Finally, there is at first a sense of incongruity in the appearance of a canoe when in a cart, on a train, or in a house, and you have often to meet an inexplicable but evident smile at the whole affair, which perhaps comes from pity, certainly from ignorance, and it may be from contempt; whereas a sailing-boat crossing the deep is doing what people in ports and ships know very well about, and if your boat keeps on doing it successfully they cannot despise the deed because the boat that does it is small. A man who comes to the “meet” on a little pony will not be laughed at if he is always well in at the death.
Perhaps the voyage alone in a yawl will not be so often repeated by other people as that in a canoe, but this last manner of touring became popular at once.
One of the members of the Royal Canoe Club (The late Hon. J. Gordon), a distinguished University oar and Wimbledon Prizeman, sailed [240] at night across the Channel from Dover to Boulogne, paddled through France and sailed to Marseilles, and thence from Nice to Genoa, through the Italian lakes, the Swiss lakes, and by the Reuss to the Rhine home again. A second coasted along England, and paddled across the Channel from the French side in a ‘Rob Roy’ made with his own hands. A third crossed from Scotland to Ireland in his ‘Rob Roy.’ A critic complacently denied, a few months before these voyages, that a canoe could cross a bay eight miles wide. The canoes of our Members have paddled over thousands of miles in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, including China and Japan, besides cruises in Australia, New Zealand, and many groups of islands far away.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Bedtime—A trance—Thunderings—Chart—Light dims—Night flies—First running—Newhaven—On the gridiron—Mr. Smith—Tumbledown walls—Derelict.
“Where is the yawl now?” was the question we had asked in the fog, and the natural answer was—that the chart would tell, of course. So let us look at the small slice of chart copied on page 245, which is crammed, you see, with figures of soundings, and names of banks, buoys, and beacons; but the only thing to be seen on the actual horizon around us, is the Owers light behind, and about N.W. in its bearing. The tide will soon turn against our progress towards the east, therefore we tack towards shore, so as to be within anchorage soundings should it become needful to stop, for the wind has just changed rather suspiciously, and we can even hear the sound of the drums at Portsmouth as they beat the taptoo. A few bright meteors shoot athwart the heavens above, reminding us that this is one of their usual epochs—the 14th of August.
Now we are in ten fathoms by the lead, and we must anchor here, for the tide has fully turned and the wind has lulled, and perhaps it will do to sleep for six hours now before going on again.
The beautiful phosphorescence of the sea on this occasion was an attractive sight, and I could follow the line of my hemp cable by the gleam of silver light which enfolded it with a gradually softened radiance from the surface of the sea, down—down to an unseen depth, where, in sooth, it was dark enough. [242]
The gentle motion of riding with a chain-cable is quite in contrast to that when anchored by a rope; for this latter will jerk and pull, while the heavier chain, laid in a drooping curve, acts as a constant spring that eases and cushions every rude blow.
I intended to start again with any freshening breeze, and to get into Littlehampton for the night; therefore the small anchor and the hemp cable were used so as to be more ready for instant departure, and well it was thus.