Coasting Read Free Page B

evangelical philanthropist, to devote his life to Boys. His mission was to rescue street arabs from the London slums for Christ and the open-air life. He worked for the Ragged Schools, to which all his fees as a lecturer and royalties as an author were donated. He set up the Shoeblack Brigade (whose battalions of small boys, each equipped with brushes and polish, used to assemble every morning in the Strand atseven, to sing hymns and say prayers under MacGregor’s enthusiastic conductorship), and was a co-founder of the
Boy’s Own Paper
.
    His adventures at sea started with the
Rob Roy
canoe, a craft he designed himself so that his boys could paddle their way to piety at weekends. He held Sunday rallies on the Thames, half regattas and half prayer meetings, in which every time a canoe capsized another boy was simultaneously cleansed of his London dirt and washed in the blood of the Lamb.
    After a series of canoeing adventures in the Holy Land and Scandinavia, MacGregor built himself a new boat, a 21-foot yawl planked in Honduras mahogany, with a cabin, a galley and a half-decked cockpit that looked as it if were closely modeled on a preacher’s pulpit. He took on a cargo of “several boxes of Testaments, books, pictures, and interesting papers, in different tongues,” and set sail for Paris by way of the Thames Estuary, the South coast of England and the Seine. “Truly,” he wrote, “there is a sea-mission yet to be worked. Good news was told on the water long ago, and by the Great Preacher from a boat.” Wherever he docked he handed out Bibles and “interesting papers” to passing tourists, fishermen, bargees and longshoremen. “The distribution of these was a constant pleasure to me. Permanent and positive good may have been done by the reading of their contents.”
    He supplied his own illustrations, and on page 18 of
The Voyage Alone
he treated his readers to a flattering portrait of the Author At Home, in which MacGregor reclines majestically against a bolster in his pulpit-cockpit, his mustaches waxed to icicle-like points, his eyes hard and bright as a pair of chipped flints as he gazes out to sea. His finely sculpted head is turbaned against the sun, and he appears to be tippling from a mug, but the prominent teapot on the deck beside him is there to reassure you that MacGregor’s liquor is definitely nontoxic. Investigation of the crosshatching with a magnifying glass reveals an open bible propped against the gunwale.
    Here is exactly the sort of Englishman that Thomas Arnold’sRugby was created to manufacture. You could trust the colonization of Africa, or the management of the Sheffield steel industry, to this sturdy open-necked figure who exudes the Victorian virtues of Temperance, Probity, Resolution and Independence. Setting himself up as the very type of the hero of the age, MacGregor shows a well-built athlete sailing westward in the service of God and Queen.
    Out at sea, MacGregor meditated on the condition of England:
    In all our great towns there is a mass of human beings whose want, misery, and filth are more patent to the eye, and blatant to the ear, and pungent to the nostrils than in almost any other towns in the world. Their personal liberty is greater, too, than anywhere else. Are these two facts related to each other? Is the positive piggery of the lowest stratum of our fellows part of the price we have to pay for glorious freedom as guaranteed by our “British Constitution”? and do we not pay very dearly then? Must the masses be frowsy to be free?
    From the long-distance perspective afforded by
Rob Roy
running before the wind off Southsea, the answers to the nation’s problems came pat: what was needed was “strong Tory government” and a great Christian crusade.
    The Voyage Alone
became a Victorian best-seller, not for its religious or political content but because it managed to glorify yachting as much more than a mere sport. MacGregor turned sailing a small boat into a species