XXX.
The estuaries of rivers appeal strongly to an adventurous
imagination. This appeal is not always a charm, for there are
estuaries of a particularly dispiriting ugliness: lowlands, mud-
flats, or perhaps barren sandhills without beauty of form or
amenity of aspect, covered with a shabby and scanty vegetation
conveying the impression of poverty and uselessness. Sometimes
such an ugliness is merely a repulsive mask. A river whose estuary
resembles a breach in a sand rampart may flow through a most
fertile country. But all the estuaries of great rivers have their
fascination, the attractiveness of an open portal. Water is
friendly to man. The ocean, a part of Nature furthest removed in
the unchangeableness and majesty of its might from the spirit of
mankind, has ever been a friend to the enterprising nations of the
earth. And of all the elements this is the one to which men have
always been prone to trust themselves, as if its immensity held a
reward as vast as itself.
From the offing the open estuary promises every possible fruition
to adventurous hopes. That road open to enterprise and courage
invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts towards the
fulfilment of great expectations. The commander of the first Roman
galley must have looked with an intense absorption upon the estuary
of the Thames as he turned the beaked prow of his ship to the
westward under the brow of the North Foreland. The estuary of the
Thames is not beautiful; it has no noble features, no romantic
grandeur of aspect, no smiling geniality; but it is wide open,
spacious, inviting, hospitable at the first glance, with a strange
air of mysteriousness which lingers about it to this very day. The
navigation of his craft must have engrossed all the Roman's
attention in the calm of a summer's day (he would choose his
weather), when the single row of long sweeps (the galley would be a
light one, not a trireme) could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet
of water like plate-glass, reflecting faithfully the classic form
of his vessel and the contour of the lonely shores close on his
left hand. I assume he followed the land and passed through what
is at present known as Margate Roads, groping his careful way along
the hidden sandbanks, whose every tail and spit has its beacon or
buoy nowadays. He must have been anxious, though no doubt he had
collected beforehand on the shores of the Gauls a store of
information from the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen,
slave-dealers, pirates--all sorts of unofficial men connected with
the sea in a more or less reputable way. He would have heard of
channels and sandbanks, of natural features of the land useful for
sea-marks, of villages and tribes and modes of barter and
precautions to take: with the instructive tales about native
chiefs dyed more or less blue, whose character for greediness,
ferocity, or amiability must have been expounded to him with that
capacity for vivid language which seems joined naturally to the
shadiness of moral character and recklessness of disposition. With
that sort of spiced food provided for his anxious thought, watchful
for strange men, strange beasts, strange turns of the tide, he
would make the best of his way up, a military seaman with a short
sword on thigh and a bronze helmet on his head, the pioneer post-
captain of an imperial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the Isle of
Thanet of a ferocious disposition, I wonder, and ready to fall with
stone-studded clubs and wooden lances hardened in the fire, upon
the backs of unwary mariners?
Amongst the great commercial streams of these islands, the Thames
is the only one, I think, open to romantic feeling, from the fact
that the sight of human labour and the sounds of human industry do
not come down its shores to the very sea, destroying the suggestion
of mysterious vastness caused by the configuration of the shore.
The broad inlet of the shallow North Sea passes gradually into the
contracted shape of the river; but for a long time the feeling of
the open water remains with the ship steering to the westward
through one of the lighted and buoyed passage-ways of the Thames,
such as Queen's Channel, Prince's Channel, Four-Fathom Channel; or
else coming down the Swin from the north. The rush of the yellow
flood-tide hurries her up as if into the unknown between the two
fading lines of the coast. There are no features to this land, no
conspicuous, far-famed landmarks for the eye; there is nothing so
far down to tell you of the greatest agglomeration of mankind on
earth dwelling no more than five and twenty miles away, where the
sun sets in a blaze of colour flaming on a gold background, and the
dark, low shores trend towards each other. And in the great
silence the deep, faint booming of the big guns being tested at
Shoeburyness hangs about the Nore--a historical spot in the keeping
of one of England's appointed guardians.
