The cruise of the Nona : The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with…
"The cruise of the Nona" by Hilaire Belloc is a travel memoir and reflective essay collection written in the early 20th century. Framed by a small-boat voyage around the Welsh and English coasts, it uses day-to-day seamanship and landfalls as springboards for meditations on history, language, politics, faith, and manners. The narrator-skipper and his beloved cutter Nona, with a minimal crew, shape an intimate, digressive, and wryly opinionated journey that blends sea
adventure with literary rumination. The opening of this work moves from a playful, wandering dedication into the decision to call the book a “cruise,” then immediately launches a midnight departure from Holyhead. A light drift turns into a hard blow and a brutal fight with wind-against-tide in Bardsey Sound: the dinghy is lost, the jib blows out, and the boat barely escapes into smooth water—prompting stark reflections on fear and indifference to danger. In calmer shelter Belloc muses on islands, small kingdoms, Scandinavian place-names, living dialects versus literary speech, and the rise of charged words like “cad.” A slow run to Pwllheli brings a surly local and, on departure, a Welsh crowd swayed by a fiery orator, which leads to thoughts on leadership and the genius of the Speaker in Parliament. He creeps into Porthmadog by night with an inept pilot, grounding repeatedly, and spins this into a comic-serious essay on fools and labels. Under Harlech’s mountains he recalls childhood awe, then offshore hears the tolling bell at Sarn Badrig, unfolding a long, passionate critique of Anglo-Irish politics and the failure of Westminster. The section closes with meditations on sea “mystery” and sudden “vision,” and a practical vignette: teaching his friend to steer by compass to Strumble Head, whose lifted light confirms how experience seals belief. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
For an overview of the different reading options, see our Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.html.images | 675 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.epub3.images | 606 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.epub.images | 612 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.epub.noimages | 385 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.kf8.images | 1.1 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.kindle.images | 1.1 MB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78020.txt.utf-8 | 636 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/78020/pg78020-h.zip | 856 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Belloc, Hilaire, 1870-1953 |
|---|---|
| LoC No. | 25010997 |
| Title | The cruise of the Nona : The story of a cruise from Holyhead to the Wash, with reflections and judgments on life and letters, men and manners |
| Original Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925. |
| Credits | Aaron Adrignola and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PR: Language and Literatures: English literature |
| Subject | England -- Description and travel |
| Subject | Nona (Cutter) |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 78020 |
| Release Date | Feb 23, 2026 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 5093 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |