Read an Excerpt
Seamanship
A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles
Chapter One
The Auk
I was having an affair with the Atlantic. Alone with my books in my room, I had been thinking of little else for weeks. I was longing for the sea. I wanted to get out, away from my desk, into the air, somewhere on the big Atlantic shore of the British Isles, that incomparable, islanded world which has more miles of coastline than the whole eastern seaboard of the United States. Not just to see it, but to sail it, to immerse myself in that ocean side of the country, its long, beautiful wildness, from headland to headland, the place where high winds met hard rock. I wanted days and nights of it. If I thought of openness, or even freedom, it was the Atlantic that filled my mind. I didn't mention it to Sarah. I knew these were, in their heart, treacherous thoughts.
I went down, one Sunday, to the beach on the Sussex coast. Milky rollers poured on to the shingle. The café windows stared at them as though the sea weren't there. People sat in their cars looking at the waves. From time to time they used their wipers to clear their windscreens of the spray. I drank it in and felt stranded on the shore. To be out there! What would I give for that?
Until the eighteenth century, Europeans thought the sea in general and beaches in particular smelled disgusting. The air on a beach was not full of liferestoring, energising ozone, but stiff with rot. The beach was where the natural order collapsed and the sea beyond it was pure anarchy. It carried no marks of history or civilisation and was filled with nauseating monsters whose flesh turned putrid if evercast ashore. When, in the first chapter of Genesis, the Spirit of God was said to move 'upon the face of the waters', those waters were clearly what God was not. The sea was the absence of all meaning, not its source.
But I wasn't living in 1680, I was heir to another tradition. Looking out from the beach suggested to me, as it had to others for two or three hundred years, something larger than the ordinariness of life on land. The Romantic instinct equates roughness with reality.
It thinks of the sheer discomfort and violence of the sea as the guarantee of authenticity, the lack of safety a measure, strangely, of truth.
It is a curious fact that you can know why you are acting as you are; be fully aware of the influences which have you in their grasp; understand the damage which those actions might cause; and still be unable to do anything about it. So I talked to Sarah one evening. 'The sea?' she said, a sudden focus in her eyes. Yes, yes, I explained, the sea, the western shore, that wild place, away from here, encountering the world as it was, a boat, perhaps from March to October.
She looked away and said, 'If that is what you need to do, that is what you need to do. But you have got to make sure we are all right here before you go.' She took the idea for what it was, a kind of leaving, a desire to live before you die. 'I don't want you to go,' she said, 'but I can't stop you.'
Alone with an atlas and a cup of coffee, I picked a course, wandering through that ocean-enriched and ocean-threatened world. Not knowing what I wanted or needed, I looked at yachts in magazines. Nor, to be honest, did I know how to sail ...
Seamanship
A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles. Copyright © by Adam Nicolson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
