Page:Yachting wrinkles; a practical and historical handbook of valuable information for the racing and cruising yachtsman (IA yachtingwrinkles00keneiala).pdf/29

 lacking that saving qualification to go sailing with you. Nauticus nascitur, non fit is a true adage. There is a huge army of our fellow creatures who think with Dr. Johnson that the pleasure of going to sea is getting ashore again from a prison, where there is also the risk of getting drowned. But a far brighter literary light than he, Thomas Carlyle, to wit, the crabbed, the cynic, who was ever ready to use his mordant pen of wormwood in holding up to execration the foibles and the sins of humanity ashore, was always blind to the faults of his fellow-man afloat. The acrid gall of his being, induced by the horrors of chronic dyspepsia, was converted into milk and honey by the magic influence of the Ocean.

Who can forget the account of his trip to Ostend and back in the revenue cutter Vigilant in 1842? He described the craft as a smart little trim ship of some 250 tons, rigged, fitted, kept and navigated in the highest style of English seacraft, made every way for sailing fast that she may catch smugglers. Outside and inside, in furniture, equipment, action and look, she seemed a model, clean as a lady's work-box.

His biographer, Froude, has told, of their return trip, how at midnight they were in their berths aboard the Vigilant running out into the North Sea: "The wind fell in the morning and they were becalmed. They sighted the North Foreland before night, but the air was