"A man who is not afraid of the sea", declared an Aran islander to John Millington Synge, "will soon be drowned, for he will be going out on a day he shouldn't. But we do be afraid of the sea, and we do be drowned only now and then."
I do not know if Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, he who devised the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force, feared the water, but we do have information that he was "drowned now and then". One such adventure, and his closest brush with death in his long career, occurred five or six years before the telegraphic episode recorded here yesterday.
In July 1791, as a midshipman of 17, Beaufort was in a dinghy heading for his ship in Portsmouth harbour when he fell into the water. Years later he recalled the incident in a letter to a scientific colleague, and he described in detail how he had felt, seeming to confirm the popular notion that in such circumstances the whole of a man's life will pass in a series of rapid flashbacks through his fading consciousness. Beaufort's account attracted much attention among 19th-century savants interested in such matters.
"From the moment that all exertion had ceased", he wrote, "a calm feeling of the most perfect tranquillity superseded the previous tumultuous sensations. Though the senses were thus deadened, not so the mind; its activities seemed to be invigorated in a ratio which defies all description. Every past incident of my life seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde succession; not however in mere outline, as here stated, but the picture filled up with every minute and collateral feature.
"In short, the whole period of my existence seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic view, and each act seemed to be accompanied by a consciousness of right and wrong, or by some reflection of its cause or consequences; indeed, many trifling events which had been long forgotten then crowded into my imagination, and with the character of recent familiarity."
Beaufort, luckily enough, was rescued by a fellow sailor, albeit in the nick of time, and professed himself amazed at how quickly these reminiscences had flashed upon his inward eye: "The length of time that was occupied with this deluge of ideas, or rather the shortness of time into which they were condensed, I cannot state with precision; yet certainly two minutes could not have elapsed from the moment of my suffocation to that of my being hauled up."