At half-flood it looked a noble stream at least half a mile wide, and pointing west in an almost perfect straight line. Nobody on board ever had been up the Stour or knew anybody who had. The skipper said it was a ticklish stream, but he was always ready for an escapade. We proceeded. Not a keel of any kind was ahead. And in a moment, as it seemed, we had quitted civilization and the latest machinery and mankind, and were back in the Anglian period. River marshes, and distant wooded hills, that was all; not even a tilled field in sight! The river showed small headlands, and bights of primeval mud. Some indifferent buoys indicated that a channel existed, but whether they were starboard or port buoys nobody could tell. We guessed, and took no harm. But soon there were no buoys, and we slowed down the engine in apprehension, for on the wide, deceptive waste of smooth water were signs of shallows. We dared not put about, we dared not go ahead. Astern, on the horizon, was the distant fleet, in another world. A head, on the horizon, was a hint of the forgotten town of Mistley. Then suddenly a rowboat approached mysteriously out of one of those bights, and it was maimed by two men with the air of conspirators.
They rowed round us, critically staring, and receded.
“Why in thunder is n’t this river buoyed?” I demanded of the skipper.
The skipper answered that the intention obviously was to avoid taking the bread out of the mouths of local pilots. He put on speed. No catastrophe. The town of Mistley approached us. Then we had to pause again, reversing the propeller. We were in a network of shallows. Far to port could be seen a small red buoy; it was almost on the bank. Impossible that it could indicate the true channel. We went straight ahead and chanced it. The next instant we were hard on the mud in midstream, and the propeller was making a terrific pother astern. We could only wait for the tide to float us off. The rowboat appeared again.
When we floated, the skipper said to me in a peculiar challenging tone:
“Shall we go on, sir, or shall we return?”
“We ‘ll go on,” I said. I could say no less.
We bore away inshore to the red buoy, and, sure enough, the true channel was there, right under the south bank. And we came safely to the town of Mistley, which had never in its existence seen even a torpedo-boat and seldom indeed a yacht, certainly never a _Velsa_. And yet the smoke of the harbor of Harwich was plainly visible from its antique quay. The town of Mistley rose from its secular slumber to enjoy a unique sensation that afternoon.