The sea used to get into everything in England, though now it doesn’t. We are not really a sea-faring people any more. Even the yearly joy of the ferry to France and back has been abolished, as you can now do the journey in a tunnel, aboard a comfortable train. I miss that voyage so much that last year I made a special effort to go once again by ship, and found myself utterly exhilarated when, after a lavish dinner, we went up on to the highest part of the ferry as the evening light thickened and we watched the lights come on, on the hilly, friendly Isle of Wight, over which the sea-wind had spread a great cloud. I tried to make out Tennyson’s old house at Farringford in the soft dusk. England, where it is beautiful, is even more beautiful seen from the sea than it is when you are inland. By morning we were running into handsome, war-battered Saint-Malo and close to the parallel planet which is France.
Nothing really beats a sea voyage for sheer adventure and spirit. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited would be half the book it is if some of its central events had not taken place aboard a giant liner in an Atlantic storm. I have been across those colossal, lonely deeps twice in Cunarders, and there is a strong feeling of being slightly outside normal time and very much in communion with all those who have steamed or sailed the same way in the past. I will never forget making my first American landfall one evening, glimpsing Cape Race, Newfoundland, in the yellow light of a September sunset, and feeling I had never really been to America before, however many times I had flown there and back. And while I would never wish to be seasick again, I am very glad I have been. An Englishman who has never been seasick cannot really understand how it is we have remained so free for so long. The sea is very hard to cross, and harder still if anyone is trying to make the voyage uncomfortable for you. As the one hundred seventh Psalm points out, “They that go down to the sea in ships: and occupy their business in great waters; These men see the works of the Lord: and his wonders in the deep. For at his word the stormy wind ariseth: which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep: their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man: and are at their wit’s end.” It pleases me to think that Saint Paul knew those words and may have had them in mind as he was washed up so perilously on the shores of Malta, island of my birth.
No other nation but mine, as far as I know, has in its national prayer book a whole section entitled “Forms of Prayer to be Used at Sea.” The American Episcopal church has, in the equivalent place in its 1928 Prayer Book, a series of rather lovely “Forms of Prayer to be Used in Families,” a more urgent need in the United States, with so many scattered homesteads far from any church. I suspect the United States Navy has been known to borrow our great Navy Prayer, or bits of it anyway (the references to “our most gracious Sovereign Lord, King Charles” and to “the inhabitants of our Island” would get in the way). For it is ultimately very English. I will not quote it here in full as it is too long, but if you care to watch a rather moving British war film of the 1940s, In Which We Serve, you will be able to see and hear Noël Coward, of all people, playing the captain of one of His Majesty’s destroyers. He reads the whole prayer to his ship’s company at a Christmas service in December 1939, as he would then have been obliged to do daily. (The film’s title, In Which We Serve, is itself a quotation from the prayer.) In 2025, I cannot imagine a captain reading it in full, or any film showing it in full, so we should be glad that this enduring record exists of something once normal and now hard to imagine. The part I love most is the opening, which runs “O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens, and rulest the raging of the sea; who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end; be pleased to receive into thy most gracious protection the persons of us thy servants, and the Fleet in which we serve. Preserve us from the dangers of the sea, and from the violence of the enemy. . . .”
There are other prayers for use in storms or “before a Fight at Sea against any Enemy.” There is a “Thanksgiving after a Dangerous Tempest.” And there is a prayer of gratitude for victory over a foe, addressed to “Almighty God, the Sovereign Commander of all the world.” But it is the words “who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end” which bowl me over. I first really noticed them when we said the prayer at my naval father’s funeral, now nearly forty years ago. Around that time I began to travel a great deal, often unpleasantly and slightly worryingly by air, sometimes in Communist countries where there was not even the pretense of safety procedures, and the aircraft did not inspire much confidence. And I felt an increasing need of a prayer to say when I boarded one of those.
I especially remember doing so one day in 1989 when, at East Berlin’s dusty, smeared, grey and brown Schönefeld airport, I took a flight on an unexpected, dark journey which would eventually bring me to a wintry Bucharest in the midst of the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu, at Christmas. That evening, I constructed a prayer for help and protection out of the Navy Prayer, and have been using it ever since on all kinds of voyages.
The phrase “until day and night come to an end” conjures up an old picture in some encyclopedia of a grey and worried king, lifted high above his dominions with his beard blowing in the gale, grasping the arms of his throne as he looks down in concern on the great world spread out beneath him, and with night coming on at the far frontier of his realm. There are some phrases in the Psalms which have a similar effect, such as, in the one hundred fourth Psalm, “He walketh upon the wings of the wind” or, in the one hundred third Psalm, “for look how high the heaven is in comparison of the earth; so great is his mercy also toward them that fear him. Look how wide also the east is from the west; so far hath he set our sins from us.” Like the references to “stretching the line,” in the Book of Job, which seem to me to be about the lines bricklayers still use to keep their bricks straight, this is a mixture of extreme beauty and poetry with the measured practicalities of building and maintaining an intricate universe operating to fine tolerances, in which we live and move and have our being.
But where and what is the place where day and night come to an end? Is it like that place in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where sky and sea meet, and the water is sweet? Or is it like the puzzling Bering Strait, which I once crossed from Siberia to Alaska, leaving Provideniya in Russia on Monday morning and arriving in Nome, Alaska, the previous Sunday afternoon? I know it is only a technicality of international law, but it is still a reminder that day and night do indeed come to an end, and there are places where you can gaze from today into yesterday, or even from today into tomorrow if your eyes are good enough and the air is clear enough.
