Letters from England/The Harbours

by Karel Čapek

The Harbours

 

OF course, I had a look at the harbours, and I saw so many of them that now I mix them up. Well, wait a bit, Folkestone, London, Leith, Glasgow—that’s four; then Liverpool, Bristol, Plymouth, and possibly there are others. The finest one is Plymouth, which is beautifully bored out between rocks and islands, and where they have an old harbour in the Barbican with real sailors, fishermen and black barks, and a new harbour beneath the Hoe promenade with captains, statues and striped lighthouse. I have drawn this lighthouse, but the drawing does not show that the night is pale blue, that the sea is asparkle with the green and red lamps of ships and buoys, that I am sitting beneath the light house with a black cat on my lap—I mean a real cat—that I am stroking the sea, the kitten, the flashes on the water and the whole world in a fit of frenzied joy at being alive; and below on the Barbican there is a reek of fish and ocean as in the times of old Drake and Captain Marryat, and the sea is quiet, ample and lustrous—I tell you, the finest harbour is at Plymouth.

But Liverpool, reader, Liverpool is the biggest; and for its size I now pardon it for the harm it did me. Owing to some congress or royal visitor or whatever it was, it would not grant the wayfarer a night’s lodging; and it terrified me with a new cathedral, big and hopeless like the ruins of the baths of Caracallus at Rome. And at midnight it enveloped itself in a Puritanic darkness to prevent me from finding my way to a wretched inn, which gave me a bed as damp and sour-smelling as a tub of cabbage—well, as I say, I forgive Liverpool all this, for there was something worth seeing from Dingle to Bootle and still further to Birken head on the other side—yellow water, puffing steam ferries, tug-boats, like pot-bellied, black hogs rocking on the waves, white Atlantic liners, docks, basins, towers, cranes, silos, elevators, smoking factories, stevedores, barks, warehouses, wharves, casks, packing cases, tubs, bales, chimneys, masts, rigging, trains, smoke, chaos, yelling, clanging, clattering, panting, rent bellies of ships, smell of horses, of sweat, of foul water and garbage from all parts of the earth; and if I were to go on heaping up words for another half hour I should not prove a match for that sum-total of quantity, confusion and extent which is called Liverpool. Beautiful is the steamer when with a screech it scatters the water with its broad breast, hurling smoke from its stout funnels; it is beautiful when it vanishes beyond the arched shoulder of the waters, dragging a veil of smoke behind it. Beautiful is the distance and the goal, O man, you who stand on the bow as you depart. Beautiful is the sailing-boat which glides over the waves, beautiful is departure and arrival. My sealess country, is not your horizon somewhat narrow, and do you not lack the murmur of distant places? Yes, yes, but there can be the bustle of expanses around our heads; even if we cannot navigate, we can at least indulge in thought, furrow on wings of the spirit the broad and high world; I tell you, there is still room enough for expeditions and for big ships. Yes, it is needful to keep on sailing forth; the ocean is in all places where courage is.

But, steersman, I beg of you, do not turn back; we are not yet sailing home. Let us linger here in this roadstead of Liverpool and look at everything before we return; it is vast, dirty and noisy. Where is the real England, I wonder? There in those quiet and clean cottages amid the fearfully ancient trees and traditions, in the homes of people who are in the pitch of perfection, peaceable and refined, or here on these turbid waves, in the clattering docks, in Manchester, Poplar, Glasgow’s Broomielaw? Well, I must confess that I do not understand this; there in that England almost too much perfection and beauty; and here, here almost too much. . .

Well, I do not understand it; it is not like the same country and the same people. So be it, let us sail forth; let the ocean splash me, let the wind buffet me; I think that I have seen too much.