Chapter 66

Portland Race should, by rights, be the most famous thing in all the seas of the world. I will tell you why. It is a dreadful, unexpected, enormous, unique business, set right upon the highway of all our travel: it is the marvel of our seas. And yet it has no fame. There is not a tired man writing with a pencil at top speed in the middle of the night to the shaking of machinery in Fleet Street who will not use the word ‘Maelstrom’ or ‘Charybdis.’ I have seen Charybdis—piffling little thing; I have not seen the Mael…