and Sussex shores of the English Channel, having its headquarters at Deal. Briefly, a “hoveller” is a boatman who follows none of the steady orthodox lines of boatmanship, such as fishing, plying for passengers, etc., but hovers around the Channel, a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, a pilot, a wrecker, or if a ghost of a chance presents itself, a smuggler.
[2] Whilst this reprint was in the press the writer received an ingenious explanation of the word from Mr. Charles Fleet, an old resident on the Sussex coast. He derives it from “Hoviler,” a sort of mounted militia raised during the Commonwealth, and so named from the “hovils” (leathern jackets) they wore.
Naturally, the poor hoveller does not bear the best of characters. The easy unconventional fit of his calling settles that for him as conclusively as the cryptic term “general dealer,” so often seen in police-court reports, does a man’s status ashore, but with far less reason. It must be admitted that he is not over-scrupulous or prone to regard too rigidly the laws of meum and tuum. The portable property which occasionally finds its way into his boat is, however, usually ownerless except for the lien held by the Crown upon all flotsam, jetsam, and ligan; which rights, all unjust as he in common with most seafarers consider them to be, he can hardly be blamed for ignoring.
But when the worst that can be alleged against the character of the hoveller has been said, a very large margin of good remains to his credit, good of which the general public never hears, or hearing of it, bestows the praise elsewhere.
They are the finest boatmen in the world. Doubtless this seems a large claim to make on their behalf, but it is one that will be heartily endorsed by all who know anything of the condition of the English Channel in winter, and are at the same time in a position to make comparisons. And it must also be remembered that the harvest of the hoveller is gathered when the wintry weather is at its worst, when the long, hungry snare of the Goodwins is snarling and howling for more and more of man’s handiwork to fill its for ever unsatisfied maw, when the whole width of the strait is like a seething cauldron, and the atmosphere is one weltering whirl of hissing spindrift; while the hooting syrens, shrieking whistles, and clanging bells from the benighted and groping crowd of unseen vessels blend their discord with the tigerish roar of the storm in one bewildering chaos of indescribable tumult.
Then, when the fishermen have all run for shelter, and even the hardy tugboats hug some sheltering spit or seaward-stretching point, the hoveller in his undecked clinker-built lugger, some thirty-five feet long and ten feet beam, square-sterned and sturdy-looking like himself, may be seen through the writhing drifts of fog and spray climbing from steep to steep of the foaming billows like a bat hawking along some jagged cliff.