Noah Slater tells me about going on a short trip to Ireland, taking to
the sea for the first time. The voyage was to be from Brythonic North
Wales to Goidelic Irish Dublin. One of the main things on his mind was
the Ocean and Stars of Flame note which Coleridge had written on his
own first voyage, from England to Germany:
“The Ocean is a noble Thing by night; a beautiful while cloud of foam
at momently intervals roars & rushes by the side of the Vessel, and
Stars of Flame dance & sparkle & go out in it — & every now and then
light Detachments of Foam dart away from the Vessel's side with their
galaxies of stars, & scour out of sight, like a Tartar Troop over a
Wilderness! — What these Stars are, I cannot say — the sailors say,
that they are the Fish Spawn which is phosphorescent.”
He wondered if he would be able to see something of the same sort, so
he planned to camp up on deck, but when he did so he found that there
was nowhere to sit. Gazing out to sea for a short while anyway, he was
unable to see Stars of Flame, but he did see some Fairies of Water,
and wrote about these in the style of Coleridge:
“Wispy eddies darting over the waves like a swarm of insects / gave
the distinct impression that they were following the ship, like an
[army / family] of water faeries, [chaperoning / accompanying] us on
our treacherous journey into the unknown”
Whereas Coleridge was looking back at the wake of the ship and had his
mind only on his immediate surroundings, perhaps comforting himself
from worrying about his circumstances at home and the great
opportunities which lay ahead in Germany, Noah was more focussed on
the boat pushing forward. To Coleridge, the Stars of Flame were
gushing from the vessel, whereas to Noah the party or band of fairies
were following him, as he rushed uncontrollably onwards towards
Dublin.
Noah enjoyed Ireland, and some months after he came back he moved
house to the banks of a large river. One evening he was out taking a
stroll by the riverside, and the wind was up very strong. He noticed
that the sea fairies pattern had come to the river. They lulled his
mind into thinking that they must be common, so though he had recently
bought an iPhone for capturing just such a thing, he did not take any
photographs of them.
This time, with the incident fresh in his memory at least, he was able
to give a full description. “The effect looks like a swarm of insects,
or the trails from some tiny water faeries, skiming across the surface
of the water in a direction, but swerving from side to side. They
always appear en mass, so if it were really due to some thing or other
skimming the surface, there would have to be hundreds if not thousands
of them. In summary, they are tiny, there are lots of them, and they
leave trails and have definite (although shifting) direction. The
water itself was very still, with hardly any waves or movement at
all!”
He wondered if there was an attested word for this phenomenon, so I
tried the OED and HTOED as well as numerous other books searching with
various synonym combinations to try to find out. The closest that I
found to his fancy was that this was some kind of advection pattern. I
observed that I would like a miniature encyclopædia of Ocean Surface
Conditions, something that I can imagine being produced in the
Victorian era, with extremely detailed descriptions of various water
patterns and their situations.
The fact that he was travelling from Brythonic Wales to Goidelic
Ireland made me wonder whether there are any tales of fairy commerce,
in the old sense, between the two lands. His boat passed just north of
the fabled lands of Maes Gwyddno, or Cantre'r Gwaelod (The Lowland
Hundreds) as they're called now. These lands were said to have been
lost in a great post-Romano-British flood, and that one can still hear
the church bells ringing from the sea in the vicinity of Aberdyfi. The
great 18th century Welsh antiquarian William Owen Pughe describes
having seen some of the remains of Cantre'r Gwaelod a few miles out to
sea.
Compare Noah's own account here:
http://tumbolia.posterous.com/notes-on-faerietrails