The cruise of the Nona

I have dedicated to you two books: one was a book ‘On Nothing.’ This I dedicated to you because, being on nothing, it dealt with what is better than the fullness of life.

You may guess what that did to a boat in our straits! It made the helm almost impossible to hold with the violent gripe of the mainsail, half our head canvas being gone; and at...

That night the last of the wind fell suddenly, and it was a still air all through the darkness, but with the next morning there arose a moderate fresh breeze, still from the north.

To be coming thus into a very shoal fairway, after dark, and to be in the hands of a pilot who was quite clearly one of God’s Three Welsh Fools—one of the Triad, one of the Thre...

As I thus looked over the rail musing upon the strangeness of such things, I remembered how, many years ago, in this same boat and holding this same tiller, I had wondered, afte...

It was full ebb. The water roared and thundered over the rocks inshore for all the world as though we were not upon the sea at all but upon the lower reaches of a tidal river. T...

I had come with friends in a motor-car, because I had been told a man should see Clovelly before he died. I had come from the noble isolation of Hartland, where the great seas w...

It is the absence of this sympathy with, and eager help of, the governed which prevents a trading community from ever biting into alien soil. For, in a trading community, the ad...

The sea teaches one the vastness and the number of things, and, therefore, the necessary presence of incalculable elements, perpetually defeating all our calculations. The sea,...

The anchor took the ground. We were in, perhaps, five fathom of flood water; for it was full evening, though still light. When we had so lain for a quarter of an hour or so, tak...

I confess to a complete ignorance of going round the land, that is, of turning the point of Cornwall, and of passing from the northern to the southern coast. Three times have I...

A coast of good memories: may it stand for ever in spite of petrol and every other evil thing. There might be no London at all, so kindly and so well guarded are all the men and...

I remember Boulanger saying, when I was a boy of nineteen: ‘_La guerre est une chose aléatoire._’ It was one of those enormous truisms which make one shake with laughter, and, c...

That man, as man—I mean man as we know him (not imperfect man)—has lived upon this earth for very much more than ten thousand years, we are now pretty sure; and we owe the first...

For instance, our senses tell us, and we know, that if you mix two known substances in a certain fashion, and in a certain proportion, say two portions by weight of the one and...

I wonder sometimes whether the Roman Empire did not attempt the same sort of thing. If it did, all the traces have gone. There are great Roman roads which come down now right on...

Though I was too young to remember the heat of the quarrel, yet I always listened with interest to the violent disputes I heard between my elders, especially those which regular...

It is exceedingly difficult in so subtle a matter of human motive to ferret out the root, though obviously that root must lie in the mind, and we have to seek for some mental ne...

Although the old harbour (which lay between the hills—where the gasworks are to-day) had long ago gone dry, yet the marks of it and much human ingenuity added, maintained the po...

It is this which makes the coming of compulsory labour in our great industrial cities probable enough. Any one can see that there are only three possible solutions to the presen...

To-day, you have a press in which the less vital of these characteristics remain; the essential have wholly disappeared. Information is still rapidly acquired (though the Englis...

The individual private member of Parliament has no power of action in Parliament except the chance of the ballot or the putting-down of a question. I put down my question. It wa...

I handed the helm to my companion, who had a better eye than I had, and a firmer hold, and he, with great skill, did just save the gybe. We had not the luck to hold the tide; we...

I had almost written that there is no such thing as ‘great’ prose, in the sense in which there is ‘great’ rhetoric or ‘great’ verse. The very best prose may be dull if the subje...

My eighth rule (which, if I were putting them in order of importance would come very early in the list) is: _Look to every part of your gear_; not only when you are starting out...

It is certainly so in the case of this Gospel of Saint John. A man who denies its apostolic authority, and who comes forward with a disconnected mass of guesswork, scrappy parti...

In “The Cruise of the Nona” he employs much the same device as a vehicle for his riper thought and richer experience. “I propose to write a book,” says Mr. Belloc, “called ‘The...