The Levelling Sea: The Story of a Cornish Haven in the Age of Sail. Philip Marsden
by George Thomas Doo, after Unknown artist (1855), stipple engraving. © National Portrait Gallery, London
Falmouth, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, engraved by T. Lupton. © Tate, London 2011
Liberty’s bow. © Philip Marsden
From Falmouth Guide 1815. Courtesy of Cornwall Centre
Opening of the Falmouth and Truro railway (1863). © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans
Little Falmouth boatyard. © Philip Marsden
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material reproduced herein, the publishers would like to apologize for any omissions and would be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in future editions.
CHAPTER 1
For more than twenty years I have lived beside the sea, in Cornwall, in a house with a square of grass in front of it, a hedge, a road, a low cliff and then a shingle beach sloping to the water. To the north and west, I can see the whitewashed cluster of cottages around the arm of the quay. Out towards the headland, the houses grow larger: a facade of homes built during the great age of sail by trader-captains who exchanged shifting decks for solid ground, prize-money for building-stone, ship-life for a safe contemplation of the horizon. Beyond these are the newer buildings, villas from the 1930s and the 1960s in their rescued patches of land, built also for sea-contemplation but by those who never knew the dog-watch nor the terror of working the tops. On the point itself, like a high-plains beast come down to drink, its silhouette magnificent against the evening sky, stands one of Henry VIII’s castles.
The headland opposite bears no buildings. A stand of pine covers its dipping entry into the sea. Gorse-spotted ground runs back from the point to a wood of holm and sessile oak. These two headlands, the one peopled and the other unpeopled, have been the borders of my life for two decades, open-ended, framing the vast-skied view from my studio window. Between them, stretching away into the distance, is the water.
During these years I have wasted weeks – months probably, when all added up – looking out at it. I have watched its constantly shifting shapes: the silvery slop after a blow, the sparkling mosaic in a winter sun, the slow swells of a southerly gale. I have listened to the rush of a week-long Atlantic storm, to the court of black-headed gulls, to the rummaging oystercatchers and roistering children. On windless nights, the air taut with expectation, I have woken to the rhythm of waves on the beach, each one hissing its message from centuries past, unintelligible and endlessly repeated. And during that time I have wondered this: what cumulative effect does such sea-proximity have? Does it offer anything more than a chance for idle gazing? Does it encourage a sense of restlessness, or complacency? Does it promote some spirit of equilibrium, a daily reminder that all things find their level? Or is its influence ultimately corrupting, creating the illusion of fulfilment always over the horizon, and in shipboard life an opportunity for living free from the constraints of the shore?
I have known this place since I was a child and although we came here for only a few weeks every year, it spurred an engagement with the world that nowhere inland could ever match. It was here that began a string of enthusiasms that filled my boyhood – first the beginnings of a rock collection (serpentine from the Lizard, quartzite pebbles from Samphire Island), then a passion for butterflies and moths (blues and commas and red admirals), birds, fishing and boats, always boats. Later, in my mid-twenties, in the wrong job and confounded by things I craved but could not name, I came here for a few weeks, to this house beside the Cornish sea, armed with one of those comforting and utterly useless phrases of intent – something like: to try to find the calm to work things out.
Calm! I remember the first morning. It was January. I had driven through the night and then watched dawn reshape the familiar form of the bay. I was used to it being full of boats, but there were none now. Instead the waters heaved in a grey easterly, bursting against the harbour wall and flopping back against the swells. Everything was in flux, the sea surface, the rushing clouds, the gulls flitting and arcing in the wind. By the next day, the sky was clear, the wind had gone and the sea was still. For weeks I wrote and walked and wallowed in the weather shifts and felt surprised by each one. But I was aware, too, of a growing sense of urgency, a sea-prompted rage against the rush of time. With the summer coming, I went off to East Africa before returning for another winter writing it up. That set up a pattern that continued for many years, a decade-long odyssey that followed its lone and dusty course through the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Sometimes I spent a whole year away, in Addis Ababa, Jerusalem and Moscow. But always I came back here, to this house beside the sea.
When I married, I thought it must be over, that solipsistic sea-life, but we stayed. We lived here for another ten years and now for various reasons we are moving inland (partly to do with a run-down farmhouse that has stolen our hearts). We are leaving this village, with its face turned to the water, and people say constantly: ‘You will miss the sea.’ And my instinct is to resist. I won’t miss it. But how can I know? If I haven’t been able to understand the presence of the sea, what chance is there of understanding its absence?
One October, in the brief decades between the wars, a young man arrived in this village. He was a Scot. With him was an English wife whose naval connections went back for generations, but it was he who was the yachtsman, he who hired the boat and took it out into the harbour – between the twin headlands. So struck was he by that day, by the village and by the little boat, that he came back the next year, and the year after that, and each year for the next half a century. He brought his children every summer, to sail a small gaff-rigged sloop named Ratona (‘female rat’ in Spanish) and each evening wrote up the day in a series of leather-bound logs; embossed on their plain covers was the single word Ratona. If it was a particularly good day, or the first sail for one of his grandchildren, he would carefully flush the blue ink from his fountain pen and replace it with red.
In one of these logs, from the early 1960s, is this red-letter entry: ‘Philip, two years old, left in the arms of his mother as we rowed aboard, wailed until we gave in.’ I was bundled with the storm-sails in the forepeak and although I do not remember that first time, I do recall the hours spent there later, half sleeping and half waking, looking up at the underside of the foredeck with its white gloss scattered with rosettes of black mould. I can still hear the lap of the water and smell the rough folds of the Egyptian cotton sail-cloth beneath me.
One golden evening when I was 9 or so, my grandfather and I were out alone in Ratona. He handed me the helm. As we beat back and forth across the Carrick Roads, heeling to one of those northerlies that often follows a hot day, he pointed up at the sails and for the first time explained the principle of sailing – the miracle of hull-shape and sail-set that enables a boat, obliquely, to sail towards the wind. I watched him in that moment, with his hand arced against the icing-white mainsail, describing the technique with a cracked softness in his voice that he used only when he spoke of certain people, and of certain periods in his life. I realised then, in a way I could not articulate, that this was as powerful as any human attachment, this love of the sea.
But I know, too, that ‘love of the sea’ is not strictly accurate. Mariners do not love the sea. Love for the sea is something you feel from the shore. You can admire the sea from a deck; you can be drawn to it, awed and terrified by it. If you are out on the water, your affection is not for the shifting mass all around the hull, but for the hull itself. What seamen feel for their vessel is something that elevates it high above the inanimate. It is, said Conrad, ‘profoundly different from the love that men feel for every other work of their hands’.
No other arena of human endeavour has proved quite so challenging as the ocean. It has driven individuals and whole nations to do remarkable things – innovative, courageous and brutal. I have seen plenty of men, and it is almost always men, who are ill at ease on land, dazed, whose shore life is a mess; but put them on a boat, and they are transformed. They become athletes, commanders, strategists, heroes. The skills needed on a boat are unlike any on land, because everything is different at sea.
Take the language. Many think that nautical language is some dialect generated by cultural divergence long ago, in an age when mariners and landsmen rarely came