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with a pilot ready to board and assist us through the channel to the anchorage.
    The white masthead lights and green starboard navigating lightsof a large vessel can be seen moving down the main channel, while the navigation lights of a smaller ship are visible coming out through the secondary channel.
    Three white lights in a vertical triangle indicate a dredger working at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank and that it is safe to pass on either side of her.
    The masthead light and port and starboard lights of a small craft off our starboard bow indicate that she is heading towards us. The edges of the main channel are marked by the flashing lights of buoys, and further up the river the lights of fixed beacons can be discerned which assist the navigator to keep in the deeper water. Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.
    There were the lights fixed and flashing, each in its proper place in that perfect night miniature and vast. Then the night faded, there was sunlight on the distant hills of the port, sunlight on the water before me and on the vessels coming and going, and I was:
    APPROACHING PORT LIBERTY BY DAY
    When a ship approaches port the navigator has various aids to help him.
    He has a chart of the area, which he keeps up to date by Admiralty Notices to Mariners, issued weekly.
    He has leading marks and the international system of buoys and beacons which mark the channel which he will have to follow and which he has to look out for as he approaches.
    In most ships he usually has an echo sounder to indicate to him the depth of water and a radar set to supplement his eyes if visibility is poor because of fog or rain or falling snow.
    What you can see

Imagine you are standing on the navigating bridge of aship approaching the estuary of the River Line and Port Liberty.
    The Landfall buoy marking the entrance to the channel is right ahead of you and close by you can see the pilot launch displaying its distinguishing code flag waiting to put a pilot on board. Steaming out through the main channel is a 12,000 ton cargo vessel and astern of her a coaster is about to pass through the secondary channel used by smaller craft.
    There is a fishing boat heading out to sea off Plushers Point and at the inner end of Crusher’s Bank a dredger is working.
    Port Liberty can just be seen around the bend in the river and the buoys marking the main and secondary channels into the River Line and up to the quay are clearly visible.
    Model made to the requirements of the Department of Navigation by Thorp Modelmakers Ltd.
    So clear and sharp, Port Liberty. So precise and real. Realer than anything else I know. Of course it doesn’t exist. There’s no such place. There is no River Line, no Crusher’s Bank, no Plushers Point, no Port Liberty. The chart and the soundings, the channel markers and the buoys have no counterparts in the full-size world. Port Liberty is a fiction invented by the Admiralty as Fig. 67 in the
Admiralty Manual of Navigation
Volume I, and the National Maritime Museum commissioned a model of it.
    There’s more to the model than meets the eye. I once got in touch with Thorp Modelmakers Ltd and was astonished to find that the tiny fixed and flashing lights are not actually on the tiny vessels, the lighthouse, the buoys. I couldn’t believe it. The scale was too small for that, I was told. The lights are underneath the model and there is a system of mirrors derived from an old theatrical illusion called ‘Pepper’s Ghost’. The night window is a mirror and the lights fixed and flashing so perfectly, each in its proper place, are not in fact where one sees them. I think about it often.

10

Neaera H.
    I think there is less merit in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem ‘The Windhover’ than there would have been in not writing it. I think that Basho’s frog that jumped into the old pond has more falcon in it than Hopkins’s bird, simply because it has more of