Trip To The Jersey Shore

[Ariel 109]

Ebb,

Raban has none of the old prejudices which we all know were quite common in Belloc's time. In "Coasting" one theme Raban takes apart is the ideal of the what drives amateur sailors to take to the sea in small boats, a relatively recent human pastime. In earlier times people did not go to sea unless they really needed to. He writes about the early books on yachting and the bias of their writers, quite interesting.

From Raban's "Coasting", the four boats he names below are the yachts of early sailing writers.

"The "Rob Roy", "The Kate", "Perseus" and "Nona" are a lot more than mere yachts. Loaded down on their marks with testaments, theories, dogmas and solutions, that are like arks of the Covenant, holy vessels bearing sacred texts. Jesus Christ...Aristotle...Malthus...Mussolini..each of the lone sailors puts to sea with a ghostly first mate. And the boats themselves are miniature ships of state, their trim style of domestic ecomony set side by side with the ramshackle and disordered house of England across the water."