As the breadth across this celebrated strait has been so often disputed,
I particularly state, that the Faro Tower is exactly six thousand and
forty-seven English yards from that classical bugbear, the Rock of
Scylla, which, by poetical fiction, has been depicted in such terrific
colours, and to describe the horrors of which, Phalerion, a painter,
celebrated for his nervous representation of the awful and the
tremendous, exerted his whole talent. But the flights of poetry can
seldom bear to be shackled by homely truth, and if we are to receive the
fine imagery, that places the summit of this rock in clouds brooding
eternal mists and tempests--that represents it as inaccessible, even to
a man provided with twenty hands and twenty feet, and immerses its base
among ravenous sea-dogs;--why not also receive the whole circle of
mythological dogmas of Homer, who, though so frequently dragged forth as
an authority in history, theology, surgery, and geography, ought in
justice to be read only as a poet. In the writings of so exquisite a
bard, we must not expect to find all his representations strictly
confined to a mere accurate narration of facts. Moderns of
intelligence, in visiting this spot, have gratified their imaginations,
already heated by such descriptions as the escape of the Argonauts, and
the disasters of Ulysses, with fancying it the scourge of seamen, and
that in a gale its caverns ‘roar like dogs;’ but I, as a sailor, never
perceived any difference between the effect of the surges here, and on
any other coast, yet I have frequently watched it closely in bad
weather. It is now, as I presume it ever was, a common rock, of bold
approach, a little worn at its base, and surmounted by a castle, with a
sandy bay on each side. The one on the south side is memorable for the
disaster that happened there during the dreadful earthquake of 1783,
when an overwhelming wave (supposed to have been occasioned by the fall
of part of a promontory into the sea) rushed up the beach, and, in its
retreat, bore away with it upwards of two thousand people.