The “sights” of the sea are not what they are cracked up to be. Some
writer, Lowell, I believe, who was seduced into going seaward, had a
sovereign contempt for everything connected with the sea. With a
charming abandon, he says, “A whale looks like a brown paper parcel—the
white stripes down his back resembling the pack-thread.” It is not hard
to bring everything down to this standard.
The very motion of the waves, the cause of rhymes unnumbered, becomes
terribly monotonous after the first day or two. The rise and relapse of
the tinted water glistening in the sun, and blooming lilies on the
wave-crest, is a pretty enough sight at first; but before long one longs
to shiver the surface of the deep, and calm its eternal restlessness.
The waves, wriggling up like a woman’s regrets from nowhere, come
dragging themselves over the weary waste, and, plashing back upon each
other, spring off on another uneasy remonstrance, until the brain of the
looker-on is actually addled. I would have given a great deal to have
had the power to have settled the upheaving waters for one hour, just as
a schoolboy has the power, and the inclination, too, to break the
inexorable calm of a mill-pond by splashing it with rocks. Nothing tires
us like sameness; sameness, inactivity, is intolerable.
We saw some flying-fish. And we saw, what I valued much more, on board
with us a man who knew a man whose cousin had seen the great
sea-serpent. I have a great respect for a man who knows somebody that
has seen the sea-serpent. He is a link between us and the supernatural
in the ocean. He is a relic, stranded by the shore of science, of that
world of wonders that began with the syrens, was modernized with the
mermaids, and that ends in the devil-fish and sea-serpent. While he
lives I want to be near him. When he dies I want his tooth set on my
mantel-piece; it will be a sort of guarantee, under which I can read the
weird stories of the old, unexplored ocean, that made boyhood joyous.
Give me the sea-serpent as a fact, and I will swear to the mermaids, bet
on the phantom ship, and pin my faith to the syrens.