Jonathan Raban - Coasting: A Private Voyage

JONATHAN RABAN

COASTING

Jonathan Raban is the author of Soft City, Arabia, Foreign Land, Old Glory, For Love and Money, Hunting Mister Heartbreak, Bad Land, and Passage to Juneau; he has also edited The Oxford Book of the Sea. Raban has received the National Book Critics Circle Award (for Bad Land), the Heinemann Award for Literature, the Thomas Cook Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Governors Award of the State of Washington, and the PEN West Creative Nonfiction Award, among others. Raban lives in Seattle, with his daughter.

Soft City

Arabia

Foreign Land

Old Glory

For Love and Money

God, Man, and Mrs. Thatcher

Hunting Mister Heartbreak

The Oxford Book of the Sea (editor)

Bad Land

Passage to Juneau

FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, FEBRUARY 2003

Copyright1987 by Foreign Land Ltd.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Simon and Schuster, New York, in 1987.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Departures and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint the following:

Lyrics from It Doesnt Matter Any More by Paul Anka. Copyright 1958, 1974 by Spanka Music Corp./Management Agency and Music Publishing, Inc. International copyright secured. Used by permission.

Excerpt from The Old Fools from High Windows by Philip Larkin.
Copyright 1974 by Philip Larkin. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

Excerpts from Dockery and Son and For Sidney Bechet from
The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin, copyright 1964.
Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Raban, Jonathan.
Coasting / Jonathan Raban.
p. cm.

Originally published: London : Collins Harvill, 1986.
eISBN: 978-0-307-51771-5
1. Great BritainDescription and travel. 2. CoastsGreat Britain.
3. National characteristics, British.
4. Raban, JonathanJourneysGreat Britain. I. Title.
DA632 .R33 2003
914.10485dc21
2002069044

Author photographMarion Ettlinger

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

To Caroline,

and another, shared, voyage

There is in this aspect of land from the sea I know not what of continual discovery and adventure, and therefore of youth, or, if you prefer a more mystical term, of resurrection. That which you thought you knew so well is quite transformed, and as you gaze you begin to think of the people inhabiting the firm earth beyond that line of sand as some unknown and happy people; or, if you remember their arrangements of wealth and poverty and their ambitious follies, they seem not tragic but comic to you, thus isolated as you are on the waters and free from it all. You think of landsmen as on a stage. And, again, the majesty of the Land itself takes its true place and properly lessens the mere interest in ones fellows. Nowhere does England take on personality so strongly as from the sea.

Hilaire Belloc, Off Exmouth

COASTING

The Marriner having left the vast Ocean, and brought his Ship into Soundings near the Land, amongst Tides or Streams, his Art now must be laid aside, and Pilottage taken in hand, the nearer the Land the greater the Danger, therefore your care ought to be the more.

Being in Tides-ways, narrow Channels, Rocks and Sands, I hope the ingenious Mariner will not take it amiss in recommending this to your care, your Tides, Courses, Soundings, and the goodness of your Compasses.

Captain Greenville Collins, Great Britains Coasting Pilot, 1693

A ll morning the sea has been gray with rain under a sky so low that the masts of the boat have seemed to puncture the soft banks of cloud overhead. The water is listless, with just enough wind to make the wavelets peak and dribble dully down their fronts. Sails hang in loose bundles from their spars as the boat trudges on under engine, dragging its wake behind it like a long skirt.

The engine, the engine. Its thump and clatter, all mixed up with the smell of diesel oil and the continuous slight motion of the sea, is so regular and monotonous that you keep on hearing voices in it. Sometimes, when the revs are low, theres a man under the boards reciting poems that you vaguely remember in a resonant bass. Sometimes the noise rises to the bright nonsense of a cocktail party in the flat downstairs. At present, though, youre stuck with your usual cruising companion at sixteen hundred revs, an indignant old fool grumbling in the cellar.

Whered I put it? Cant remember. Gerroff, you, blast and damn you. Whered I put it? Cant remember. Sodding thingummy. Whered I put it? Cant remember.

Way out in front, England shows as a dark smear between the sea and the sky like the track of a grubby finger across a windowpanea distant, northern land. Were crossing into the cold fifties of latitude, as far from the warm middle of the world as Labrador at one end of it and the Falklands at the other. The light is frugal, watery, and it always falls aslant, even in high summer. The sun, when it manages to find a break in the cloud, fills the land with shadows. Its no wonder that England, seen from the sea, looks so withdrawn, preoccupied and inwarda gloomy house, all its shutters drawn, its eaves dripping, its fringe of garden posted against trespassers.

All the pilot books warn one of the dangers of an English landfall. The Admiralty Pilot cautions all those who sail up from the south: Fogs, bad weather and the long nights of winter frequently render it impossible to obtain a position under such circumstances the course steered, the log, lead and nature of bottom are the seamans only guides. The first signs of England arent very encouraging either:

The edge of soundings may generally be recognised in fine weather by the numerous ripplings in its vicinity; and in boisterous weather by a turbulent sea and by the sudden alteration in the colour of the water from dark blue to a disturbed green.

The sea is never still. Even when its calm, the tides sweep at speed along the English coast, racing round headlands and throwing up acres of churning white waterwater so violent and unnavigable that even big cargo boats have been lost in these rapids and overfalls.