CHAPTER I.

Transcriber's Note

Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

All oe ligatures were converted to oe.

THE SEA.

_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_,

And by the same Author.

_LOVE_ (L'AMOUR.) (_Twenty-seventh edition._) Price, $1,00

_WOMAN_ (LA FEMME.) (_Thirteenth edition._) 1,00

_THE CHILD_ (L'ENFANT.) (_In press._)

_THE INSECT_ (L'INSÈCTE) Its Life, Loves and Labors. (_In press._)

_THE BIRD_ (L'OISEAU.) Its Life, Loves, and Labors. (_In press._)

_WOMEN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION._ (_In press._)

THE SEA

(La Mer.)

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.

[Illustration]

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.

CONTENTS.

Page

Extract from The London Atheneum, 5

BOOK FIRST.

A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS.

I. The Sea as seen from the Shore, 11

II. The Beach, the Sands, and the Iron Bound Coast, 19

III. The Same, (_Continued_) 24

IV. The Same, (_Continued_) 81

V. The Fiery and the Watery Circle. The Currents of the Sea, 40

VI. Tempests, 58

VII. Tempests (_Continued_) 63

VIII. The Storm of October, 1859, 72

IX. The Beacons, 91

BOOK SECOND.

THE GENESIS OF THE SEA.

I. Fecundity, 105

II. The Milky Sea, 114

III. The Atom, 128

IV. Blood-Flower, 139

V. The World Makers, 149

VI. Daughter of the Seas, 160

VII. The Stone Picker, 173

VIII. Shells, Mother of Pearl, and Pearl, 182

IX. The Sea Rovers (Poulpe, &c.) 194

X. Crustaceæ. Battle and Intrigue, 202

XI. The Fish, 212

XII. The Whale, 225

XIII. The Syrens, 236

BOOK THIRD.

CONQUEST OF THE SEA.

I. The Harpoon, 251

II. Discovery of the Three Oceans, 260

III. The Law of Storms, 275

IV. The Polar Seas, 289

V. Man's War upon the Races of the Sea, 306

VI. The Law of the Ocean, 319

BOOK FOURTH.

THE RESTORATION OF THE SEA.

I. Origin of Sea Bathing, 329

II. Choice of Coast, 340

III. The House, 349

IV. First Aspiration of the Sea, 360

V. Baths. Restoration of Beauty, 369

VI. The Restoration of Heart and Brotherhood, 377

VII. The New Life of the Nations, 388

Notes. 401

BOOK FIRST.

A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS.

CHAPTER I.

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, Phoenicians 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.

CHAPTER II.

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.

CHAPTER III.

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.

CHAPTER IV.

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.

CHAPTER V.

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.

CHAPTER VI.

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?

CHAPTER VII.

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.

CHAPTER VIII.

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."

CHAPTER IX.

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?

BOOK SECOND.

THE GENESIS OF THE SEA.

CHAPTER I.

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.