THE SEA.
UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME,
And by the same Author.
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THE SEA
From the French of
M. J. MICHELET,
Of the Faculty of Letters, Author of "A History of France,"
"Love," "Woman," "The Child," "The Insect,"
"The Bird," "Women of the French Revolution,"
etc., etc., etc.
TRANSLATED FROM THE LATEST PARIS EDITION.
NEW YORK:
RUDD & CARLETON, 180 GRAND STREET
PARIS: L. HACHETTE ET Cie.
MDCCCLXI.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by
RUDD & CARLETON,
In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.
EXTRACT FROM THE LONDON ATHENÆUM, Feb. 9. 1861.
'The Sea' is another of M. Michelet's dreamy volumes,—half science, half fancy, with a blending in both of sensuous suggestion. M. Michelet takes the seas of the world in his hands, manipulates them, invokes their monsters, assembles all their finny droves, gossips with the sirens, sails among the Hyperborean waters with Behemoth, and is on intimate terms with Tennyson's little shell-king, who lives in a palace with doors of diamond, and wears a rainbow frill, for the admiration of the nations that dwell in his dim, sunken wildernesses. * * * * * He discourses upon marine terrors and beauties, and tells the reader, as a sublime Peter Parley might, that the salt of all the seas, if piled upon America, would spread over the continent a solid, cliff-edged mass, 4,500 feet high. There are chapters on Sands, Cliffs and Beaches; on Waves; on the anatomy of the Sea itself, which resembles "a gigantic animal arrested in the earliest stage of its organization;" on Tempests; on the sympathy between Air and Water; on the Fecundity of the Sea, which, were it not self-devouring, would putrefy, according to M. Michelet into one solid mass of herring; on Fish of every species, and especially on Pearls. The Queens of the East, he says, dislike the gleams of the diamond. They will allow nothing to touch their skins except pearls. A necklace and two bracelets of pearls constitute the perfection of ornament. The pearls silently say to the woman, "Love us! hush!" In the North, too, dainty Countesses love their pearls,—wearing them beneath their clothes by night and by day, concealing them, caressing them, only now and then exposing them. So do the Odalisques of Asia prize the soft linen vestment that just covers their limbs, never taking it off until worn out, which says little for Oriental baths.
The book is pleasant reading, like all else that M. Michelet writes.
A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS.
THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE.
A gallant Dutch seaman, a cool and stern observer, who has passed his whole life at sea, frankly tells us that his feeling on first seeing the ocean was fear. For all terrestrial animals, water is the non-respirable element, the ever heaving but inevitably asphyxiating enemy; the fatal and eternal barrier between the two worlds. We need not, all things being considered, be at all surprised, if that immense mass of waters which we call the sea, dark and inscrutable in its immense depths, ever and always impresses the human mind with a vague and resistless awe.
The imaginative Orientals see it only and call it only, as, the Night of the Depths. In all the antique tongues, from India to Ireland, the synonymous or analogous name of the sea is either Night or the Desert.
Ah! With what a great and a hallowed and a hallowing, with what an at once soothing and subduing melancholy it is that, evening after evening, we see the Sun, that great world's joy, that brilliant, life-quickening, and light-giving Sun of all that lives, fade, sink, die—though so surely to rise and live again! Ah! as that glorious light departs, how tenderly do we think of the human loves that have died from us—of the hour when we, also, shall thus depart from human ken, lost, for the time, to this world—to shine more gloriously in that other world, now dark, distant, unknown, but certain.
Descend to even a slight depth in the sea, and the beauty and brilliancy of the upper light are lost; you enter into a persistent twilight, and misty and half-lurid haze; a little lower, and even that sinister and eldritch twilight is lost, and all around you is Night, showing nothing, but suggesting everything that darkness,—handmaiden of terrible Fancy—can suggest. Above, below, beneath, all around, darkness, utter darkness, save when, from time to time, the swift and gracefully terrible motion of some passing monster of the deep makes "darkness visible" for a brief moment—and, then, that passing gleam leaves you in darkness more dense, more utter, more terrible, than ever. Immense in its extent, enormous in its depth, that mass of waters which covers the greater part of our globe seems, in truth, a great world of shadows and of gloom. And it is that which, above all, at once fascinates and intimidates us. Darkness and Fear! Twin sisters, they! In the early day, the at once timid and unreasoning Childhood of our race, men imagined that where no Light was, neither could there be Life; that in the unfathomed depths, there was a black, lifeless, soundless, Chaos; above, nought but water and gloom,—beneath, sand, and shells, the bones of the wrecked mariner, the rich wares of the far off, ruined, and vainly bewailing merchant;—those sad treasures of "that ever-receiving and never-restoring treasury—the Sea."
The waters of the sea afford us no encouragement by their transparency. Look not there for the seductive, brightly sparkling, and ever-smiling nymph of the fountain. Opaque, heavy, mighty, merciless, your sea is a liquid Polyphemus, a blind giant that cares not, reasons not, feels not—but hits a terribly hard blow. Trust yourself upon that vast and ever-heaving bosom, bold swimmer, and marvellously will you be upheld; the mighty thing that upholds you dominates you, too; you are a mere weak child, upheld, indeed, for the instant by a giant-hand—in another moment that giant-hand may smite you with a giant's fatal force.
Her anchor once tripped, who can tell whither the good ship may be urged by some sudden wind, or some unsuspected but irresistible current? Thus it was that our northern fishermen, not only without their intention, but even in spite of it, discovered polar America, and supped full of the horrors of funereal Greenland. Not a nation upon the earth but has its tales and traditions of the sea. Homer and the Arabian Nights, have handed down to us a goodly number of those frightful legends, of shoals and tempests and of calms no less murderous than tempests,—those calms during which the hardiest sailor agonizes, moans, loses all courage and all hope in the tortures of the hours, days, haply even weeks, when, with cracked lip and blood-shotten eye, he has around him, heaving upward and sinking downward, but never progressing a cable's length,
"Water, water, everywhere,
But not a drop to drink."
Thrilling and saddening legends have all our old writers handed down to us of the Anthropophagi, those loathsome man-eaters, and of the Leviathan, the Kraken, the great sea-serpent, &c. The name given to the great African desert—The Abode of Terror,—may very justly be transferred to the sea. The boldest sailors, Phœnicians and Carthaginians, the conquering Arabs who aspired to encircle and grasp the whole world, seduced by what they heard of the Hesperides and the land of gold, sailed out of the Mediterranean to the wide ocean, but soon were glad to seek their port again. The gloomy line eternally covered with clouds and mist which they found keeping their stern watch before the equator, intimidated them. They lay to; they hesitated; from man to man ran the murmur "It is the Sea of Darkness—and, then, back went they to port and, there told to wondering landsmen what wonders they had seen, and what horrors they had imagined." Woe to him who shall persist in his sacrilegious espionage of that dread region! On one of those weird and far isles stands a sternly-threatening Colossus, whose sempiternal menace is—"Thus far thou hast come—farther thou shalt not go!"
Childish as we may think those terrors of the long by-gone ages they really were much the same as the emotions which we may any day see evinced by an inland-born novice who for the first time looks upon the sea. And not merely man, but all animals, experience the same surprise, the same shock, when suddenly brought face to face with the mighty water-world. Even at ebb tide, when the water so gently and so lovingly caresses, as it leaves, that shore to which it shall so boisterously return, your horse quite evidently likes it not; he shudders, balks, snorts,—and very often bolts from it at the very top of his speed. Your dog recoils, howls, and, after his own canine fashion, returns insult for insult to the waves that annoy and terrify him; he never concludes a real peace with the element which to him seems less doubtful than positively hostile. A certain traveller tells us that the Kamtschatkan dogs, accustomed as they are to the sight of the sea, are nevertheless irritated and alarmed by it. During the long nights immense troops of them howl back to the howling waves that break, in their furious might, upon the iron-bound shores of the northern ocean.
The natural introduction, the portico, the ante-room, of the Ocean, which prepares us thoroughly to appreciate its vast and melancholy extent, is to be found in the dreary course of the rivers of north-western France, the vast sands of the South, or the sad and rarely trodden Landes of Brittany. All who approach the sea by any of those routes are greatly impressed by that intermediate region. All along the rivers, there is a seemingly infinite chaos of roots and stumps, of willows and the like water-loving vegetation, and the waters becoming more and more brackish, at length become absolutely salt—the veritable sea-water. In the Landes, on the other hand, as we approach the sea, we have a preliminary and preparatory sea of low-growing and coarse shrubs, broom, and bushes. Proceed a league or two, and you see sickly and drooping trees which seem, after their manner, to tell you how much they suffer from the blighting breath of their near neighbor, and great tyrant, the Sea. Evidently, if they were not held there by their great strong roots they would fly to some climate more genial and some soil more generous; they turn every branch from the sea and towards the earth, as though they were a routed host, disorganized, panic-stricken, and prepared to seek safety in flight. Fixed to the soil, they bend themselves eastward, twisting, writhing, mutely agonized at every new assault of the storm-winds from the seaward. Still nearer to the Sea, the trunk of the tree is slender, its stature dwarfish, and its few poor branches spread themselves confusedly to the horizon. On the shore, on the very margin and boundary line between land and Sea, where the crushed shells rise in a fine and pungent dust, the trees are invaded, covered, choked up with it; their pores are closed, they inhale no air, they are stifled; still living as to form, they are mere petrified trees, spectral trees, melancholy shadows which have not even the privilege of departing,—sad prisoners—even in death! Long before we are face to face with the Sea, we can hear and imagine that grand and terrible entity. At first, we hear only a dull, uniform, and distant moaning, which grows louder and louder still, until its majestic roar silences, or covers, all meaner sounds. Very soon we perceive that that roar is not monotonous, but has its alternating notes; its full, rich, mellow tenor, and its round, deep, majestic bass. The pendulum of the clock oscillates less regularly than that alternating moan and roar of the Ocean in its grand unrest. And this latter, let me repeat it, has not the monotony of the pendulum, for in "what those wild waves are saying," we feel, or fancy that we feel the thrilling intonations of life. And in fact, at high flood, when wave rears its crest upon wave, immense, electric, there mingles with the tumultuous roaring of the fiercely rushing waters, the sound of the shells and pebbles, and the thousand things animate as well as inanimate that they carry with them in their shoreward rush. When the ebb comes, a soft murmur tells us that, together with the sands, the sea carries back into her depths all with which for a few brief hours the shore had been adorned or enriched.
And how many other voices hath the mighty sea! Even when least agitated, how her wailings and her deep sighs contrast with the dull dead silence of the deserted shore, which seems to expect, in mute terror, the threatening of that mighty mass which so recently laved it with a gentle and caressing wavelet. And will she not speedily fulfil her threat? I know not, and will not anticipate. I will not, just now, at least, speak of those terrible concerts in which, haply, she ere long will take the principal part; of her duets with the rocks, of the basses, those muttered thunders which she utters in the deep caverns of the rocky shore, or of those strange, wild, weird, shrieking tones in which we seem to recognize the "Help, spare, save me!" of some tortured or fearfully imperilled humanity. No; let us, for the present, contemplate her in her calmer moods; when she is strong, indeed, but not violent.
THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST.
We need not be at all surprised if childhood and ignorance are astounded, astonied, when they first find themselves face to face with that vast and mysterious Sphinx of the Great Master's sculpture, the Ocean. Why, in fact, should we be astonished by their gaze of mingled awe, admiration and bewilderment, when we ourselves, despite our early culture and life-long experience, see so much in the great Riddle of that great Sphinx which we cannot even hope to explain?
What is the real extent of the ocean? That it is greater than that of the earth is about as much as, conscientiously, we can at all positively affirm. On the entire surface of our globe, water is the Generality—land the Exception. But what is their relative proportion? That, water covers four-fifths of the globe is probable, though, some say a third or a fourth. It is difficult, not to say impossible, to answer the question precisely. A bold explorer discovers a polar land, lays it down, latitude and longitude, with scientific precision; in the very next year an equally bold and no less scientific adventurer seeks it in vain; and in all latitudes immense shoals and lovely Coral islands form in the dark depths, rise to the surface, and disappear, just as suddenly and unaccountably as they arose.
The real depth of the sea is still less known to us than its extent; we are only at the mere commencement of our early, few, and imperfect soundings.
The daring little liberties which we take with the surface of the invincible element, and the confidence with which we go hither and thither upon its unsounded depths, have really nothing to say against the grand and well-founded pride of the Ocean, impenetrable as she is as to her secrets, ever moving yet unchangeable, a reality, yet, in all but a few of her phenomena, as unreal to us as the spectres of our actual dreaming. That those mighty depths contain a whole world, a marvellously great and diversified world, of life, love, war, and reproduction of all sorts and sizes, we must imagine and may already with confidence affirm; but we have only, and barely, touched upon the threshold of that world. We are in such a hurry to leave that strange and hostile element! If we need the Ocean, see ye, my brothers, the Ocean in no wise needs us. Nature, fresh from the hand of Deity, scorns the too prying gaze and the too shallow judgment of finite but presumptuous man.
That very element which we term fluid, shifting, capricious, suffers, in reality, no change; on the contrary it is a very perfect model of regularity. The really and constantly changing creature is Man. His body of this year will have evaporated by this time next year, for, according to Berzolius, four-fifths of our frame are water, which at every instant we yield to the ever craving atmosphere. Fragile and fleeting creature as Man is, he has indeed good reason for reflection and for humility when he finds himself in presence of the great unchanging, and, humanly speaking, unchangeable, powers of nature, just, and grand, glorious, as is his hope, his belief, his certainty of a spiritual immortality. Despite that delightful hope, that confident belief, that sustaining certainty, Man yet is necessarily and terribly saddened by the smiting and strange suddenness with which he hourly sees the thread of man's life forever broken. The Sea seems to exult over our fleeting tenure of a life of which we cannot anticipate, far less command, one added moment. Whenever we approach her, she seems to murmur from her dark, inscrutable depths, unchangeable as His will who made them—"Mortal! to-morrow you shall pass away, but I, I am, and ever shall be, unchanged, unchangeable, mighty and mysterious. The earth will not only receive your bones but will soon convert them into kindred and indistinguishable earth, but I, ever and always, shall remain, main, the same majestic and indifferent entity, the great perfectly balanced Life, daily harmonising myself with the harmonious and majestic life of the bright far worlds that shine above and around you." A stern and a scorning rebuke that is which is given to our poor human pride when, twice in our every mortal day the sea tears from our vexed shores the stony spoils which twice in every day she scornfully and terribly hurls back again. To any imagination but that of the trained and veteran seaman, the fierce rush of the rising tide infallibly suggests the likeness of a fierce and deadly combat; but when the child, or the Savage, observes that the fury of the sea has its inevitable limits, the terror of the child or Savage is turned—true coward-fashion—into an unreasoning compound of hate and rage, and he as fiercely, as impotently, pelts the terrible waves with the very pebbles which without effort, without consciousness, she has cast, heaps upon heaps, by ship loads, at every vast beat of her semi-diurnal pulse! Foaming, roaring, threatening, the waves rush shoreward; the boy observes that though they may kiss, they cannot, at his safe stand-point, submerge his delicate little feet, returns laughter for their roarings, petty pebbles for their impotent threats.
I saw a battle of this sort at Havre, in July, 1831. A little boy whom I took thither felt his young courage aroused and his young pride stung, by the loud challenges and fierce threats of the incoming tide, and he returned scorn for threat, feebly-thrown pebble for surging and mighty wave. Greatly, aye, laughably unequal was the strife between that small, white, delicate and feeble hand of the young mortal, and the vast and terrible force which cared not about it, feared it not, felt it not, knew it not. Laughably, said I? Ah! no inclination towards laughter remains with us when we reflect upon the fleeting existence, the ephemeral and impotent fragility of our best beloved, our fellows, our Maker's favored, erring, vain-glorious, and, in the last issue, utterly helpless Humanity, when in presence of that tireless and inscrutable Eternity to which we may at any moment be recalled! Such was one of my earliest glances at the Ocean; such the gloomy meditations, only too truly and too sternly realized, that were suggested to me by that combat between the fierce Sea upon which I look so often, and the glad and laughing, and buoyant child upon whom, alas! I shall look, lovingly and anxiously, no more.
THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST, CONTINUED.
Look upon the Ocean where and when you may, you everywhere and alway shall find her the same grand and terrible teacher of that hardest of all the lessons man has to learn,—man's insignificance. Take your stand upon some bold headland, from which with earnest and well trained eye, you can sweep the entire horizon; or, wander, with shortened ken, in the sandy desert;—go whithersoever you will, where old Ocean shall lash the shore, and everywhere and alway, I repeat, you shall find Ocean the same—mighty and terrible. True it is, that our finite and dim gaze cannot discern the, humanly speaking, Infinity of the Ocean; but we feel, we instinctively comprehend, that Infinity, and the impression made by that instructive comprehension is even deeper than could be made by Ocean visibly to our material eye, tangibly to our poor human hand.
Such, so deep, so permanent, was the impression made upon me by that wild tumultuous scene on the scourged-shore where Granville—dear old Granville!—keeps neutral watch between Normandy and Brittany. The wealthy, kindly and hearty, though bluff, and somewhat vulgar Normandy with its vast outspread of orchard and meadow suddenly disappears, and, by Granville and by the frowning Saint Michel we pass all at once into quite another world. For Granville, though Norman as to race, is thoroughly Breton as to aspect. Sternly, solidly, invincibly, the great Rock rears his defiant front, and looks down in a quite insolent contempt upon the wild surges that incessantly assault, but never harm, that passionless and mutely mocking Titan. Let the wild winds, unpent from their northern caverns, sweep the rugged coast; borne on the cross-currents from the angry West, let the wind sweep all things else clear from its path and this stern unconquerable rock ever and alway saith "thus far shalt thou come, but no farther. Strengthened though you are by your mad trans-Atlantic leap of a thousand leagues, against me your fury shall be spent in vain."
I loved that odd and somewhat dull little town, which owes its support to the distant and most perilous fishery. Every family there, feels that it is supported by a dread game in which human life is at stake; and this feeling produces a certain harmonious gravity in the aspect and tone of the dwellers hereabout, and of all their surroundings. A touching and a hallowing melancholy, that, of which I have often felt the influence, when, walking on the already darkening shore or gazing from the upper town that crowns the great rock, I have seen the sun sink below the far and misty horizon, harshly streaked by alternate rays of luridness and gloom, and not pausing to tint the sky with those glowing and fantastic brilliances which in other climes delight us. Here it is already autumn in August, and twilight scarcely exists. Scarcely has the sun set, when the shrewd winds freshen, and the dark green waves sweep on with added force; below, you see a few spectral forms hurrying along in their dark cloaks, and from afar you hear the melancholy bleatings of the sheep already benighted on their scanty pasturage.
The very small upper town rears its northern front sharply and boldly above the very edge of a cold dark abyss, facing the great sea, and swept by an eternal blast. This part of the place consists of only poor houses, and in one of them I found my quarters with a poor man, a maker of those pretty shell pictures for which the place is famous. Ascending by a ladder, rather than a staircase, into a dark little room, I looked out upon the strange wild scene, as strange and tragic, as wild and impressive, as that which had presented itself, when, also from a window, I had caught my first view of the great glacier of the Swiss Grindelwald. The glacier had shown an enormous monster of peaked icebergs which seemed crashing down upon me; and this vexed sea of Granville seemed an army of monstrous waves all rushing together to the attack.
My host here, though far from old, was feeble and suffering, and, as I examined his shell work and talked with him, I perceived that his mind was somewhat shaken. Poor fellow; upon that shore his only brother had perished, and from that moment the sea appeared to him an intelligent and persistent enemy. In the winter it beat his windows with snow or with icy winds, and kept him sleepless and peaceless during the long and dreary nights, and in the summer it brought him the vivid lightnings and the far resounding thunders. At the high tides it was still worse; the spray then beat upon his very windows, and he felt doubtful if some day he would not be drowned even on his own hearth. But he had not the means of finding a more secure shelter, and perhaps he was unconsciously retained there by we know not what strange fascination. He had not resolution to break altogether with that terrible foe, for which he had a certain respect, as well as a great awe. He seldom spoke of it by name; like the Icelander who, when at sea, does not name the Ourque, lest she should hear, and appear. I fancy that even now I can see his pale face, as, pointing to the wave-beaten beach, he said—"That terrifies me!"
Was he a lunatic? Not at all. He spoke quite sensibly, and was in reality interesting and even distinguished. A nervous being, too delicately organized for such a scene as that in which he was placed.
But the sea can madden, and often does. Livingstone brought from Africa a bold and intelligent man who had hunted and killed Lions, but had never seen the Sea. When taken on board ship, the novel sight was too much for his brain, he became frantic, and threw himself headlong into the heaving deep, which at once terrified and fascinated him. On the other hand, so attached do some men become to the sea, that they can never quit it. I have seen old pilots, compelled by infirmity to abandon their office, fret themselves into imbecility.
On the very summit of Saint Michael you are shown what they call Maniac's Shelf; and I know no place better fitted to make one mad than that giddy height. All around a vast stretch of white sand, solitary ever, and ever treacherous. It is neither land nor water; it is neither sea water nor fresh, though streams are constantly flowing beneath. Rarely, and but for brief moments, a boat can cross there, and if you cross when the water is out you risk being swallowed in. I can state that with full authority, for I nearly lost my life there. A very light vehicle in which I ventured there, and the horse that drew it, disappeared in too, and only by a perfect miracle I escaped on foot, feeling myself sinking at every step. At length, however, I reached the Rock, that gigantic Abbey, Fortress and Prison, that frowning sublimity, so well worthy of the scene which it so sternly dominates. This is no place for a detailed description of such a monument. On a huge block of granite, that Titanic pile rises and rises still, rock upon rock, age upon age, and still dungeon above dungeon. At the foot, the in pace of the Monks; higher up, the iron cage made by Louis XI.; higher still, that of Louis XIV.; higher still, the prison of our own day. And all this in a whirlwind, a perpetual tempest; a Sepulchre without the Sepulchre's peace.
Is it the fault of the sea, if this beach is treacherous? Not at all. There, as elsewhere, the Sea arrives strong and loud, indeed, but in all frankness and loyalty. The real fault is in the land, apparently solid, but undermined by numberless streams of fresh water which converts that seemingly solid beach into a treacherous and devouring quagmire. And especially is the fault in the ignorance and negligence of man. In the long dark ages when man invented the legend and the pilgrimage of the Archangel who vanquished the Devil, the Devil took possession of that deserted plain. The sea is quite innocent in the matter. Far, indeed, from doing harm, the sea upon its madly bounding waves brings in a nourishing and fecundating salt more precious than the fat slime of the Nile, enriching the once hideous marshes of Dol into the lovely gardens of our own day. The Sea is a somewhat violent mother, no doubt;—but a mother still. Abounding in fish, she lavishes upon the opposite Cancale, and upon many another bank, millions, thousands of millions, of oysters, whose crushed shells give beauty, and verdure, and flowers, and fruit. We must enter into a right understanding with the Sea, and not be led away by the false notions which its barren beach or its own more violent phenomena—often only the disguises of very real and very great benefits—may suggest to us.
THE BEACH, THE SANDS, AND THE IRON-BOUND COAST, CONTINUED.
The headlands, the sandy beaches, the bold capes and the low shores, command various, but ever useful, views of the great sea, stern and wild at the first glance, but divine and friendly, as we come to know it better. The advantage of the headlands is that at the foot of one of those giant rock-walls we more entirely than elsewhere appreciate the breathing and bounding pulse of the sea. Insensible, imperceptible, on the Mediterranean, that pulse is very distinct on the ocean. The Ocean breathes and pulsates, even as you and I do; it compels me to calculate my days and hours, and to look up to Heaven. It reminds me alike of myself and of the world. Let me seat myself upon some such shore, that, for instance, of Antifer, whence I may look out upon that vast expanse. The sea which, but a moment agone, seemed dead, has suddenly shuddered and become tremulous—first symptom of the great approaching movement. The tide has heaved past Cherbourg and Barfleur, and turned sharply and violently round the lighthouse; its divided waters lave Calvados, rush upon Havre and come to me at Étretat, at Fécamp, at Dieppe, to hurl themselves into the canal despite the strong Northern currents. It is for me to watch its hour. Its height, almost indifferent to the sandhills, is here, at the foot of the headland, alike worthy of your attention and powerful to command it. This long rock-wall of thirty leagues has but few stairways. Its narrow inlets, which form our smaller havens, occur at rare and great distances. And at low water we can with inquiring gaze inspect and question the strata above strata, gigantically and regularly superposed, which, as so many Titanic registers, tell us the history of accumulated ages of growth and decay, of life and death. From that great open book of time every year tears away a page. We have before us a piece of an hourly perishing, hourly renewing, world, which the sea from beneath is hourly devouring, and the torrents and the tempests, the frosts and the thaws from above, are hourly, and still more destructively, attacking. Wearing, crushing, beating, pulverising, wave, and wind, and storm and Time, that great Edax rerum, that unsparing and untiring Moth of the Universe, are, even as we gaze, converting the one vast rocky mass into the rounded and petty pebble. It is this rough work which makes this coast, so richly fertile on the land side, a real maritime desert on the seaward. A few, very few, sea plants survive the eternal crushing and grinding of the ever crushed and ever crushing pebbles driven hither and thither by every wave that every wind scourges into motion. The molluscæ, and even the very fish shun this vexed shore. Great contrast that between an inland country so genial, and such a stern, rugged, threatening and inhospitable coast.
It is only to be seen thoroughly when looked down upon from the bold headland. Below, the hard necessity of toiling over the beach, the sand yielding, and the pebbles round, hard, and rolling, makes the task of traversing this narrow beach a real and violent gymnastic exercise. No; let us keep to the heights where splendid villas, noble woods, the waving harvests, the delicious gardens which even to the very edge of the great rocky wall, look down upon that magnificent channel which separates the two shores of the two great empires of the world.
The land and the sea! What more! Both, here, have a great charm; nevertheless, he who loves the sea for her own sake, he who is her friend, her lover, will rather seek her in some less varied scene. To be really intimate with her, the great sandy beaches, provided, always, that they be not too soft, are far more convenient. They allow of such infinite strolls! They suffer us so well to build up our air castles, and to meditate upon so many things; they allow us to hold such familiar and deep conference with that never silent sea! Never do I complain of those vast and free arenas in which others find themselves so ill at ease. When there, I am never less lonely than when alone. I come, I go, I feel that ever present sea. It is there, ever there, the sublime companion; and if haply that companion be in gentle mood, I venture to speak, and the great companion does not disdain to speak to me again. How many things have we not said to each other in those quiet wastes, when the crowd is away, on the limitless sands of Scheveningen, Ostend, Royan, and Saint Georges. There it is that in long interviews we can establish some intimacy with the Sea, acquire some familiarity with its great speech.
When from the towers of Amsterdam the Zuyderzee looks muddy, and when at the dykes of Scheveningen the leaden waves seem ready to overleap the earthy mound, the Sea wears its least pleasing aspect; yet I confess that this combat between land and water attracts me forcibly—this great invention, this mighty effort, this triumph of man's skill and man's labor, over the fiercest force of inanimate nature.
And this sea also pleases me by the treasures of fecund life which I know to abound in its dark depths. It is one of the most populous in the world. On the night of St. John, when the fishery opens, you may see another sea arise from the depths—the Sea of Herrings. You will imagine that the boundless plain of waters will prove too limited for this great living upburst, this triumphant revelation of the boundless fecundity of Nature. Such was my first impression of this sea, and when I saw the pictures in which genius has so well marked its profound character, Ruysdaël's gloomy Estacade beyond any other painting in the Louvre has always irresistibly attracted me. Why? In the ruddy tints of those phosphorescent waters, I feel not the cold of the North Sea, but the fermentation, the stream, the rushing energy of life.
Nevertheless, were I asked what coast the most grandly and powerfully impresses me, I should answer, that of Brittany, especially those wild and sublime headlands of granite which terminate the old world at that bold point which dominates the Atlantic and defies the western storm winds. Nowhere have I better felt than there, those lofty and ennobling melancholies which are the best impressions of the sea.
But I must explain, here. There are different melancholies; there is a melancholy of the weak, and a melancholy of the strong,—the melancholy of the too sensitive souls who weep only for themselves, and that of the disinterested hearts, which cheerfully accept their own lot, and find nature ever blessing and blessed, but feel the evils of society, and in melancholy itself find strength for action, means for creating good or mitigating evil. Ah! what need we have, we of the working brain, often to strengthen our souls in that mood which we may call heroic melancholy.
When, some thirty years since, I paid a visit to this country, I could not account for the potent attraction that it had for me. At the foundation of this attractive potency of Brittany, is its great harmony. Elsewhere, we feel, though we cannot explain it to ourselves, a certain discordance between the race and the soil. The very beautiful Norman race, in those districts in which it is most unmixed, and where it retains the peculiar, ruddy complexion of the true Scandinavian, has not the slightest apparent affinity with the territory upon which it has intruded itself. In Brittany, on the contrary, on the most ancient geological formation on our globe, on that soil of granite and of flint, lives a race solid as that granite, sharp as that flint, a sturdy and antique race. Just as much as Normandy progresses, Brittany retrogrades. Witty, lively, and too imaginative, the impossible, the utterly absurd, are ever welcome to her. But, if wrong on many points, she is great upon a most important one; she has character; often you may think her erroneous, but never can you deem her common-place.
If we would for a time emerge from that wretched common-place, that deadly liveliness, that horrible waking dream "of stupid starers and of loud huzzas," let us seat ourselves on one of the impending and commanding peaks that overlook the bay of Douarnenez,—the stern, bold headland, for instance, of Penmark. Or, if the wind blow too strongly there for our frame, effeminated by the late hours, the bad atmosphere, and the hateful habits, and still more hateful passions, of the thronged city, let us take a quiet sail among the lower isles of the Morbihan, where the soft warm tide is lazy, and all but soundless. Where Brittany is mild, Brittany is surpassingly mild. Sailing among her islands and on her gentler tides, you might fancy yourself on Lethe; but, on the other hand, when Brittany is aroused, Brittany, take my word for it, is terribly strong and terribly in earnest!
In 1831 I felt only the sadness of that coast, not its more than compensating inspiration; I was yet to learn the real character of that sea. It is in the most solitary little creeks, pierced in between the wildest and most rugged looking rocks, that you will find her truly gay, joyous, buoyant, abounding in glad and vigorous life. Those rocks seem to you to be covered by you know not what greyish ashy asperities—look a little more closely and you perceive that that layer of seeming dust is a little world of living creatures, left there high and dry by the ebb of the sea, to be revived and fed again next tide. There, too, you see our little stone workers, hosts upon hosts of those sea hedge-hogs or urchins, which M. Cailland has so intelligently watched and so admirably described. All this swarming though minute world chooses and feels just contrariwise to our choice and our feeling. Beautiful Normandy terrifies them; the hard pebbles of the beach would crush them, and they love not, either, the crumbling limestone that overhangs the more smiling shore, for they care not to build where at any moment building and foundation may sink into the depths forever. They love and affect only the solid rocks of Brittany. Let us take a lesson from them, and trust only to truth and not to mere appearance. The marine life shuns precisely those enchanting shores whose vegetable life is the most abounding and the most brilliant. They are rich, but rich only in fossils; very curious are they to the geologist, but they yield to him only the bones of the dead. The stern granite, on the contrary, looks down upon the sea swarming with its piscine life, and supports upon its massive breast the humble, but none the less interesting little molluscæ whose laborious life makes the serious charm, the great moral of the sea.
And yet amidst all that teeming life there is a deep silence; that infinite population is ever and inevitably silent. Its life is self-concentrated, its labors unmarked, uncheered, by a sound; it has no connection with you or me—to us, that life is only another aspect of Death. A great and a dead solitude, says some feminine heart; it alarms, it saddens me.
Wrong! All here is lovable and friendly. These little creatures speak not to the world, but they all the time are hard at work for it. They yield themselves up to the sublime voice of their sublime parent, the Ocean, that speaks for them; by his great utterance, they speak, confidingly, and by proxy.
Between the silent earth and the mute tribes of the sea, a great, strong, grave, and sympathetic dialogue is constantly carried on—the harmonious agreement with the Great I AM, with himself and his great work—that great eternal conflict which, everywhere and always, is Love.
THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE—THE CURRENTS OF THE SEA.
Scarcely has the earth cast one glance upon herself ere she not merely compares herself to the Heavens above, but vaunts her own superiority. Geology, the mere infant, hurls a Titanic cry against her elder sister, Astronomy, that haughty and splendid queen of all the sciences. "Our mountains," exclaims Geology, "are not cast confusedly hither and thither like those stars in the sky; our mountains form systems in which are found the elements of a general and orderly arrangement of which the celestial constellations present no trace." Such is the bold and impassioned phrase which is uttered by a man as modest as he is illustrious,—M. Elias de Beaumont. Doubtless, we have not yet developed the order, which, yet, we may not doubt is great, which prevails in the seeming confusion of the Milky Way, but the more obvious regularity of the surface of the globe, the result of the revolutions in its unfathomed and unfathomable depths, preserve still, and ever will preserve, for the most ingenious science, many clouds and many mysteries. The forms of that great mountain, upheaved from the mighty mass of waters, which we call the Earth, shows many arrangements which, while they are sufficiently symmetrical, are still not reducible to what would seem a perfect system. The dry and elevated portions show themselves more or less as the waters leave them bare. It is the limiting line of the sea which, in reality, traces out the form of continent and of island; it is by the Sea that we commence all true understanding of Geography.
Let us note another fact, which has been discovered only within a few years past. The Earth presents us with some seemingly antagonistic features. The New World, for instance, stretches from north to south, the Old World from east to west; the sea, on the contrary, exhibits a great harmony, an exact correspondence between the two hemispheres. It is in the fluid portion of our world, that portion which we have deemed to be so capricious, that the greatest regularity exists. That which this globe of ours presents of the most rigidly regular, the most symmetrical, is just that which appears to be most utterly free, most entirely the mere sport of unrestricted motion. No doubt, the vertebræ and the bones of that vast creature have peculiarities which we, as yet, are not qualified to comprehend. But its living movements which cause the ocean currents, convert salt water into fresh water, which anon is converted to vapor to return again to the salt water, that admirable mechanism is as perfect and systematic as the sanguineous circulation of the superior animals; as perfect a resemblance as possible to the constant transformation of your own venous and arterial blood.
The world would wear quite another aspect, were we to class its regions, not by chains of mountains but by maritime basins.
Southern Spain, resembles Morocco, more than Navarre; Provence, resembles Algeria, rather than Dauphiny; Senegambia, the Amazon, rather than the Red Sea; and the great valley of the Amazon, is more like to the moist regions of Africa than it is to its arid neighbors, Peru, Chili, &c.
The symmetry of the Atlantic is still more striking in its under-currents and the winds and breezes that sweep over it. Their action potently helps to create these analogies, and to form what we may call the fraternity of the shores.
The principle of Geographical unity, will be more and more sought for in the maritime basin, where the waters and the winds, faithful intermediaries, create the relation, the assimilation, of the opposite shores. Far less can we ask this illustration of Geographical unity from the mountains, where two slopes frequently present to you, under the same latitude, both a Flora and a population absolutely different; on the one slope, eternal summer, on the other, eternal winter, according to the aspect of each. The mountain rarely gives unity of country; far more frequently, duality, discordance, actual diversity.
This striking state of the case was first pointed out by Borg. de Saint Vincent, and has since, in a thousand instances, been confirmed by the discoveries of Maury.
In the immense valley of the sea, beneath the double mountain of the two continents, there are, strictly speaking, only two basins:—
1. The basin of the Atlantic;
2. The great basin of the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific.
We cannot give the name of basin to the indeterminate cincture of the great Austral Ocean, which has no boundary save that on the north it is touched by the Indian Ocean, the Coraline and the Pacific.
The Austral Ocean alone exceeds in extent all other seas together, and covers almost one-half of the entire globe. Apparently, the depth of that sea is in proportion to its extent. While recent soundings of the Atlantic give a result of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, Ross and Denham found in the Southern Ocean from 14,000 to 46,000 feet. Here, too, we may note the mass of the Antarctic ice, infinitely more vast than the Arctic. We shall not be very wide of the truth, if we say that the southern hemisphere is the world of waters, the northern the world of land.
He who sails from Europe to cross the Atlantic, having been fortunate enough to get clear of our ports in which he too frequently is imprisoned by the westerly wind, and having cleared the variable zone of our capricious seas, speedily gets into the fine climate and constant serenity which the N. E. breezes, the genial trade-winds, spread over sea and sky. Above and around, everything favors him, everything smiles upon him, but, as he approaches the Line, the inspiring breezes cease to breathe balmily upon him, and the air is almost suffocating. He enters the circle of those calms which prevail under the Equator, and present unchangeably their barrier between our northern trade-winds and those of the south. Heavy mists and clouds are all above and around him, and the tropical rains descend in mighty torrents. Bitterly the seaman complains of those gloomy and deluging clouds, but only for their gloomy screen what scathing beams would descend upon the poor dizzy heads, and be reflected in smiting power from the bright, broad mirror of the Atlantic? But for those torrents which fall upon the other face of our globe, the Indian Ocean and the sea of Coral, what would be their fermentation in the craters of their antique volcanoes! That dark mass of blackest clouds, once the terror of the navigator and the obstacle to navigation, that sudden and dense night extended over those broad waters form precisely the safeguard, the protecting facility which softens our passage and enables us, sailing southward still, to meet again the bright sun, the clear sky, and the balmy mildness of the regular winds.
Quite naturally, quite inevitably, the heats of the Line raise the waters in masses of vapor, and form that dark band, so threatening in appearance, but in reality so beneficent.
The observer who from some other planet could look upon our world would see around her a ring of clouds not unlike the belt of Saturn. Did he seek the purpose and the use of that ring, he might, in reply, be told—"It is the regulator which, by turns absorbing and giving forth, equalizes the evaporation and fall of the waters, distributes the rains and dews, modifies the heat of each country, interchanges the vapors of the two worlds, and borrows from the southern world the rivers and streams of our northern world." Marvellous co-partnership and mutual reaction! South America, from the respiration of its vast forests, condensed into clouds, fraternally nourishes the flowers and fruits of our Europe. The air which revives and inspirits us, is the tribute paid by the hundred isles of Asia, exhaled by the great vegetation of Java or Ceylon, and entrusted to the great cloud-messenger that turns with the world and sheds life and freshness upon it.
Place yourself in imagination upon one of the many islands of the Pacific and look to the southward. Behind New Holland you will perceive that the southern ocean touches with its circular wave the two extreme points of the old and the new continents. No land in that antarctic world; not one of those little islands or of those pretended Polar lands which discoverers have marked only to behold their disappearance, and which probably have been but so many icebergs. Water, still water; water without end.
From the same post of observation on which I have, in imagination, placed you, in contrast with the great circle of antarctic waters, look eastward, towards the arctic hemisphere, and you may discern what Ritter terms the circle of fire. To speak more precisely, it is an opened ring, formed by the volcanoes commencing at the Cordilleras, passing by the heights of Asia, to the innumerable basaltic isles of the eastern ocean. The first volcanoes, those of America, present, for a length of a thousand leagues a succession of sixty gigantic Beacons whose constant eruptions command the abrupt coast and the distant waters. The others, from New Zealand to the North of the Philippines, number eighty still burning, and a countless host that are extinct. Steering northward, from Japan to Kamschatka, fifty flaming craters dispense their ruddy lights far away to the gloomy seas of the Arctic. In the whole, there is a circle of three hundred active volcanoes around the eastern world.
On the other front of the globe, our Atlantic Ocean presented a similar appearance, prior to the revolutions which extinguished most of the volcanoes of Europe and annihilated the continent of the Atlantis. Humboldt believes that that great ruin, only too strongly attested by tradition, was only too real. I may venture to add that the existence of that continent was in logical concordance with the general symmetry of the world, for that face of the globe was thus harmonized with the other. There rose, with the volcano of Teneriffe, which alone remains of them, and with our extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, of the Rhine, &c., those which were to destroy Atlantis. Altogether, they formed the counterpoise of the volcanoes of the Antilles, and other American craters.
From these burning or extinct volcanoes of India and the Antilles, of the Cuban and the Javanese seas proceed two enormous streams of hot water, which are to warm the north, and which we may fitly term the aortæ of the world. They are provided, beside or beneath, with their two counter currents which, flowing from the north, bring cold water to compensate the flow of hot water and preserve the balance. To the two streams of hot water which are extremely salt, the cold currents administer a mass of fresher water which returns to the equator, the great electric furnace, where it is heated and made salt.
These streams of hot water, narrow at first, some twenty leagues in breadth, long preserve their force and their identity, but by degrees they grow weaker as they widen ultimately to about a thousand leagues. Maury estimates that the hot water stream which flows from the Antilles in a northernly course towards us displaces and modifies a fourth part of the waters of the Atlantic. These great features in the life of the seas, noticed only recently, were, however, as visible as the continents themselves. Our great Atlantic and her sister, the Indian artery, proclaim themselves by their color. In each case it is a great blue torrent which traverses the green waters; so darkly blue is this torrent, that the Japanese call theirs the black river. Ours is very clearly seen, as it leaps boilingly from the Gulf of Mexico, between Cuba and Florida, and flows west, salt, and distinguishable between its two green walls. In vain does the Ocean press upon it, on either side, it still flows on, unbroken. By I know not what intrinsic density, or molecular attraction, these blue waters are so firmly held together, that, rather than admit the green water, they rear their centre into an arch, and they thus slope to the right and to the left, so that anything thrown into them rolls off into the ocean. Rapid and strong, this Gulf stream at first flows towards the north, along the shores of the United States; but, on reaching the great bank of Newfoundland, its right arm sweeps off to the eastward, while the left arm, as an under current, hastens to create, towards the Pole, the recently discovered open sea where all else around is fast frozen. The right arm spreading out, and proportionately weakened, at length reaches Europe, touches Ireland and England, which again divide the waters previously divided at Newfoundland. Weaker and weaker, it yet carries a little warmth to Norway, and carries American woods to that poor Iceland which, but for them, would die frozen beneath the very fires of her volcano.
The Indian and the American streams have this in common, that, starting from the Line, from the electric centre of the globe, they carry with them immense powers of creation and agitation. On the one hand they seem the deep and teeming womb of a whole world of living creatures; on the other hand, they are the centre and the vehicle of tempests, whirlwinds, and water spouts. So much nursing gentleness and so much destroying fury; have we not here a great contradiction? No, it proves only that the fury disturbs only the exterior and not any considerable depths. The weakest creatures, shelled atomies, the microscopic medusæ, fluid creatures that a mere touch dissolves, availing themselves of the same current, sail, in all safety, though the tempest is loud and fierce right above them. Few of them reach our shores; they are met at Newfoundland by the cold stream from the Pole, which slays them by myriads. Newfoundland is the very bone-house of these frost-stricken voyagers. The lightest remain in suspension, even after death; but at length sink, like snowy showers to the depths, where they deposit those banks of shells which extend from Ireland to America.
Murray calls the Indian and American streams of hot water, the two Milky Ways of the sea.
So similar in color, heat, direction, and describing precisely the same curve, they yet have not the same destiny. The American, at the very outset, enters an inclement sea, the Atlantic, which, open to the North, bears down the floating army of icebergs from the Pole, and it thus early parts with much of its heat. The Indian stream, on the contrary, first circulating among the isles, reaches a closed sea well protected from the North, and thus for a long time preserves its original heat, electric and creative, and traces upon our globe an enormous train of life.
Its centre is the apogee of terrestrial energy, in vegetable treasures, in monsters, in spices, in poisons. From the secondary currents which it gives off, and which flow towards the North, results another world, that of the Sea of Coral. There, says Maury, over a space as large as the four continents the polypes are industriously building thousands of islands, shoals, and reefs, which are gradually studding and dividing that sea; shoals which at present are the annoyance and the dread of the mariner, but which will at length rise to the surface, join together to form a continent, which, some day—who knows? may be the refuge of the human race, when flood, or fire, or earthquake, leave it no other shelter.
John Reynaud in his fine article in the Encyclopedie, remarks that our world is not solitary. The infinitely complicated curve which it describes represents the forces, the various influences, which act upon her, and bear testimony to her connection and communication with the great luminaries of the Heavens.
That connection and communication are especially visible with the Sun and Moon; the latter, though the servant of earth, has none the less power over her. As the flowers of the earth turn their heads sunward, so does the flower-bearing earth aspire towards him. In her most movable portion, her immense fluid mass, she raises herself and gives visible token of feeling his attraction. She rises as far as she can and swelling her bosom twice a day gives, at least, a sigh to the friendly stars.
Does not our earth feel the attraction of yet other globes? Are her tides ruled only by the sun and moon? All the learned world say it, all seamen believe it; thence terrible errors resulting in shipwrecks. At the dangerous shallows of Saint Malo the error amounted to eighteen feet. It was in 1839 that Chazallan, who nearly lost his life through these errors, began to discover and calculate the secondary, but considerable undulations which, under various influences, modify the general tide. Stars less dominant than the sun and moon have, doubtless, their share in producing the alternate rise and fall of the waters of our globe. But under what law do they produce this effect? Chazallan tells us;—"the undulation of the tide in a port follows the law of vibrating chords." A serious and suggestive sentence, that, which leads us to comprehend that the mutual relations of the stars are the mathematical relations of the celestial music, as antiquity affirmed.
The earth, by great and secondary tides, speaks to the planets, her sisters. Do they reply to her? We must think so. From their fluid elements they also must rise, sensible to the rise of the waters of the earth. The mutual attraction, the tendency of each star to emerge from egotism, must cause sublime dialogues to be heard in the skies. Unfortunately the human ear can hear but the least part of them. There is another point to be considered. It is not at the very moment of the passing of the influential planet that the sea yields to its influence. She is in no such servile haste to obey; she must have time to feel and obey the attraction. She has to call the idle waters to herself, to vanquish their inert force, to attract, to draw to her the most distant. The rotation of the world, too, so terribly rapid, is incessantly displacing the points subjected to the attractive power. To this we must add that the great army of waves in its combined motion has to encounter all the opposition of natural obstacles,—islands, capes, straits, the various curvings of shores, and the no less potent obstacles of winds, currents, and the rapid descent of mountain torrents, swelled by the melted snows;—these, and a thousand other unforseen accidents occur, to alter the regular movement into terrible strife. The ocean yields not. The display of strength which is made by broad and swift rivers cannot intimidate him. The waters, that the rivers pour down upon him, he heaps them up into mountainous masses and drives them back so violently that he seems bent on forcing them to the summits of the mountains from whence they have descended.
Obstacles thus numerous and various cause apparent tidal irregularities, which at once impress and confuse our minds. None of those irregularities is more surprising than the difference of their time between two quite closely neighboring ports. One Havre tide, for instance, equals two of Dieppe,—as is mentioned by Chazallon, Baude, &c. It is greatly to the honor of human genius to have subjected phenomena so complex to even proximately accurate calculation and positive laws.
But beneath these exterior movements, the sea has others within; those under currents by which she is traversed in various directions and at varying depths. Superposed at different depths, or flowing laterally in opposite directions, hot currents in one direction, cold counter currents in another, they, between them, keep up the circulation of the sea, the exchange of salt and fresh waters, and the alternating pulsation which is the result. The hot pulse-beat is from the line to the pole; the cold, from the pole to the line. Shall we be warranted in saying, as it has sometimes been said, that these currents so distinct and unmingling, may be strictly compared to the vessels, veins and arteries, of the superior animals? Strictly speaking, we cannot so compare them; but they have considerable resemblance to the less determinate circulation which materialists have lately discovered in some inferior creatures, as molluscs and annelides. That lacunary circulation supplies the want of, and at the same time prepares, the vascular; the blood flows in currents before it has precise channels.
Such is the sea. She resembles a vast animal that has stopped short at the first degree of organization. Who has developed the currents, those regular fluctuation of the abysses into which we never descend? Who has taught us the geography of those dark waters? Those that live within or float upon those waters;—animals and vegetables. We shall see how the huge whale and the minute shelled atomies, how even the woods of America, floating to bleak Iceland, have concurred in revealing the flow of hot water from the Antilles to Europe, and the counter current of cold meeting it at Newfoundland, passing it beside or below, and thus getting its ices melted into immense fogs.
A vast cloud of red animalcules, carried by a tempest from Orinoco to France, explained the great aërial current of the Southwest which brings to our Europe the rains that have their birth place in the far Cordilleras of South America.
But for the constant change of waters which is made by the currents in the depths of the sea, she would, in parts, be filled up with salt, sands, animal and vegetable remains and the like detritus. It would be another case of the Dead Sea, which, for want of movement, has its banks loaded with salt, its vegetation incrusted with salt, and the very winds that cross its surface, burning, withering, breathing only of famine and of death.
All the scattered observations upon currents of the air and of the water, the seasons, the winds and the tempests, were long confined to the memory of the fishermen and sailors, and too frequently died with them. Meteorology, that guide of navigation, for want of being systematized and centralized seemed vain, and was even denied rank and usefulness as a science. The illustrious M. Biot, demanded a strict account of the little that she had yet done. However, upon the two opposite shores of Europe and America, persevering men founded that neglected and denied science upon the basis of observation.
The latest and most celebrated of these observers, Maury the American, courageously undertook what a whole administration had recoiled from, viz., to extract from and arrange the contents of I know not what multitude of log books, those often confused and ill-kept records of the sea captains. These extracts, reduced into tables under regular heads, gave, in the result, rules and generalities. A congress of seamen assembled at Bruxelles decided that the observations, henceforth to be logged with more care, shall be sent from all parts to the observatory at Washington. A noble compliment, that, paid by Europe to young America and her patient and ingenious Maury, the learned poet of the sea. He has not only summed up and exemplified her laws; he has done much more, for, by the force of heart and by the love of nature as much as by positive results, he has carried the whole world with him. His charts and his first work, of which a hundred and fifty thousand copies were printed, are liberally distributed to sailors of all nations by the United States government. A number of eminent men in France and in Holland, Tricot, Jullien, Margole, Zurcher, and others, have made themselves the interpreters, the eloquent missionaries, of this apostle of the sea.
Why is it that in this matter America, so young, has outstripped Europe, so old? It is precisely because she is young, and burning with a desire to be in close connection with the whole globe. Upon her superb continent and in the midst of so many states, she yet deems herself solitary. So far from her European brother, she looks towards that centre of civilization as the earth looks toward the sun, and whatever seems to draw her into closer and more familiar connection with the grand old world, thrills her in every nerve. We have abundant proof of that from the joy, the intoxication, the perfect frenzy with which she hailed the completion of the submarine telegraph which joined the two distant shores, and promised that they should communicate within the brief space of minutes, in such wise that the two worlds should have but one thought.
TEMPESTS.
It is with a very real and masterly genius that Maury has demonstrated the harmony that exists between air and water. As is the maritime ocean, so is the aërial ocean. Their alternating movements and the exchange of their elements are precisely analogous. The aërial ocean distributes heat over the world and making dryness or humidity. The latter, the air draws from the seas, from the infinity of the central ocean, and especially at the tropics, the great boilers of the universal cauldron. Dryness, on the contrary, the air acquires as it sweeps over the arid deserts, the great continents, and the glaciers (those true intermediate poles of the globe), which draw out its last drop of moisture from it. The heating at the equator and the cooling again at the pole, alternating the weight and lightness of the vapors, cause them to cross each other in horizontal currents and counter currents; while under the line the heat which lightens the vapors creates perpendicular currents, ascending from sea to sky. Previous to dispersing they hover in this misty region, forming, as it were, a ring of clouds around the globe.
Here, then, we have pulsations both maritime and aërial, different from the pulse of the tide. This latter was external, impressed by other planets upon ours, but this pulse of various currents is inherent in the earth, it is her own veritable life.
To my taste, one of the finest things in Maury's book, is what he says of salt: "The most obvious agent in producing maritime circulation, heat, would not alone suffice; there is another and a no less important agent, nay, an even more important—it is salt."
So abundant is salt in the sea that if it could be cast on shore it would form a mountain 4,500 feet thick.
Though the saltness of the sea does not vary very greatly, it yet, is augmented or diminished somewhat, according to locality, currents and proximity to the equator or to the poles. As it is more or less salted, the sea is lighter or heavier, and more or less mobile. This continued, with its variations, causes the water to run more or less swiftly, that is to say, causes currents, so like the horizontal currents in the bosom of the sea and the vertical currents from the sea of water upward to the sea of air.
A French writer, M. Lartique, has ingeniously corrected some deficiences and inexactitudes in M. Maury's great work "Maritime Annals." But the American author had anticipated criticism by frankly pointing out where and why he thought his work and his science incomplete. On some points distinctly confining himself to hypothesis, at times he shows himself uncertain, and anxious. His frank and candid book quite plainly reveals the mental struggle which the author undergoes between biblical literalism and the modern sentiment the sympathy of nature. The former makes the sea a thing, created by God at once, a machine turning under his hand, while the latter sees in the sea a living force, almost a person, in which the Loving Soul of the World, is creating still, and ever will create.
It is curious to observe, how, by degrees, as it were by irresistible proclivity, Maury approaches this latter view. As far as possible he explains himself mechanically, by weight, heat, density, &c. But this does not suffice, and for certain cases he adds a certain molecular attraction or a certain magnetic action. But even this does not suffice, and then he has recourse to the physiological laws which govern life. He attributes to the sea a pulse, veins, arteries, and even a heart. Are these mere forms of style, simple comparisons? Not so; he has in him—and it is one source of his strength—an imperious, an irresistible feeling of the personality of the sea. Before him the sea was to most seamen a thing; to him it is a person, a violent and terrible mistress whom we must adore, but must also subdue.
He loves, he deeply loves the sea; but on the other hand, he every moment thinks it necessary to restrain his enthusiasm and to keep within bounds. Like Levammerdam, Baunet and many other illustrious men at once philosophical and religious, he seems to fear that in explaining nature too completely by her own phenomena we show disrespect to Nature's God. Surely, a very ill founded timidity. The more we exhibit the universality of life,—the more we confess our adoration of the great soul of the universe. Where would be the danger were it proven that the sea in her constant aspiration towards organized existence is the most energetic form of the Eternal Desire which formerly evoked this globe and still creates in it?
This salt sea, like blood, which has its circulation, its pulse, and its heart (for so Maury terms the equator) in which its two bloods are exchanged, is it quite sure that an entity that has all these is a mere thing, an inorganic element?
Look at a great clock, or a steam engine which imitates almost exactly the movement of the vital forces. Is that a freak of nature? Should we not far rather imagine that in these masses there is a mixture of animality?
One immense fact that he exhibits, but only secondarily, and as it were in a mere side view, is that the infinite life of the ocean, the myriads upon myriads of beings which it at every moment makes and destroys, absorb its various salts to form their flesh, their shells, &c., &c. They thus, by depriving the water of its salt, render it lighter, and, by so much, aid in producing currents. In the potent laboratories of animal organization, as those of the Indian ocean and the Coraline, that force, elsewhere less remarkable, appears as what it really is—immense.
"Each of these imperceptibles," says Maury, "changes the equilibrium of the ocean, they harmonize and compensate it." But is this saying enough? Should they not be the grand moving powers which have created the currents of the sea, put the immense machine into motion?
Who knows whether this vital circulus of the marine animality is not the starting point of all physical circulus? If animalized sea does not give the eternal impulse to the animalizable sea—not organized, indeed, as yet, but aspiring to be so, and already fermenting with approaching life?
TEMPESTS.
There are occasional commotions of the sea, which Maury, in his forcible way, calls "the Sea's spasms." He especially alludes to the sudden movements which appear to proceed from below, and which in the Asiatic seas are often equivalent to a genuine tempest. These sudden outbursts are attributed to various causes, as: 1st, the violent collision of two tides or currents; 2nd, the sudden superabundance of rain water on the sea's surface; 3rd, the breaking up and sudden melting of the icebergs, &c. To these causes, some authors add the hypothesis of electric movements and volcanic submarine heavings.
It seems probable, however, that the depths of the great mass of the waters are quite peaceable; were it otherwise, the sea would be unfitted for her office of nursing-mother to her myriads upon myriads of living beings. If these occasional commotions, so violent at the surface, were equally so at the bottom of the sea, what could preserve the nurslings of that great nursery where a whole world of delicate creatures more fragile even than those of our earth, are cradled in and nourished by its waters? The myriad-life of the Ocean assures us that these violent commotions cannot be common in its depths.
Naturally, the great sea is of great general regularity; subject to great periodical and uniform movements. Tempests are the occasional and transient violences into which the sea is lashed by the winds, by electric power, or by certain violent crises of evaporation. They are the mere accidents which reveal themselves on the surface, but tell us nothing about the real, the mysterious personality of the sea. It would be sad reasoning were we to judge of a human temperament by the ravings of a brain-fevered man; and by what better right do we judge the sea on account of the momentary and merely superficial movements which probably do not make themselves felt to the depth of a very few hundred feet? Everywhere that the sea is very deep, we may fairly assume that she is constantly calm, ever producing, ever nourishing, her quite literally countless brood. She takes no note of those petty accidents which occur only at the surface. The mighty hosts of her children that live, as we cannot too often repeat, in the depths of her peaceful night, and rise at the most only once a year within the influence of light and storm must love their great, calm, prolific mother as Harmony itself.
But these surface-disturbances of the great mother Ocean have too serious a bearing upon the life of man, to allow of his sparing any pains towards obtaining a thorough comprehension of them. And to obtain that comprehension is no easy matter; in making the necessary observations, the boldest of us is a little apt to lose his cool presence of mind. Even the most serious descriptions give only vague and general features, scarcely anything of the marked individuality which makes every tempest a thing of originality, a thing sui generis, the unforeseen result of a thousand unknown circumstances, potent in their influence, but obscure far beyond our power of search. He who safely gazes from his safe watch-tower on the shore, may, no doubt, see more clearly, as he is not distracted by his own danger. But for that very reason, he cannot so well appreciate the tempest in its grand and terrible entirety, as he can who is in the very centre of its rage and of its power, and looks in every direction upon that terrible panorama!
We mere landsmen are indebted to the bold navigators for at least the courtesy of giving what old Chaucer calls "faith and full credence" to what they tell us about what they have actually seen and suffered. It seems to me that there is exceedingly bad taste in that sceptical levity which men of the study, those stay-at-home travellers occasionally exhibit in their criticisms of what seamen tell us, for instance, about the height of the waves. They laugh at the seaman who tells us of waves a hundred feet in height. Engineers affect to be able to measure the tempest, and to assure us that twenty feet is the utmost height of a wave. On the other hand, an excellent observer assures us, on the testimony of his own sight, that standing in safety on the shore, observing calmly, and in absence of all distraction, he has seen waves that would overtop the towers of Notre Dame, and the heights of Montmartre. It is abundantly evident that these opposing witnesses speak of two totally different things; and hence their flat contradiction. If we speak of the lower bed of the tempest, of those long bowling waves which even in their fury preserve a certain regularity, probably the calculation of the engineers is pretty exact. With their rounded crests alternating with depressed valleys, it is likely enough that their utmost height does not greatly exceed twenty or five-and-twenty feet. But your chopping sea, where cross wave furiously hurls itself against cross wave, rises far higher. In their fierce collision they hurl each other to a quite prodigious height, and fall with a crushing weight, assailed by which the stoutest craft would open her seams, and go bodily down into the dark depths of the angry sea. Nothing so heavy as sea water, in those mighty shocks, those enormous falls of which sailors truthfully speak, and of which none but those who have witnessed them, can calculate the tremendous greatness and power.
On a certain day, not of tempest but of emotion, when old Ocean indulged only in wild and graceful gaieties, I was tranquilly seated upon a beautiful headland of some eighty feet in height, and I enjoyed myself in watching the waves as upon a line of a quarter of a league they rushed in as if to assail my rocky seat, the green crest of each wave rounding and rearing, wave urging wave as though in actual and intelligent racing. Now and then a sea would strike so that my very headland seemed to tremble, and burst as with a thunder clap at my very feet. Advancing, retiring, returning, breaking, the wildly sportive waves were for a long time quite admirably regular in their movements. But on a sudden this regularity was at an end. Some wild cross wave from the west suddenly struck my great regular and hitherto well behaved wave from the south. Such was the crash that in an instant the very sky above me was darkened by the blinding spray; and on my lofty promontory I was covered, not with the many colored and fleeting mist, but with a huge, dark, massive wave, which fell on me, heavy, crushing, and thoroughly saturating. Ah! Just then I should very much have liked the company of those very learned Academicians and ultra positive Engineers, who are so well posted up in the combats of the Ocean, and so very certain that the utmost height of a wave is just twenty feet! No; tranquilly seated in our studies we should not lightly question the veracity of so many bold, hardy, and resolved men, who have looked Death in the face too often to be guilty of the childish vanity of exaggerating the dangers which they have often braved—and are ready to brave again. Nor should we ever oppose the calm narratives of ordinary navigators on the great and well known courses to the animated and often thrilling pictures occasionally presented to us by the bold discoverers who seek the very reefs and shoals which the common herd of sailors so carefully avoid. Cook, Peron, Durville—discoverers such as these incurred very real dangers in the then unfrequented Australian and Coraline seas, compelled as they were to dare the continually shifting sand bank, and the conflicting currents which raise such frightful commotions in the narrow channels.
"Without tempest, with only rollers to deal with, and with a moderate wind right abaft, a cross wave will give your craft such a shock, that the ship's bell will strike, and if these big rollers with their sweeping motion, continue for any time, your masts will go by the board, your seams will open—you will be a wreck." So says the experienced Durville—gallant sailor, if ever there was one. And he tells us that he has himself seen waves from eighty to a hundred feet high. "These waves," he says, "only boarded us with their mere crests, or the craft must have been swamped. As it was she staggered, and then for an instant stood still, as though too terrified to understand what was the matter. The men upon the deck were for moments completely submerged. For four long hours that night this horrible chaos endured; and those hours seemed an eternity to turn one's hair grey. Such are the southern tempests, so terrible that even ashore the natives have a presentiment of their approach, and shelter themselves in caves."
However exact and interesting these descriptions may be, I do not care to copy them; still less would I be bold enough to invent descriptions of what I have not seen. I will only speak briefly about tempests which I have seen, and which have, as I believe, taught me the different characteristics of the Ocean and the Mediterranean.
During half a year that I passed at about two leagues from Genoa, on the prettiest shore in the world, at Nervi, I had in that sheltered spot but one little sudden tempest, but while it lasted it raged with a quite wonderful fury. As I could not, quite so well as I wished, watch it from my window, I went out and along the narrow lanes that separate the palaces, I ventured down, not indeed, to the beach, for in reality, there is none worthy the name, but to a ledge of black, volcanic rock, which forms the shore, a narrow path, often not exceeding three feet in width, and as often overhanging the sea at varying heights of from thirty up to sixty feet. One could not see far out; the spray continually raised by the whirlwind, drew the curtain too closely too allow of one's seeing far, or seeing much, but all that was to be seen was sufficiently frightful. The raggedness, the salient and cutting angles, of this iron-bound coast, compelled the tempest to make incredible efforts, to take tremendous leaps, as, foaming and howling, it broke upon the pitiless rocks. The tumult was absurd, mad; there was nothing connected, nothing regular; discordant thunders were mingled or followed by sharp shrill shrieks, like those of the steam engine; piercing shrieks, against which one only in vain tried to stop his ears. Stunned by this wild scene, which assailed sight and hearing at once, I steadied myself against a projecting wall of rock, and thus comparatively sheltered, I was better able to study the grandly furious strife. Short and chopping were the waves, and the fiercest of the strife was on this side where the sea broke on the ragged, yet sharply pointed rocks, as they rose boldly above, and ran out far beneath the waves, in long, shelving, reefs. The eye, as well as the ear was vexed, for a blinding snow was falling, its dazzling whiteness heightened by contrast with the dark waves into which it fell.
On the whole, I felt that the Sea had less to do than the land in rendering the scene terrible; it is exactly the contrary on the Ocean.
THE STORM OF OCTOBER, 1859.
The storm, which of all storms, I had the best opportunity of observing, was that which swept in fury over the west of France, from the 24th of October 1859, to the 31st of the same month, the implacable and indefatigable storm, which, with but few and very short intervals, raged furiously for six days and six nights, and strewed our whole western coasts with wrecks. Both before and after that storm, the barometer indicated great disturbances, and the telegraphic communications were cut off by the breaking of the wires, or the magnetic falsifications. Very hot seasons had preceded this tempest, but it brought us a succession of very different weather; rainy, and cold. Even 1860, up to the very day on which I write these lines, is marked by heavy rain storms, and cold winds from the west, and south, which seem to bring us all the rains of the Atlantic, and of the great South Sea.
I watched this tempest from a spot so smiling and peaceful that tempest was the last thing that one would anticipate there. I speak of the little port of Saint George, near Royan, just at the entrance of the Gironde. I had passed an exceedingly quiet five months there, meditating what I should say on the subject which I had treated upon in 1859; that subject at once so serious and so delicate. The place and the book are alike filled with memories very agreeable to me. Could I have written that book in any other place? I know not; but one thing is quite certain: the wild perfume of that country; its aspect, at once staid and gentle, and the vivifying odors of its Brooms, that pungent and agreeable shrub of the Landes, had much to do with that book, and will ever be associated with it in my thought.
The people of the place are well matched with its aspect and its nature. No vulgarity, no coarseness, among them. The farming population are grave in manner, and moral in speech and conduct, and the seagoing population, consists, for the most part, of pilots, a little band of Protestants, escaped from persecution. All around, too, there is an honesty so primitive that locks and bolts are absolutely unknown there. Noise and violence are utterly out of the question among people who are modest and reserved, as seamen seldom are, and who have a quiet and retiring tact not always to be found among a far more pretentious and highly placed people. Though well known to and well respected by them, I yet enjoyed all the solitude which study and labor demanded. I was all the more interested in these people and their perils. Without speaking to them, I daily and hourly watched them in their heroic labors, and heartily wished them both safety and success. I was suspicious of the weather, and looking upon the dangerous channel, I often asked myself whether the sea, so long gentle and lovely, would not, sooner or later, show us quite another countenance.
This really dangerous place has nothing sad or threatening in its aspect. Every morning, from my window, I could watch the white sails, slightly ruddied by the morning beams, of quite a fleet of small coasters, that only waited for a wind to leave the little port. At this port, the Gironde is fully nine miles wide. With some of the solemnity of the great rivers of America, it combines the gaiety of Bourdeaux. Royan is a pleasure place, a bathing town which is resorted to by all Gascony. Its bay, and the adjoining one of St. George, are gratuitously regaled with the wild pranks of the porpoises, that boldly venture into the river, and into the very midst of the bathers, leaping, at once heavily and gracefully, six feet, and more, above the surface of the water. It would seem that they are profoundly convinced of the fact, that no one thereabout is addicted to fishing; that at that point of great daring and great labor, where from hour to hour all hands may be called upon to succor some imperilled vessel, folks will scarcely care to slay the poor Porpoise, for his oil.
To this gaiety of the waters, add the especially harmonious beauty of the two shores, as the abounding vineyards of Medoc look across to the varied culture of the fertile fields of Saintonge. The sky, here, has not the fixed, and sometimes rather monotonous beauty of the Mediterranean, but, on the contrary, is very changeable. From the mingling waters of sea and river, rise variegated mists, which cast back upon the watery mirror, strange gleamings of gorgeous coloring, rod, blue, deepest orange, and most delicately pale green. Fantastic shapes, "a moment seen, then gone for ever," "appearing only to depart, and seen only to be regretted," adorn the entrance to the Ocean with strange monuments of bold collonades, sublime bridges, and, occasionally, triumphal arches.
The two crescent-shaped shores of Royan and Saint Georges, with their fine sands afford to the most delicate feet a delightful promenade of which one does not easily grow tired, tempted, and regaled as we are by the perfume of the pines which so enliven the downs with their young verdure. The fine promontories which overlook these shores, and the sandy inland downs send near and far their healthful perfumes. That which predominates on the downs has a something of medicinal, a mingled odor, which seems to concentrate all the sun and the warmth of the sands. The inland heaths furnish the more pungent odors which stir the brain and cheer the heart; thyme, and wild thyme, and marjoram, and sage which our fathers held sacred for its many virtues, and peppermint, and, above all, the little wild violet, exhale a mingled odor surpassing all the spicy odors of the far East.
It seems to me that on these heaths the birds sing more beautifully than elsewhere. Never have I heard elsewhere such a lark as I listened to in July on the promontory of Vallière, as she rose higher and higher, her dark wings gilded and glinting in the rays of the fast setting sun. Her notes coming from a height of probably a thousand feet were as sweet as they must needs have been powerful. It was to her humble nest, to her upward gazing and listening nestlings that she evidently sang her "wood notes wild," her song at once so rustic and so sublime, in which one might fancy that she translated into harmony that glorious sunlight in which she hovered, and called to her nestlings—"Come up hither my little ones, come!"
Out of all these, perfumes and song, soft air, and sea made mild by the waters of the beautiful river, proceeded an infinitely agreeable, though not very brilliant harmony. The moon shone with a softened light, the stars were quite visible, but not very bright, and the atmosphere so mild and pleasant, that it would have been voluptuous, that whole scene and its accessories had there not mingled with all a something, which made one reflect, and substituted active thought for luxuriously idle reverie.
And why so? Do those shifting sands, those many colored and varying hues of the downs, and that crumbling and fossiliferous limestone remind you of the eternal change, that one only rule which here on earth has no exception? Or, is it the silent but undying memory of the persecuted Protestants? It is also, and in still greater power, the solemnity of the roadstead, the frequency of wrecks, the near neighborhood of the most terrible of seas, by which the interior becomes so serious, so suggestive of great and solemn thought.
A great mystery is being enacted here, a treaty, a marriage infinitely more important than any human and royal nuptials; a marriage of interest between ill matched spouses. The lady of the waters of the south-west, swelled and quickened by Tarn and Dordogne and by those fierce brethren the torrents of the Pyrenees, hastens, that amiable and sovereign Gironde, to present herself to her giant spouse, old Ocean, here, more than elsewhere, stern and repulsive. The mud banks of the Charente and the long line of sands which, for fifty leagues, oppose him, put him in bad humor; and when he cannot hurtle fiercely against Bayonne and Saint Jean de Luz, he pitilessly assaults the poor Gironde. Her outlet is not like that of the Seine, between sheltering shores; she falls at once into the presence of the open and limitless ocean. Generally, he repels her; she recoils to the right and to the left, and seeks shelter in the marshes of Saintonge, or among the Medoc vineyards to whose vines she imparts the cool and sober qualities of her own waters.
And now imagine the boldness of the men who throw themselves headlong into the strife between two such spouses; who go in the frail boat to the aid of the timorous craft who wait at the mouth of the pass afraid to venture in. Such is the boldness of my pilots here; a boldness at once so modest, so heroic, so glorious, could it but be fully described.
It is easy to understand that the old monarch of shipwrecks, the antique treasurer and guardian of so much submerged wealth bears no great good will towards the bold ones who venture to dispute with him his prey. If he sometimes allows them to succeed, sometimes also he avenges himself upon them—more malignantly delighted to drown one pilot than to wreck two ships.
But for sometime past no such accident had been spoken of. The exceedingly hot summer of 1859, produced only one wreck in this neighborhood; but I knew not what agitation even then foretold greater disasters. September came, then October, and the brilliant crowd of visitors, loving the sea only when it is calm and smiling, already took its departure. I still remained, partly kept there by my unfinished work, partly by the strange attraction which that season of the year has for me.
In October we had strange eccentric winds, such as seldom blow there; a burning storm-wind from the East, that quarter usually so peaceable. The nights were occasionally very hot, even more so in October than in August; sleepless, agitated, nervous nights; nights to quicken the pulse to the fever pace, and without apparent cause to render one excited and peevish.
One day as we sat among the pines, beaten by the wind though somewhat sheltered by the downs, we heard a young voice, singularly clear, piercing, resonant, and, so to speak, metallic. It was the voice of a very young girl, small in figure, but austere in countenance. She was walking with her mother and singing snatches of an old ballad. We invited her to sit down and sing us the whole of it. This old ballad, this rustic little poem admirably expressed the double spirit of the country. Saintonge is, in the first place, essentially rustic and home-loving, with none of the wild adventurous impulses of the Basques. And yet in spite of her sedentary tastes Saintonge turns sailor and goes forth into not unfrequent dangers. And why? The old ballad explains:
The lovely daughter of a king while washing, like Nausica of the Odyssey, loses her ring in the sea; a young lover dives in search of it, and is drowned. She weeps his loss so bitterly that she is changed into the rosemary of the shore, at once so bitter and so odorous. This ballad, heard in that pine wood already shuddering and moaning at the threatening storm, touched and delighted me, but at the same time strengthened my secret presentiments.
Whenever I went to Royan, I might calculate upon being overtaken, unsheltered, in a storm, before I could accomplish that short journey of only a few hours. It pressed upon me in the vineyards of Saint George and the heathy table land of the promontory which I first ascended; and it pressed upon me more heavily still as I traversed the great semi-circular shore of Royan. Even now, in October, the heath exhaled all its perfumes of wild flowers and shrubs, and their perfumes seemed to me more pungent now than ever. On the still unvexed shore, the wind, warmly and gently fanned my cheek, and the no less gentle sea in murmuring ripples strove to kiss my feet. But for both caressing wind and gently murmuring wave, I was too well prepared, too suspicious, to be deceived by them. By way of prelude to the great change, after so many beautiful and almost effeminating evenings, suddenly, in the very middle of the night, burst forth a frightful gale of wind. Again and again this occurred, but especially on the night of the 26th. On that night I felt sure that some great damage must needs be done. Our pilots had gone out on their generous and perilous errand. During those long fluctuations of the equinoctial weather they had hesitated somewhat, delayed some little, then they grew impatient of delay, duty and business called to them aloud, and they resolved to put out, at the risk of some sudden and ruinous gust. I felt that there would be some such; I whispered to myself, "some one perishes now." And too truly was it so.
From a pilot boat, which, in face of the bad weather, put out to rescue a vessel imperilled in the pass, an unfortunate man was swept from the deck, and the boat, herself in utmost peril was unable to lie-to for him. He left three young children and a pregnant wife. What rendered this calamity especially to be regretted, was the fact that this excellent young man, with the generous affection so common among sailors, had married a poor girl rendered incapable of earning her bread by an accident which had mutilated her hands. Alas! How much was she to be pitied, helpless, pregnant, burdened with a young family—and thus suddenly widowed!
A subscription was made for her, and I went to Royan, with my mite towards it. A pilot whom I met there, spoke to me, with real grief and emotion, of the sad accident. "Ah, Sir," said he, "such is our hard profession; it is precisely when wind and sea are most angry, and most threatening, that it is especially incumbent upon us to go forth." The marine commissioner, who keeps the register of the living and the dead of that little community, and who, better than any one else, knows the history and the circumstances of every family there, appeared to me to be exceedingly saddened and anxious. It was plain that he thought, as I did, that this was only the beginning of calamity.
I resumed my journey along the shore, and in the course of it, I had the opportunity to notice and study the dark zone of clouds which hemmed me in on every side, to the extent of, I should judge, not less than eight or ten leagues. On my left was Saintonge, expectant, dull, passive; on my right, Medoc, from which I was separated by the river, lay in a gloomy and misty stillness. Behind me, coming from the west and brooding over the Ocean, was a whole world of cloud and mist, but in my face, and opposing that world of cloud, blew the fresh land-breeze. Sweeping down the course of the Gironde, it seemed that the funereal pall that rose above the Ocean, might be repulsed and dispelled. Still uncertain, I looked behind me to the shoal of Cordovan, from which, pale, fantastic, weird, its tower rose like some spectre that said—"Woe, woe, woe!"
I was not mistaken. I saw quite plainly that the land-breeze not only would be conquered, but that it would be compelled to become the help-mate of its seeming foe. That land-breeze blew quite low over the Gironde, swept away from before it all dwarfish obstacles, but still hovered beneath the high pitched and inky clouds that swept in from the Ocean, and formed for those clouds, as it were, a slippery inclined plane over which they would glide only the more easily and the more swiftly. In a brief space all was still from the landward, every breath died away beneath the thick grey mists; and, unopposed, the upper winds swept the ominous storm-clouds shoreward.
When I reached the vineyards of Vallière, near St. George, hosts of people were busily at work, striving to improve the brief time during which they could hope to labor. The first heavy drops of rain came down, solid and smiting as so much molten lead, and in another instant, one was right glad to find a sheltering roof.
I had seen my full share of tempests. I had read my full share of descriptions of them; and I was prepared to expect anything and everything from their fury and from their power. But nothing that I had either seen or read, had prepared me for the effects of this tempest, so fierce, so long-enduring, so implacable in its unceasing and uniform fury. When, from time to time, we have a pause, even the slightest mitigation, even a change, however slight, in the Tempest's moods and manifestations, our over-distended senses also relax, recuperate, prepare themselves for the next assault. But in this case, night after night, day after day, for six weary and wearying nights and days, the storm-fiend never winked an eye or spared a blow. Fierce, strong, angry, implacable; still the storm-fiend raged, untiring, and unsparing. On mine honor, see ye! it was something to daunt the boldest, to suggest despair to the most hopeful. No thunder, no crashing combat of the positive and negative storm-clouds, no loud and animating crash of the meeting and contending waves. All around was one dark, leaden, sinister, ominous, and mysterious pall of cloud and mist, all above us one black sky, terminated in the horizon by a sickly and leaden line brooding over a slowly heaving and mighty mass of leaden looking sea;—so slowly and monotonously heaving that one almost wished for the coming storm-blast to rouse them into a fierce fury, less terrible, less oppressive, than their horribly oppressive monotony. No poetry of a great terror could oppress one like this most prosaic and dark monotony. Still, still and ever, came from the deep bosom of the coming storm the same terribly monotonous—"Woe, woe! Alas, alas, alas!" Our abode was close upon the shore. We were no mere spectators of that scene; we were in it, of it, sharers, actors, thrilled actors in that sublime scene. Every now and then the wild sea came within twenty feet of us; at every rush, she made our very hearth stone quiver beneath our feet. Happily, the ever-rising and terrible sou' west wind struck our windows only obliquely, or we should have been drowned as we gazed, so vast was the torrent, nay the deluge, which every blast bore upon its mighty bosom, alike from the clouds above, and from the vexed and upheaving Ocean below. In haste, and with no small difficulty, we fastened the shutters, and lighted lamps, that we might at least look coming fate in the face. In those apartments which looked out upon the landward, the noise and the perturbation were no jot or tittle inferior. I wrote on, curious to ascertain whether this wild outburst of nature could in reality oppress and fetter a free intellect, and I thus kept my intellect active, agile, cool, thoroughly in self-command. I wrote, I noted, I compared, I drew mine own conclusions. At length, worn out solely by fatigue, and abstinence, and the want of
"Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep,"
I felt myself deprived of that which I believe to be one of the most important of the writer's powers, the quick, sure, delicate sense of rhythm; I felt that my sentences became inharmonious. That sense of rhythm was the first cord in my being to snap, broken, inharmonious, over-strained,—ruined.
The mighty howling of the Tempest had but one variation, in the weird and strange tones of the winds that pitilessly yet mournfully assailed us. The house in which I was seated was directly in their path; and they therefore assaulted it in utmost fury and apparently on every side at once. Now it was the strong, stern blow of the master, impatient to enter his own house; anon some strong hand tried to dash open the shutters; and again came shrill shrieks down the wide chimneys, wailing for the master's exclusion, fiercely threatening, if we did not admit him, and, at length, furious and mighty attempts to force an entry by dislodging the very roof from its rafters. And all these sounds were occasionally dominated by the sad, deep, melancholy, Heu, heu! Alas, alas! Woe, woe, and Desolation. So immense, so potent, so terrible was that Heu, heu! of chorusing wind and sky, that even the voice of the bold storm-blast seemed to us, in comparison, secondary and mild. At length, the wind managed to clear a way for the rain; our house—I had almost said our craft—began to leak; the roof, opening its seams here and there, admitted the rain in torrents.
Still worse, the fury of the Tempest, by a desperate effort, loosened one of the hinges of a shutter, which still remained closed, but from that moment shook, creaked, shrieked, in the most dismal fashion that you can imagine. To make it fast I had to open the window, and that moment that I did so, though sheltered by the shutter, I felt myself in the very centre of the whirlwind, half-deafened by the frightful force of a sound equal to that of a cannon fired close to one's ear. Through the cracks of the shutter I perceived what gave me a clear notion of the tremendous power that was raging landward, skyward, seaward, horizontally, upward, and downward. The waves, meeting and battling, smote each other so fiercely that they could not descend again. Gust after gust from beneath them, carried them landward; mighty and vast as they were, they were borne landward as though so many feathers, by the upheaving force of those mighty blasts.
How would it have been, if, shutters and windows being driven in, our poor room had shipped one of those vast billows which the storm-wind thus hurled upon the adjacent heaths? We were, in fact, exposed to the strange chance of being shipwrecked on the land. Our house, so close to the shore, might at any moment have its roof or even its upper story carried right away by wind and wave. The villagers often told us that that was, in fact, their nightly thought and their nightly terror, and they advised us to seek a more inland shelter. But we still comforted ourselves with the thought that the longer this tempest had lasted, the sooner it must come to an end; and, to the undoubtedly reasonable advice thus given to us, our reply was, still, "To-morrow, to-morrow."
The overland news that came to us, told of nothing but wrecks, still wrecks. Close by us, on the 30th of October, a vessel from the South Sea, with a crew of thirty hands, foundered, with a loss of all hands and her rich cargo—and this at the very entrance of the roadstead. After having passed through so many storms and calms, after having safely weathered so many rocks and shoals, she had arrived within sight, within hail, almost within touch of a little beach of fine sand, the fine-weather bathing place of delicate and timid women. Well! That seemingly gentle little sandy beach, upheaved into a huge and impassable sandbar—was the grave of the good ship, which ran upon it with frightful force, and was crushed, shivered into small pieces—converted from a "thing of life," into a mutilated corpse. What became of the crew? Not a trace of them has ever been found; they were probably swept, vainly struggling, from the deck, and swallowed up by the sands.
This tragical event very naturally led us to suspect that many similar ones had occurred, elsewhere, and nothing was thought of or talked of but probable calamities. But the sea seemed by no means at the end of her work. We on shore had had quite enough of it. Not so our enraged sea. I saw our pilots, sheltering themselves behind a rocky wall from south-west, keep an anxious look-out seaward, and shake their heads in ominous doubt of what was even yet to come. Happily for them, no craft made her appearance in the offing—or they were there to risk, most probably to lose, their lives. And I, also, looked anxiously out upon that sea, on which I looked no less in hate than in anxiety. True, I was in no real danger, but for that very reason I was all the more despairingly the victim of ennui. That sea had a look at once hideous and terrible; her vagaries were as absurd as her strength was irresistible. Nothing there reminded one of the fanciful descriptions of the poets. By a strange contrast, the more I felt myself depressed, and as it were, lifeless, the more vigorously and vehemently did she seem to feel and manifest her life; as though, galvanized by her own furious motion, she had become animated by some strange, fantastic soul. In the general rage, each wave seemed animated by its own special and sentient rage; in the whole uniformity, (paradoxical as it may seem, it, yet, is quite true) there was, as it were some diabolical swarming. Was all this attributable to my worn brain and wearied eyes? Or were the reality and the impression alike true? Those waves reminded me of some terrible mob, some horrid rabblement, not of men, but of howling dogs, a myriad of howling and eager dogs, wolves—maddened and furious dogs and wolves. Dogs and wolves, do I say? Let me rather say, a dread concourse of nameless, and detestable, and spectral beasts, eyeless and earless, but with hugely yawning jaws, foaming and eager for blood, blood, still more blood!
Monsters! what more do ye require? Are ye not surfeited with wrecked ships and slain men? Do we not from all sides hear of your horrid triumphs? What more, I ask, do ye demand? And the horrid phantoms answer—"Thy death, universal Death, the destruction of the Earth, a return to black Night and ancient Chaos."
THE BEACONS.
Impetuous is the channel where her strait receives the full rush of the North sea, and very turbulent is the sea of Brittany, rushing over basaltic shoals in swift and furious rapids. But the gulf of Gascony, from Cordouan to Biarritz, is just one long maritime contradiction, one enigma of mighty strifes. As she goes to the southward, she suddenly becomes extraordinarily deep, as though her waters sank, on the instant into some vast and fathomless abyss. Passing over that sudden and immense depth, the onward wave under the impulse of the terrible pressure leaps upward to a height and onward with a velocity unequalled by any other of our seas. The great surge from the north-west is the motive-power of this huge liquid machinery; from a little more north it threatens to crush Saint-Jean-de-Luz; farther west it repels the Gironde, and crowns with her terrible billows the luckless Cordouan.
That poor Cordouan, that respectable martyr of the seas and victim of the tempests, is only too little known. I believe it is the oldest of all the European beacons. At all events, only one, the celebrated Genoese lantern, can rival it in antiquity. But there is a vast difference between them. The Genoese, crowning a fort and solidly seated upon solid rock, looks smilingly, almost scornfully, down upon the impotently furious storms. But Cordouan is upon a shoal which the water never wholly leaves. And, in truth, he was a bold man who conceived the notion of erecting a beacon here, amidst the waters; what say I? in the eternal wave-combat between such a river and such a sea. From one or the other, it, at every instant, receives tremendous blows. Yes, even the Gironde urged on the one hand by the winds, and on the other by the rude torrents from the Pyrenees, assails this stern calm guardian, as though it were responsible for the assailing and repelling fury of the ocean.
Yet, Cordouan is the only saving and consoling light that gleams over this stormy sea. Run before the north wind, and miss Cordouan, and verily, my storm-tossed brother, you are in very real danger; you, likely enough, will fail to sight Arcachon. This sea, most stormy among seas, is also the darkest. At night, storm-driven upon that sea, there is no guiding mark, if you miss the beneficent light.
During our whole six months stay upon this coast, our usual contemplation, I had almost said, our almost sole companion, was the beacon of Cordouan. We felt that this guardian of the sea, this constant watchman over the strait became less a mere building than an actually living and intelligent person. Standing erect over the vast western horizon, it shows itself under a hundred various aspects. Now it is gilded, glorified by the setting sun; anon, pale and indistinct amidst the shifting mists, it tells us nothing of good augury. At evening, when suddenly it flashes its ruddy and glowing light athwart the heaving waters, it looks like some zealous inspector impressed and anxious in its conscious and deep responsibility. Whatever happens from the seaward, our Cordouan is held responsible for it. Throwing his ruddy beams into the gloom of the tempest, he, the preserver, is held to be the cause of that which he only, and savingly, exhibits. Thus, only too often, it is that genius is accused of evoking the evils which it exposes only that it may reform them. We, also, were ourselves thus unjust towards Cordouan. Was he late in displaying his guiding light? How ready we were to exclaim: "Cordouan, Cordouan, pale phantom, can you show yourself only to conjure up the storm, and the storm fiend?"
And yet I believe, quite firmly, that to Cordouan thirty of our fellows owed their lives in the great storm of October. Their vessel was a total wreck, but they escaped with their lives.
It is much that we can see our shipwrecking, to go down in full light, knowing exactly where we are, what are our perils, and what chances we have of evading or overcoming them. "Great God! If we must perish, give us to perish in the broad, bright light of day!"
When the ship of which I speak, driven by the strong surge from the open sea, reached this shore in the deep night, there were a thousand chances to one against her making her way into the Gironde. On her starboard the bright point of the Grave warned her off from Medoc; on her larboard the little beacon of Saint-Palais showed her the dangerous rock of the Grand'Caute on the Saintonge side; and between those fixed white lights, high over the central shoal flashed the ruddy Cordouan, showing from moment to moment the only safe channel.
By a desperate effort she got through, but only, and barely; wind, wave, and current conspired to drive her on Saint-Palais. The saving light showed the much harrassed, but still undaunted crew, where only lay their chance of safety from the driving sea behind and the terrible sands in front. Fearing, yet daring, they leaped, fell, I know not how or where, and were saved, bruised, fainting,—but still living.
Who can even imagine how many ships and how many men are saved by these beneficent beacons? Light, suddenly dispelling the dense shadows of those horrible nights when the bravest lose their courage and their presence of mind, not only points the path, but clears the head and strengthens the heart. It is a great moral support to be able to say in some mortal peril, "Again! Again! Haul away my brothers, be bold! Though wind and wave are both against us, we are not alone. See, yonder! Humanity is still watching over us, and guiding us from yonder lofty tower!"
The seamen of the old times, ever hugging the shore, and anxiously marking every headland, were still more in need than we are of the friendly beacon light. The Etruscans, we are told, first kept the night-fires burning upon their sacred stones; the beacon was at once an altar, a temple, a column, and a watch tower. The Celts, too, had their round towers which were beacons also; the most important of them were built on precisely those points where the friendly light could most widely flash over the dark waters; and the Romans lit up watch fires from height to height and promontory to promontory along their whole shores of the Mediterranean.
The great terror of the Northern sea kings, and the perilled and trembling life of the dark middle age, put out all those guiding and saving lights. The people cared not to favor the inroad of the sea rover; the sea was an object of dread, almost of hatred. Every ship was an enemy, and, if it ran aground, was deemed lawful as well as unpitied prey. The pillage of a wreck was the gain of the noble; the noble and the wrecker were one! The Count de Leon, made wealthy by the fatal shoal upon his County's shore, said of that murderous rock, that it was "a precious stone, far more precious than any that glitters in a kingly crown."
Even in our own time, innocently, the poor fishermen have, again and again, by those fires which they have kindled upon the beach, seduced our poor seamen into shipwreck and death. The very beacons themselves have, not seldom, played the bad part of the false hearted wrecker, alluring, only to betray; so easy is it to mistake one light for another. Now and then, that mistake, so readily made, leads to very horrible consequences.
It was France, who, at the close of her great wars, took the lead in making the lighthouse the great saviour of the benighted and well nigh wrecked seamen. Provided with that great refracting lamp of Fresnel, (a lantern equal to four thousand common ones, and throwing its ruddy gleam over a dozen, or so, of leagues), it can cast, that good modern beacon, its directing and saving light, hither and thither so that strait and shoal are made visible and safe in the deep midnight as in the full broad glow of the bright noon. To the sailor, who steers by the stars, this invention gave him, as it were, a new heaven and added constellations. Planets, fixed stars, all were created anew for him, and in those newly invented constellations there was even an improvement upon the celestial lights, in the variety of color, intensity and duration, of their glow and of their flashing. To some, we gave the calm, fixed, pale and steady gleaming which sufficed for the tranquil night and the comparatively safe sea; to others, the revolving and flashing, and fierce and ruddy glow that shone to every point of the compass. These latter, like the phosphoric creatures of the deep, palpitate and flash fitfully, now gleaming and anon paling, now leaping into dazzling glow, and anon dying into deepest darkness. In the darkest and most tempestuous nights, they are ever restless as Ocean's self, and seem to give him back motion for motion, and gleam for gleam to the lurid and fitful lightnings.
Let us remember that in 1826, and even as late as 1830, our seas were still terrible in their drear darkness. In all Europe there were but few lighthouses; in Africa, there was but the single one on the Cape, and, in all vast Asia there were only those of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras, while the whole vast extent of South America displayed not even one. Since the latter date all nations following, imitating, even rivaling, France, have said, on every bold headland that overlooks every dangerous shoal and strait have said "Let there be light!" and every where the friendly light, gleams tranquilly, or fitfully flashes.
Just here I should like you to make with me the circumnavigation of our seas from Dunkirk to Biarritz, and to take a survey of our lighthouses. But, it would occupy us too long. Calais, with her four lights of different colors, throws out her friendly warnings and hospitable imitations even to distant Dover; and the noble gulf of the Seine, between Heve and Barfleur, lights the American seaman on his otherwise perilous passage to Havre and thence to the very home, the very heart of France.
And the good heart of France goes to her very threshold to welcome the coming and sea borne guest; lighting up, as, with an admirable skill and hospitality she does, every bold point of Brittany. At the outpost of Brest, at Saint Matthew, at Penmark, at the isle of Fen, every headland has its warning and guiding light, now flashing, now darkening, from minute to minute, or from second to second, and saying by sudden flash or momentary gloom, "Seamen! Beware! Luff it is! give that rock a wide berth! Keep off that shoal! Port! Hard aport!—Weather,—it is! Midship helm! So! Steady! Safe you are,—at your moorings!"
And observe, all these watch towers over the perilous deep, often built as they are among the breakers, and as it were in the very bosom of the tempest, solve for art the difficult problem of absolute solidity or seemingly treacherous and unsafe foundation. Many of them are quite enormously high. The architecture of the middle ages, about which so much is as boastfully as untruly said and sung, never ventured to build so high, save on condition of giving their edifices clumsy buttresses and of clamping with clumsy and costly clamps of iron, the peaked summits of their towers. A glance at the much boasted, though really anything but artistic steeple of Strasbourg, will convince you of this. Our modern builders resort to no such rude expedients. The Héaux beacon, recently erected by M. Reynaud on the dangerous shoal of the Épées de Tréguier, displays all the sublime simplicity of some gigantic ocean tree. It has no buttresses, and it needs none; its foundation is sunk boldly and bodily into the living rock; from its base of sixty feet, it rears its tall column of twenty-four feet in diameter, and each of its huge granites is, neatly as firmly, dovetailed into the other, so neatly, so closely, so firmly, that cement is a sheer superfluity; and so solidly is all built that from base to summit the tall tower is solid as, nay, we may almost venture to say, more solid than, the old rock from which science, and art, and perseverance and what the American so graphically calls pluck have hewn each separate stone. Your wild wave knows not where to find a rent in the armor of this tall ocean-espying giant. She may smite, she may rage, but her blows will not harm, her rage will be spent in vain; from that rounded and great mass the giant blow glances harmlessly off; the mightiest thunder strokes of the ever enraged and ever baffled ocean have only succeeded in giving to this grand edifice a far slighter inclination than that of the purposely inclined "leaning tower" of Pisa.
Behold, then, instead of those sad bastions which, in the olden day, overlooked and threatened old ocean, like those with which Spain threatened the Moor, our modern civilization erects peaceful towers of most benevolent and beneficent hospitality; beautiful and noble monuments, often sublime as they appeal to art, always touching as they appeal to sentiment; those towers which, flashing forth their ruddy or gleaming with their silvery fires, make upon the confines of our living, swarming, and much imperilled earth, a new firmament, saving, and guiding, blessing and blessed, as the firmament above us. When no star shines upon us from that firmament above, the seaman hails this art-created light as the star of brotherhood;
"Bids its ruddy lustre hail
And scorns to strike his timorous sail."
Pleasant it is to seat oneself below one of these noble beacons, those friendly fires, those true and welcoming homes of the storm tried mariner. Even the most modern of them is a venerable thing to all who, for one moment, reflect how many lives the most modern of them has already saved. With even the most modern, many a touching memory, many a wild and beautiful, and no less authentic story is connected. Two generations, merely, are enough to make your beacon already ancient, linked with old memories, consecrated, honorable, hallowed. Often, oh often does the mother say to her little ones—"Behold! That friendly beacon saved your grandfather; but for it you would never have been born."
And how often does our brave beacon receive the loving, and tender, and pure visits of the anxious wife or brother who watches for the return of the far husband or son! In the darkening evening, and even far into the dark night, the one or the other gazes anxiously up to the lofty tower, wishing, begging, imploring, for the first gleaming of the blessed and blessing light that shall guide the absent one safely back into port.
Oh! Very justly did the men of the old day, confound these honored stones with the altars of the man guiding and man saving gods; to the heart that weeps, and hopes, and prays and battles amidst the howlings of the tempest, see ye! they are still one and the same; they are still the saving guides, the very altars of the saving and the guiding Deity. For, in very truth, what are man's best works, but the realization of the Almighty will and the great directing mercy?
THE GENESIS OF THE SEA.
FECUNDITY.
Five minutes after midnight of St. John's—24th to 25th of June, commences the great Herring Fishery, in the North Seas. Phosphoric lights gleam and flash upon the waters, and from deck to deck is heard the hearty hail, "Look out, there! The Herring lightning!" And a real, and a vast lightning that is, as from the depths that vast mass of life springs upward in eager quest of heat, light, and dalliance. The soft, pale, silvery light of the Moon is well pleasing to that timorous host; a beacon to guide them to their great banquet of Love. Upward they spring, one and all; not one idler or straggler remains behind. Gregariousness is the fixed rule, the indefeasible law of that race; you never see them but in shoals. In shoals they lie buried in the vast dark depths, and in shoals they come to the surface to take their summer part in the universal joy, to see the light, to revel—and to die. Packed, squeezed, crushed, layer on layer, it seems that they never can be close enough, they swim in such compact masses that the Dutch fishermen compare them to their own Dykes—afloat! Between Scotland, Holland and Norway, one might fancy that an immense island had suddenly risen, and that a whole continent was about to arise. One division detaches itself eastward, and chokes up the Baltic sound. In some of the narrower straits you actually cannot row, so dense and solid is the mass of fish. Millions, tens of millions, tens of thousands of millions;—who can even guess at the number of those hosts upon hosts? It is on record that on one occasion, near Havre, one fisherman, on one morning, found in his nets no fewer than eight hundred thousand; and in Scotland, the mighty mass of eleven thousand barrels was taken in a single night!
They come as a blinded and doomed prey; no amount of destruction can discourage them. Constantly preyed upon alike by fish and by men, they still come on in myriad shoals. And no marvel either; for they love and multiply, even as they move. Kill them as fast as we may, they just as fast reproduce; their vast, deep columns, even as they float along, give themselves wholly up to the great work of reproduction. The wave of the sea and the electric wave impel that whole vast mass at every instant. No weariness, no satiety, no weakness, not even a pause, take one where you will and it either has just propagated, is propagating, or is about to propagate. In that vast polygamous host, pleasure is an adventure and love a navigation. Over every league of its passage it pours out its torrents of fecundity.
At some two or three fathoms deep the water is completely discolored by the incredible abundance of the Herring-spawn; and at sunrise, far as the eye can reach, you may see the water whitened with the marvellous abundance of the thick, fat, viscuous billows in which life is fermenting into new life. Over hundreds of square leagues it seems as though a volcano of teeming and fecund milk had burst forth and overwhelmed the sea.
Full of life as it is at the surface, the Sea would be actually choked up with it but for the fierce and eager union of all sorts of destructions. Let us remember that each Herring has forty, fifty, or even seventy thousand eggs. But for the thinning process, each of them giving the average increase of fifty thousand, and as each of these in its turn giving the same average increase, a very few generations would suffice to solidify the Ocean into a stagnant and putrid mass, and make our whole globe a desert. Here we see the imperative necessity to Life, of life's twin sister, Death; in their immense strife there is harmony; destruction is the handmaiden of preservation.
In the universal war carried on against the doomed race, it is the fierce giants of the deep that prevent the mass from dispersing, and drive it in dense shoals to our shores. The whale, and the other cetaceæ, plunge into the living mass, swallow down whole tons, and drive shoreward the still vast, the seemingly undiminished, host. And at the shore commences quite another and more vast destruction. In the first place, the smallest of fish devour the spawn of the Herring, swallowing, like any human spendthrift, the great future for the small present. And for the present, for the full-grown Herring, nature has provided a very efficiently gluttonous foe, dull-eyed, huge appetited, eager, insatiable,—the whole tribe of fish-devouring fish, Cod, Whiting, &c. The Whiting gloats, devours, crams itself so with Herring that it becomes one luscious mass of fat. The Cod similarly stuffs itself with Whitings, and becomes fat, fecund, overflowing with fecundity—with a really threatening superabundance of fecundity. Just consider! What we have seen of the fecundity of the Herring is a mere nothing when compared to the fecundity of the Cod, which not seldom has nine millions of eggs! A cod weighing fifty pounds has fourteen pounds of eggs; and its breeding season is nine months of every year. This is the creature that, unchecked, would soon solidify the Ocean and destroy the world. And accordingly we cry "Help! To arms! Launch ships and away, to check this too vigorous fecundity." England alone sends some twenty or thirty thousand seamen to the Cod Fisheries. And how many are sent from America, from France, from Holland—from everywhere? The Cod alone has caused the foundation of whole towns—of whole colonies! The catching and curing of the Cod form an art, and that art has its own idiom—the patois of the Cod fishery.
But what could man do against the enormous fecundity of the cod? Nature knows well that our petty efforts of fleets and fisheries would be insufficient and that the Cod would conquer us; and nature evokes another and a more efficient destroyer of the superfluous life that would produce universal death. Down from its spawning bed in the river, thin, famishing, eager, fierce with hunger, comes the Sturgeon, that great devourer. Real rapture it is to the famishing glutton to find, on his return to the sea, ready fattened for him, the succulent and unctuous Cod, the concentrated substance of whole shoals of Herrings! This great devourer of the cod, though less fecund than its prey, is fecund, producing fifteen hundred thousand eggs. The danger reappears. The Herring threatened with its terrible fecundity, the Cod threatened, the sturgeon threatens still. Nature, therefore, produced a creature superb in destroying, almost powerless to reproduce, a monster at once terrible and serviceable that could cut through this otherwise invincible and ruinous fecundity, an omnivorous monster, huge of jaw and constant in appetite, ready for all prey, living or dead, the great, the perfectionated, the matchless devourer—the Shark.
But these furious devourers are anticipatively kept down; mighty in destroying, they are very slow in reproducing. The Sturgeon, as we have seen is less prolific than the Cod, and the Shark is actually sterile, if compared to any other fish. Not like them does it overspread and discolor the sea. Viviparous, it sends forth its rare youngling, fierce, fully armed, savage and terrible.
In her dark and teeming depths, the Sea can smile in scorn at the destroyers to which she gives birth, well knowing, as the great proud fertile Sea does, that no might of destruction can surpass her might of reproduction. Her chief wealth, her most vast and countless produce, defies all the fury of the devourers, is inaccessible to their attacks. I speak of the infinite world of living atoms, of the microscopic atomies that live and love, enjoy, struggle, suffer and die from the surface to the utmost depths of the sea. It has been affirmed that, in the absence of solar light, life, also, must be absent; yet the darkest depths of the sea are studded with sea stars, living, moving, microscopic infusoriæ and molluscs. The dark crab, the phosphorescent seaworm, and a thousand strange and nameless creatures swarm in those uttermost depths and rise only now and then, describing long lines of variegated light upon the heaving surface. In its semi-transparent density, the sea has its own lucidity, its own glowing gleam, like that which fish, living or dead, reflect. The Sea! glorious Sea, hath her own lights, her own Sun, Moon, and Stars.
Gaze inquisitively and intelligently on a mere salt well and you at once perceive how prolific the ocean depths must be; that seeming deposit of dead and inert matter hath its real life; it is a mass of infusoriæ, microscopic, but organized and sentient. All voyagers on the wide Ocean concur in telling us that in their far wanderings they still and ever traverse living waters. Freynel saw millions of square yards covered by a crimson glow—that glow, consisting of living animalculæ so minute that a myriad is packed into every square inch. In the bay of Bengal, in 1854, Captain Kingman sailed for thirty miles through one vast white blotch which made the sea look like a great snow field. Not a cloud above, but one unbroken leaden grey, in strange contrast with the brilliant whiteness beneath. Look closely and you see that that seeming snow is gelatinous; bring your microscope into play and you see that that seeming jelly is a mass of living, moving, phosphoric animalculæ, flashing forth strange and marvellous lights.
Peron, too, tells us that for thirty leagues his good ship ploughed her way through what seemed a sort of greyish dust; examined with the microscope, this seeming dust was seen to be the eggs of some unknown species, covering and concealing the waters over all that immense space.
Even along the desolate shores of Greenland, where we vainly fancy that prolific nature must needs expire, the sea is enormously populous. Through waves two hundred miles by fifteen you sail through deep brown waters, colored by microscopic medusæ, of which, de Schleiden tells us, more than a hundred and ten thousand live and love, battle, and die in every cubic foot. These productive and nourishing waters are supersaturated with all sorts of fatty atoms adapted to the delicate nature of the fish which lazily drink in the nourishment provided for them by the fertile and generous common mother. Do they know what they thus swallow? Scarcely. Its minute but abounding nurture, its nourishing mother's-milk, comes to it without its care, and is received without its gratitude. Our great fatality, our sad calamity, fierce and terrible hunger, is known only on the land. Exertion and want of food are unknown in the great world of waters. There, life must glide away like a glad dream. What can the creature there do with his strength? All use of it is superfluous, impossible;—all save only one; all strength, all energy, are reserved for the great work of love.
The one great law, the one great work of the seas, is to increase and multiply. Love fills up the whole of its fecund depths, and is wealthiest in reproduction among those which are so small that to our unassisted eye they are invisible, unknown as though they were non-existent. We have spoken of mere atomies; but are there, in reality, any such? When we imagine that we have got the lowest, the utterly indivisible, we have but to examine with more earnest and penetrating gaze and we see that this seemingly frail atomy still loves, still reproduces itself in miniature. At the very lowest stages of life you find all the forms of life and reproduction.
Such is the Sea, such the great Female of the Globe, whose ceaseless yearning, whose permanent conception, whose production and reproduction, never end.
THE MILKY SEA.
The water of the Sea, even the purest, examined when you are far away from land, and from all possible admixture, is somewhat viscuous; take some between your fingers, and you find it somewhat ropy and tenacious. Chemical analysis has not yet explained this peculiarity; there is in that an organic substance which Chemistry touches only to destroy, taking from it all that it has of special, and violently reducing it back to general elements.
The marine plants and animals are covered with this substance, whose mucousness gives them the appearance of a coating of jelly, now fixed, anon trembling, and always semi-transparent. And nothing more than this contributes to the fanciful illusions presented to us by the world of waters. Its reflections are irregular, often strangely variegated, as, for instance, on the scales of fish and on the molluscæ, which seem to owe to it the exquisite beauty of their pearly shells.
It is that which most attracts and enchains the interest of the child when he first sees a fish. I was very young when I first saw one, but I still remember how vividly I felt the impression. That creature with variously colored lights flashing from its silvery scales, threw me into an astonishment, a fascination, a rapture, which no words can describe. I endeavored to catch it, but found that it could no more be held than the water which glided through my small weak hand. That fish seemed to me to be identical with the element in which it swam, and gave me a confused idea of animated, organized and surpassingly beautiful water.
A long time after, in my maturity, I was scarcely less impressed when on a sea beach I saw, I know not what of shining and transparent substance, through which I could clearly see the sand and pebbles. Colorless as crystal, slightly, very slightly solid, tremulous when ever so slightly touched, it seemed to me as to the ancients and to Réaumur, that which Réaumur so graphically named it—gelatinised water.
Still more forcibly do we feel this impression when we discover in the early stage of their formation the yellowish white threads in which the sea makes her first outlines of the fuci and algæ which are to harden and darken to the strength and color of hides and leather. But when quite young, in their viscuous state, and in their elasticity, they have the consistence of a solidified wave, all the stronger because it is soft. What we now know of the generation and the complex organization of the inferior creatures, animal or vegetable, contradicts the explanation of Réaumur and the ancients. But all this does not forbid us to return to the question which was first put by Borg. de Saint Vincent; viz: What is the mucus of the Sea? That viscuousness which water in general presents? Is it not the universal element of life?
Much engaged with these and the like reflections, I called upon an illustrious chemist, a man at once positive and sound, an innovator no less prudent than bold, and I abruptly asked him this plain question—"What, in your opinion, is that whitish, viscuous matter which we find in sea water?" "Nothing else than life," was his reply, then retracting, or rather explaining his somewhat too simple and too absolute dictum, he added, "I should rather say a half organized and wholly organizable matter. In certain waters it is a dense mass of infusoriæ, in others a matter which is not yet, but which is to become infusoriæ. In fact, we have yet to begin, at all seriously, the study of this matter."
This was spoken on the 17th of May, 1860.
On leaving our great Chemist, I went to a Physiologist, whose opinion has no less weight with me, and to him I put the same question. His reply was very long and very beautiful. In substance it ran thus: "We know in reality no more about the composition of water than we know about that of blood. What we best know and can most safely affirm about the mucus of sea water, is that it is at once an Alpha and an Omega, a beginning and an end. Is it the result of the numberless deaths which furnish forth materials for new lives? No doubt, that is the general law; but in the case of the sea, that world of rapid absorption, the majority of the creatures there are absorbed while in full life; they do not slowly linger on towards death, as we on land do. The sea is a very pure element; war and death purvey to it. But life, without arriving at its final dissolution, is incessantly approaching it, exuding and exhaling all that is superfluous. With us, the animals of the earth, the epidermis, through its millions of pores, wastes the body at every instant; we suffer, as it were, a partial death at every breath we draw. Now this partial death, this vast exudation, in the case of the marine world, fills that vast world of waters with a gelatinous wealth of which the young world has the instant benefit. It finds in suspension the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still living atoms and liquids which have not had time to die. All this does not fall back into the inorganic, but enters quickly into new organisms. Of all the theories on the subject, this seems the most reasonable; rejecting this theory, we plunge into a sea of extreme difficulties."
These ideas of the most enlightened and earnest thinkers of the present day, are not irreconcilable with those which, nearly thirty years ago were promulgated by Geoffrey Saint Hilaire, upon that general mucus in which nature seems to find all life. He calls it "the animalisible substance, the raw material of organic bodies. Not a creature, whether animal or vegetable, but both absorbs and produces it from the earliest to the latest breath; indeed, the weaker the creature, the more abundant that is."
This remark suggests a broad and bright light upon the life of the seas. Their tenants seem, for the most part, fœtuses in the gelatinous stage, which absorb and produce the mucous substance, permeate and saturate with it all the waters, and give to them the fecund and nourishing powers of a vast womb, in whose depths an infinite succession of generations, perpetually float, as in warm milk.
Let us make ourselves present in this divine work. Let us take a drop from the sea; in it we shall be able to espy the very process of the primitive creation. Nature's God is ever consistent; he does not work in one fashion to-day, and in another to-morrow. This drop of water, I doubt not, will tell us in its transformations, the tale of the Universe. Let us be patient, and observe. Who can foresee or guess the history of this drop of water? Which will it first produce, the vegetable-animal, or the animal-vegetable? Will this drop be the infusoriæ, the primitive monad, which, vibrating, shall shortly become vibrion, and ascending step by step, from rank to rank, polypus, coral, or pearl, may perchance in ten thousand years reach the dignity of insect? Will it produce the vegetable thread, so slight and silken that one would scarcely discern it, and yet already is no less than the first born hair, amorous and sensitive, which is so well known as Venus's hair? This is no fable—it is true natural history. This hair, of double nature, at once animal and vegetable, is, in fact, the commencement of life.
Look quite down into the depths of a vessel of water; at first you discover nothing; patience for a few moments and you perceive drops, atomies, that are moving. Bring a good glass into the service, and you see a whole cloud of these atomies. Are they gelatinous or fleecy? Under the microscope this seeming fleece becomes a group of filaments, of finest and silkiest threads; a thousand times finer, it is believed, than the finest hair that adorns the head of woman. You are now looking upon the first timid attempt of life that is struggling to achieve organization. These confervæ, these hair-weeds, are to be found wherever there is stagnant water, whether fresh or salt. They are the commencement of that double series of the primary vegetation of the sea which became terrestrial when the earth emerged from the watery depths. Once above and beyond the waters, they become the vast, the numberless Fungus-family; in the water, they are the hair-weeds, the many-formed and many-named Algæ.
This is the primitive, the indispensable element of organized vitality, and we find it even where we should, at the first glance deem it to be impossible. Even in the dark depths of the ferruginous waters, supersaturated with iron; even in the all but boiling hot springs, you find this mucus, this abounding mass of little creatures, moving, writhing, agitated ever, which to your first glance, seem only so many lifeless specks. You need not greatly care into what class our finite and dim science consigns them. If Candolle honors them with the title of animals, if Dujardin, on the other hand, degrades them into the low rank of the lowest vegetation—let us not stay to heed these mere names. Such as they are, all that they ask is that they may live and that their humble existence may open up the long series of beings which, but for them, would never be. These atomies, whether we call them living or dead, or passing from life to death, or vigorously struggling from death into organic life, are self-supporting, independently struggling, and ever taking and giving from and to the maternal waters, the life creating and the life supporting gelatine.
It really is without any approach, even, to probability, that they show us, as specimens of the first creation, the primitive organization, the fossil imprints, more or less complex, whether of animal or vegetable—of the Trilobites, for instance, already furnished with the superior organs—eyes, &c.,—or gigantic vegetation, widely branched and richly foliaged. It is beyond all computation more probable that these were preceded and heralded, and prepared, by species far more simple, but of such yielding and destructible matter that it could make no impress, leave no mark behind. How can we expect that those gelatinous, those almost liquid creatures should not "die and make no sign" when we see that the hard shells are ground into very dust? In the South Seas we see fish with teeth so sharp, at once, and of such iron strength that they browse on the tough coral, even as the timid sheep browses on the tender grass-blades. Oh! Depend upon it, generation after generation of the soft gelatinous germs of life have breathed before nature put forth its robust Trilobite and its imperishable ferns.
Let us be just to these conservæ; let us restore to them their pretty obvious right to eldership in this glad and various world of ours. Be they animal or be they vegetable, or do they vibrate and struggle between both—let us at least do them justice, let us speak about them all that is evidently true.
Upon them, and at their expense, arose the immense, the really marvellous marine Flora.
At that starting point I will not hesitate to express my tender sympathy. For three very sound and sufficient reasons I love and I bless that vast vegetation; small or large, that vegetation has three lovely qualities:—
Firstly, how innocent are all its members. Not one of them all is poisonous. Vainly in the whole marine vegetation shall you search for one poisonous plant. Seek in every sea, and in every latitude, you will find the vegetation wholesome, genial, a blessing and a mercy.
Those innocent plants ask for nothing more than to nourish or to heal animality. Many of them, the Laminaires, for instance, contain a luscious sugar; and others, as, for instance, the Corsican or Irish Moss, have a health-restoring bitter; and all, without exception, contain a concentrated and most nourishing mucilage, not a few of them saviours to the weak, worn, perishing lungs of presumptuous and ungrateful man. Where we now exhibit iodide, the English formerly used nothing but a confection of that same Corsican, or Irish, Moss.
The third characteristic of that vegetation is its marvellous amorousness. We cannot doubt that if we pay the slightest attention to its strange hymeneial metamorphoses, here is the striving to be, beyond being, to be potent beyond power. We see it in the fire flies and the like small things, and we see it no less, if we will only look for it, in the sea weeds which, at the consecrated moment, seem to quit their merely vegetable life and leap into animality.
Where do these wonders commence? Where are these first sketches of animality made? Where are we to look for the primitive scene of organization?
Formerly these things were hotly disputed; in our own day there seems to be a certain agreement in the learned world of Europe. I can find the reply to these questions in many recognized and authorized volumes, but I prefer to borrow it from an Essay recently crowned by the Academy of Sciences, and, consequently, shielded by its high, unquestionable authority.
Living creatures are found in the hot waters of eighty, even up to ninety, degrees. It is when the cooled globe gets down to that temperature that life becomes possible. The water has then absorbed, at least in part, that terrible element of death—carbonic acid gas. It becomes possible to breathe.
All the seas were at first like those parts of the great Pacific Ocean, which are comparatively shallow, and are studded with small, low islets. These islets are extinct craters of by-gone volcanoes; the seaman knows them only by the summits which the slow but steadfast toil of the coral insect has upheaved from the depths. But the depths between these volcanoes are probably themselves no less volcanic, and must have been, for the first essays of primitive creation, so many receptacles of life.
Popular tradition has, for ages past, attributed to volcanoes the guardianship of buried treasures, which from time to time give out to our upper world the gold that lies buried in the depths.—Poetic fiction, which yet has its firm foundation in fact. The volcanic regions have within themselves the treasure of our globe, potent virtues of fecundity. It is they that most largely dower the otherwise sterile earth; from the dust of their lavas, from their still warm ashes, life springs, expands, glows, and creates new life. We recognize the wealth of Vesuvius, and of Etna in the long offshoots that they send far into the Sea, and we know what a lovely paradise is formed under the Himalayas, by the volcanic circle of the vale of Cachemire. And the same thing is repeated in the lovely isles of the far South Sea.
Even under the least favorable circumstances, the vicinity of volcanoes, and the warm currents which are their concomitants, create and preserve animal life, even in the most desolate and dreary places. Amidst all the freezing horrors of the Antarctic pole, not far from the volcanic Erebus, Captain James Ross found living coral insects at the depth of a thousand fathoms below the surface of the frozen sea.
In the early ages of our world, innumerable volcanoes exerted a submarine action far more powerful than they exhibit now. Their clefts and their intermediate valleys allowed the marine mucus to accumulate in places, and to be electrified into life by the warm currents. No doubt the mucus affected those parts, fixed itself there and worked and fermented to the utmost of its young power. Its leaven was the attraction of the substance for itself. The creative elements, originally dissolved in the sea formed combinations, leagues, I had well nigh written marriages. First appeared, merely elementary lives—death following almost inseparably, indistinguishably, upon young life; and other lives following close upon, and nourished by, those wrecks and spoils, had firmer hold on life, became preparatory beings, slow but sure creators, which, thenceforth, began beneath the waters that eternal labor which, even in our own day and beneath our own scrutiny, they still continue.
The sea nourishing them all, gives to each that which best suits it. Each draws from that great nursing-mother, in its own fashion, and for its own especial behoof, that which it most needs, must have, to make it what we see of naked, or of shelled, of seeming vegetable, or of fierce, vigorous, and pugnacious life. And whether in life or in death, whether building actively or passively decomposing, they clothe the sad nudity of the virgin rocks, those daughters of the volcanic fires from which flaming and sterile, they were hurled from the planetary nucleus.
Quartz, basalt, porphyry, and semi-vitrified flints, each and all receive from these minute laborers a new, a more graceful, and a more fecund garb; from the fecund maternal milk (for such we must call the mucus of the Sea) they absorb and restore, and thus build up, and secure, and fructify, and beautify, this, our habitable earth. It is from these more favoring localities that have arisen our primal species.
These works must have been commenced among the volcanic isles and islets, in the depths of their Archipelagoes, in those sinuous windings, those peaceful labyrinths where the tides enter timidly and gently, warm and sheltered cradles for the newly-born.
But the bolder strength of the fully-expanded flower, is to be sought for in, for instance, the vast depths of the Indian Gulfs. There, the Sea is veritably a great artist. There she gives to the earth its most adorable forms, lively, loving, and lovable. With her assiduous caresses she rounds or slopes the shore, and gives it those maternal outlines, and I had almost said the visible tenderness of that feminine bosom on which the pleased child finds so softly safe a shelter, such warmth, such saving warmth, and rest.
THE ATOM.
From the bottom of his nets a fisherman one day gave me three almost dying creatures, a sea hedge-hog, a sea star, and another star, a pretty ophiure, which still moved and soon lost its delicate arms. I gave them some sea water, but forgot them for two days, and when I again saw them, all were dead. On the surface of the water a thick gelatinous film had formed. I took an atom of this on the point of a needle; that atom, when placed under the microscope, showed me the following scene. A whirling crowd of short, thick, strongly built animals—Kolpodes—rushed to and fro as though intoxicated with their sense of life, delighted, I may say, that they were born and keeping their birthday with a perfectly bacchanalian joy, while microscopic eels—Vibrions—swam less than vibrated to spring forward.
Wearied with the contemplation of such movement, the eye, however, soon remarked, that all was not in motion, there were some vibrions yet stiff and still, and there were some intertwined in heaps which had not yet detached themselves and which looked as though expecting the moment of their deliverance.