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In all the world there is no coast like the coast of Jersey - so treacherous, so snarling
- serrated with rocks seen and unseen - tortured by currents maliciously whimsical - encircled by tides that sweep up from
the Antarctic world with the devouring force of a monstrous serpent projecting itself towards its prey. The captain of these
tides, travelling up through the Atlantic at a thousand miles an hour, enters the English Channel, and drives on to the Thames.
Presently retreating, it meets another pursuing Antarctic wave, which, thus opposed in its straightforward course, recoils
into St Michael's Bay, then plunges, as it were, upon a terrible foe. They twine and strive in mystic conflict, and, in rage
of equal power, neither vanquished nor conquering, circle, mad and desperate, round the Channel Islands. Impeded, impounded
as they riot through the flumes of sea, they turn furiously, and smite the cliffs and rocks and walls of their prison- house.
With the frenzied winds helping them, the island coasts and Norman shores are battered by their hopeless onset; and in that
channel between Alderney and Cap de la Hague man or ship must well beware, for the Race of Alderney is one of the death-shoots
of the tides. Before they find their way to the main again, these harridans of nature bring forth a brood of currents
which ceaselessly fret the boundaries of the isles.
Always, always the white foam beats the rocks, and always must man go warily along
these coasts. The swimmer plunges into a quiet pool, the snowy froth that masks the reefs seeming only the pretty fringe of
sentient life to a sleeping sea; but presently an invisible hand reaches up and grasps him, an unseen power drags him exultingly
out to the main, and he returns no more. Many a Jersey boatman, many a fisherman who has lived his whole life in sight of
the Paternosters on the north, the Ecréhos on the east, the Dog's Nest on the south, or the Corbière on the west,
has in some helpless moment been caught by the unsleeping currents that harry his peaceful borders, or the rocks that have
eluded the hunters of the sea, and has yielded up his life within sight of his own doorway, an involuntary sacrifice to the
navigator's knowledge and to the calm perfection of an admiralty chart.
You may range the seas from the Yugon Strait to the Erebus Volcano, and you will find
no such landing-place for imps or men as that field of rocks on the south-east corner of Jersey called, with a malicious irony,
the Banc des Violets. The great rocks La Conière, La Longy, Le Gros Etac, Le Têton and the Petite Sambière, rise up like volcanic
monuments from a floor of lava and trailing vraic, which at half-tide, makes the sea a tender mauve and violet. The passages
of safety between these ranges of reef are bit narrow at high tide; at half tide, when the currents are changing most, the
violet field becomes the floor of a vast mortuary chapel for unknowing mariners.
Yet within the circle of danger bounding this green isle the love of home and country
is stubbornly, almost pathetically, strong. Isolation, pride of lineage, independence of government, antiquity of law and
custom, and jealousy of imperial influence or action have combined to make a race self-reliant even to perverseness, proud
and maybe vain, sincere almost to commonplaceness, unimaginative and reserved with the melancholy born of monotony; for the
life of the little country has coiled in upon itself, and the people have drooped to see but just their own selves reflected in
all the dwellers of the land, whichever way they turn. A hundred years ago, however, there was a greater and more general
lightness of heart and vivacity of spirit than now. Then the song of the harvester and the fisherman, the boat-builder
and the stocking-knitter, was heard on a summer afternoon or from the veille of a winter night when the dim crasset hung
from the roof and the seaweed burned in the chimney. Then the gathering of the vraic was a fête, and the lads and lasses footed
it on the green or on the hard sand, to the chance flageolets of sportive seamen home from the war. This simple gaiety was
heartiest at Christmastide, when the yearly reunion of families took place; and because nearly everybody in Jersey was a "couzain"
to his neighbour, these gatherings were as patriarchal as they were festive.
The Battle of the Strong ~ Sir Gilbert
Parker 1798
Everywhere there were people living out their lives using aspects
of suicide against themselves. They did not even have the authenticity of the final act to speak for them. Suicide is, in
short, the one continuous, everyday, ever-present problem of living. It is a question of degree. I'd seen them in all varying
stages of development and despair. The failed lawyer, the cynical doctor, the depressed housewife, the angry teenager - all
of mankind engaged in the massive conspiracy against their own lives, that is their daily activity. The meaning of suicide,
the true meaning, had yet to be defined, had yet to be created in the broad dimensions it deserved.
Daniel Stern
Quand nou s'couoche auve les tchians nou s'èrlève auve
des puches
He that sleeps with dogs rises with fleas
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