An Inland Voyage Section 1 - Antwerp to Boom

Robert Louis Stevenson (0:12)

AN INLAND VOYAGE.

Antwerp to Bohme.

We made a great stir in Antwerp docks. A stevedore and a lot of dock-borders took up the two canoes and ran with them for the slip. A crowd of children followed, cheering. The cigarette went off in a splash and a bubble of small breaking water. Next moment the arithusa was after her. A steamer was coming down, men on the paddle-box shouted hoarse warnings, the stevedore and his porters were bawling from the key. But in a stroke or two the canoes were away out in the middle of the shelt, and all steamers and stevedores and other longshore vanities were left behind. The sun shone brightly. The tide was making four jolly miles an hour. The wind blew steadily, with occasional squalls. For my part, I had never been in a canoe under sail in my life, and my first experiment out in the middle of this big river was not made without some trepidation. What would happen when the wind first caught my little canvas? I suppose it was almost as trying a venture into the regions of the unknown as to publish a first book, or to marry. But my doubts were not of long duration, and in five minutes you will not be surprised to learn that I had tied my sheet.

I own I was a little struck by this circumstance myself. Of course, in company with the rest of my fellow men, I had always tied the sheet in a sailing boat, but in so little and crank a concern as a canoe, and with these charging squalls, I was not prepared to find myself follow the same principle.

And it inspired me with some contemptuous views of our regard for life. It is certainly easier to smoke with the sheet fastened, but I had never before weighed a comfortable pipe of tobacco against an obvious risk, and gravely elected for the comfortable pipe. It is a commonplace that we cannot answer for ourselves before we have been tried, but it is not so common a reflection, and surely more consoling, that we usually find ourselves a great deal braver and better than we thought. I believe this is every one's experience, but an apprehension that they may belie themselves in the future prevents mankind from trumpeting this cheerful sentiment abroad. I wish sincerely, for it would have saved me much trouble, there had been someone to put me in a good heart about life when I was younger, to tell me how dangers are most portentous on a distant site, and how the good in a man's spirit will not suffer itself to be overlaid, and rarely or never deserts him in the hour of need. But we are all for tootling on the sentimental flute in literature, and not a man among us will go to the head of the march to sound the heady drums.

It was agreeable upon the river. A barge or two went past, laden with hay. Reeds and willows boarded the stream, and cattle and grey venerable horses came and hung their mild heads over the embankment. Here and there was a pleasant village among trees, with a noisy shipping-yard. Here and there a villa in a lawn. The wind served us well up the Scheldt and thereafter up the Rupel, and we were running pretty free when we began to sight the brickyards of Bohm, lying for a long way on the right bank of the river.

The left bank was still green and pastoral, with alleys of trees along the embankment, and here and there a flight of steps to serve a ferry, where perhaps there sat a woman with her elbows on her knees, or an old gentleman with a staff and silver spectacles. But Bohm and its brickyards grew smokier and shabbier with every minute, until a great church with a clock and a wooden bridge over the river indicated the central quarters of the town.

Bohm is not a nice place, and is only remarkable for one thing, that the majority of the inhabitants have a private opinion that they can speak English, which is not justified by fact. This gave a kind of haziness to our intercourse. As for the Hotel de la Navigation, I think it is the worst feature of the place. It boasts of a sanded parlour, with a bar at one end, looking on the street, and another sanded parlour, darker and colder, with an empty birdcage and a tri-colour subscription box by way of sole adornment, where we made shift to dine in the company of three uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character. Indeed, I have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among this pleasing people. They seemed to peck and trifle with vines all day long in an amateur spirit—tentatively French, truly German, and somehow falling between the two.