Of the complexity of the sea, and of how it is manifold, and of how it mixes up with a man, and may broaden or perfect him, it would be very tempting to write; but if one once began on this, one would be immeshed and drowned in the metaphysic, which never yet did good to man nor beast. For no one can eat or drink the metaphysic, or take any sustenance out of it, and it has no movement or colour, and it does not give one joy or sorrow; one cannot paint it or hear it, and it is too thin to swim about in. Leaving, then, all these general things, though they haunt me and tempt me, at least I can deal little by little and picture by picture with that sea which is perpetually in my mind, and let those who will draw what philosophies they choose. And the first thing I would like to describe is that of a place called the Looe Stream, through which in a boat only the other day I sailed for the first time, noticing many things. When St. Wilfrid went through those bare heaths and coppices, which were called the forest of Anderida, and which lay all along under the Surrey Downs, and through which there was a long, deserted Roman road, and on this road a number of little brutish farms and settlements (for this was twelve hundred years ago), he came out into the open under the South Downs, and crossed my hills and came to the sea plain, and there he found a kind of Englishman more savage than the rest, though Heaven knows there were none of them particularly refined or gay. From these Englishmen the noble people of Sussex are descended.
Already the rest of England had been Christian a hundred years when St. Wilfrid came down into the sea plain, and found, to his astonishment, this sparse and ignorant tribe. They were living in the ruins of the Roman palaces; they were too stupid to be able to use any one of the Roman things they had destroyed. They had kept, perhaps, some few of the Roman women, certainly all the Roman slaves. They had, therefore, vague memories of how the Romans tilled the land.
But those memories were getting worse and worse, for it was nearly two hundred years since the ships of Aella had sailed into Shoreham (which showed him to be a man of immense determination, for it is a most difficult harbour, and there were then no piers and lights)--it was nearly two hundred years, and there was only the least little glimmering twilight left of the old day. These barbarians were going utterly to pieces, as barbarians ever will when they are cut off from the life and splendour of the south. They had become so cretinous and idiotic, that when St. Wilfrid came wandering among them they did not know how to get food. There was a famine, and as their miserable religion, such as it was (probably it was very like these little twopenny-halfpenny modern heresies of their cousins, the German pessimists)--their religion, I say, not giving them the jolly energy which all decent Western religion gives a man, they being also by the wrath of God deprived of the use of wine (though tuns upon tuns of it were waiting for them over the sea a little way off, but probably they thought their horizon was the end of the world)--their religion, I say, being of this nature, they had determined, under the pressure of that famine which drove them so hard, to put an end to themselves, and St. Wilfrid saw them tying themselves together in bands (which shows that they knew at least how to make rope) and jumping off the cliffs into the sea. This practice he determined to oppose.
He went to their King--who lived in Chichester, I suppose, or possibly at Bramber--and asked him why the people were going on in this fashion, who said to him: "It is because of the famine."
St. Wilfrid, shrugging his shoulders, said: "Why do they not eat fish?"
"Because," said the King, "fish, swimming about in the water, are almost impossible to catch. We have tried it in our hunger a hundred times, but even when we had the good luck to grasp one of them, the slippery thing would glide from our fingers."
St. Wilfrid then in some contempt said again:
"Why do you not make nets?"
And he explained the use of nets to the whole Court, preaching, as it were, a sermon upon nets to them, and craftily introducing St. Peter and that great net which they hang outside his tomb in Rome upon his feast day--which is the 29th of June. The King and his Court made a net and threw it into the sea, and brought out a great mass of fish. They were so pleased that they told St. Wilfrid they would do anything he asked. He baptised them and they made him their first bishop; and he took up his residence in Selsey, and since then the people of Sussex have gone steadily forward, increasing in every good thing, until they are now by far the first and most noble of all the people in the world.
There is I know not what in history, or in the way in which it is taught, which makes people imagine that it is something separate from the life they are living, and because of this modern error, you may very well be wondering what on earth this true story of the foundation of our country has to do with the Looe Stream. It has everything to do with it. The sea, being governed by a pagan god, made war at once, and began eating up all those fields which had specially been consecrated to the Church, civilisation, common sense, and human happiness. It is still doing so, and I know an old man who can remember a forty-acre field all along by Clymping having been eaten up by the sea; and out along past Rustington there is, about a quarter of a mile from the shore, a rock, called the Church Rock, the remains of a church which quite a little time ago people used for all the ordinary purposes of a church.
The sea then began to eat up Selsey. Before the Conquest--though I cannot remember exactly when--the whole town had gone, and they had to remove the cathedral to Chichester. In Henry VIII's time there was still a park left out of the old estates, a park with trees in it; but this also the sea has eaten up; and here it is that I come to the Looe Stream. The Looe Stream is a little dell that used to run through the park, and which to-day,--right out at sea, furnishes the only gate by which ships can pass through the great maze of banks and rocks which go right out to sea from Selsey Bill, miles and miles, and are called the Owers.
On the chart that district is still called "The Park," and at very low tides stumps of the old trees can be seen; and for myself I believe, though I don't think it can be proved, that in among the masses of sand and shingle which go together to make the confused dangers of the Owers, you would find the walls of Roman palaces, and heads of bronze and marble, and fragments of mosaic and coins of gold.
The tide coming up from the Channel finds, rising straight out of the bottom of the sea, the shelf of this old land, and it has no avenue by which to pour through save this Looe Stream, which therefore bubbles and runs like a mill-race, though it is in the middle of the sea.
If you did not know what was underneath you, you could not understand why this river should run separate from the sea all round, but when you have noticed the depths on the chart, you see a kind of picture in your mind: the wall of that old mass of land standing feet above the floor of the Channel, and the top of what was once its fields and its villas, and its great church almost awash at low tides, and through it a cleft, which was, I say, a dell in the old park, but is now that Looe Stream buoyed up on either side, and making a river by itself running in the sea.
Sailing over it, and remembering all these things at evening, I got out of the boil and tumble into deep water. It got darker, and the light on the _Nab_ ship showed clearly a long way off, and purple against the west stood the solemn height of the island. I set a course for this light, being alone at the tiller, while my two companions slept down below. When the night was full the little variable air freshened into a breeze from the south-east; it grew stronger and stronger, and lifted little hearty following seas, and blowing on my quarter drove me quickly to the west, whither I was bound. The night was very warm and very silent, although little patches of foam murmured perpetually, and though the wind could be heard lightly in the weather shrouds.
The star Jupiter shone brightly just above my wake, and over Selsey Bill, through a flat band of mist, the red moon rose slowly, enormous.
[The end]
Hilaire Belloc's essay: The Looe Stream