In some of its moods the sea presents itself as a symbol of eternity.
For ages it was more than the symbol; it was eternity itself.
Men shrank from contemplation of it, as they might shrink from
contemplation of the hereafter. A voyage into its outer spaces was like
the voyage of the soul into the shadows that lie beyond life. Still,
this conception shapes the imagery and colors the faith of the race.
Life is a passage down a river that reaches an immeasurable sea. Death
is a journey upon dark waters. The bark of salvation spreads its sails
for the pure of heart, and favoring winds waft them to the Beautiful
Shore. In the songs of Christendom one hears soft winds blowing over
expanses of peaceful water. The earth geography of Homer is the
heavenly geography of Bunyan. The Ocean Stream that flowed around the
world is the river that flows by the Throne of God.
Classic mythology ties up the sea’s infinities with those of time
through the medium of the Styx, which was at once a branch of the Ocean
Stream and the river that encircled the land of shades. The lake of
Avernus which afforded entrance to the nether world, Charon’s ferry,
the rivers Cocytus, Acheron, and Phlegethon, and the Stygian Pool
itself, all gave to a Roman death the aspect of maritime adventure,
although underground. The freer Greek fancy placed the Elysium of the
soul somewhere in the western ocean, where the sun sank to rest. There
were the Isles of the Blessed, or Fortunate Isles, where there was
neither rain nor snow, but the shrilly-breathing west wind fanned and
watered the land.
Other isles were there, the abodes of formidable men and dangerous
women and prodigious animals. But one could get along very well by
accepting the fictions of the poets as good enough geography and
ethnography without launching maritime expeditions to confirm them.
The western ocean offered the peoples of the Mediterranean no present
promise or profit to match its terrors, and to alloy delights that
had too spectral a cast. Unlike the Indian Ocean, it was not a great
highway of trade. Thick clouds covered it, perpetual darkness reigned
upon it. It was an unnavigable morass and a confusion; so said Hesiod,
Pindar, and Euripides, voicing the beliefs of their time.
There was one race that without fear put forth upon the sea. This was
the Phœnicians, and their rich African colony, the Carthaginians. Their
adventures beyond the Pillars of Hercules brought profit to them, and
they saw to it that the tidings of them should bring dismay to others.
A Phœnician fleet sent out by Necho, a Pharaoh of the XXXVIth dynasty,
seems to have sailed around Africa. About B.C. 500 a Carthaginian fleet
under Hanno explored the African west coast as far as the mouths of
the Senegal and Gambia. At nearly the same time another Carthaginian
fleet under Himilco discovered the British Isles, but it brought back
depressing stories. The islands were four months’ distant from the
Straits of Gibraltar, and the voyage thither was through waters haunted
by frightful monsters and thick with entangling seaweed, where wild
storms and protracted calms succeeded one another.
These were not true tales, but other nations believed them, and the
seafaring Semites were permitted to build up trading stations along
the coasts of the outer ocean--in western Africa, in Lusitania, in the
Scilly Islands, and in Cornwall. None challenged their monopoly of
the tin trade of the Cassiterides. They covered their tracks so that
whoever had the temerity to test their fables, or seek to tap their
sources of raw material, would not know whither to go. Strabo tells
how the Carthaginians concealed from everyone the passage to the Tin
Islands: “When the Romans followed a certain shipmaster, that they also
might find the market, the shipmaster of jealousy purposely ran his
vessel upon a shoal, leading on those who followed him into the same
destructive disaster. He himself escaped by means of a fragment of the
ship, and received from the state the value of the cargo he had lost.”
According to Eratosthenes, the Carthaginians went further: “They drown
any strangers who sail past on their voyage to Sardinia or to the
Pillars.” Thus through piracy, stratagem, and fable they maintained
their monopoly on the waters of the west, and for once Greek curiosity
played into a rival’s hands. Tyrian and Punic marvel tales were
elaborated and adorned by the poets of Attica, until everyone felt that
a journey beyond the Pillars was a thing not to be undertaken. All that
the earlier Greeks knew, even of the western Mediterranean, was that
near it was a mountain called Atlas on which the sky rested, and that
the world ended at the pillars set up by Hercules.
One Greek was determined to learn more, and see if his countrymen could
not also profit from the tin and amber trades. The journey of Pytheas
of Massilia, at about B.C. 333, along the coasts of northern Europe
is one of the noteworthy scientific expeditions of history. He is the
first to speak of Thule. He found where amber came from. He noted that
the cereals gradually disappeared as one traveled north, that the
northern grain was threshed in barns instead of upon open threshing
floors, and that fermented drinks there were made from corn and honey.
In a peculiar passage he asserted that beyond Britain there was neither
earth, air, nor sea, but a mixture of all three--something like the
element which held the universe together. This substance, which he
compared to the jellyfish, rendered navigation impossible and led the
Romans later to name those waters the Sluggish Sea. The apparently
fabulous statement, made on hearsay, has been interpreted as referring
to the dense fogs of the northern seas, to the blended effects of
mist and light, and to the broken ice or slush that floats there in a
translucent state. The reference to the jellyfish may be either to its
translucence or its luminosity.
All that Pytheas reported of northern Europe was discredited. How, asks
Polybius, could a private individual conduct such a vast expedition
with his narrow means? Strabo accuses the Massilian of having forged
his tales, “making use of his acquaintance with astronomy and
mathematics to fabricate his false narration.” His complete vindication
is the work of modern scholarship.
The next report of consequence from the outer seas comes nearly three
centuries later and was made to Sertorius, the Marian general under
whom for a time Spain maintained its independence of Rome. A tale of
the Fortunate Islands--probably of the Canaries--drifted in through the
Straits and found the great soldier weary of life in camp and field.
Two sailors had arrived from islands which they described as about
twelve hundred miles west of the coast of Africa. Rains seldom fell
there, they said. The dews watered the earth, which yielded its fruits
in abundance without the labor of man. The seasons were temperate,
the air was serene and pleasant, and soft winds blowing from the west
and south brought days of bright moist weather. Even the barbarians
believed that this was the seat of the blessed.
There was that in the jaded commander which lifted to the thought of
new horizons. Sertorius, says Plutarch, was seized with a wonderful
passion for these islands and had an extreme desire to go and live
there in peace and quietness, safe from oppression and unending wars.
But the Cilician pirates, who were his allies, wanted not peace, but
spoils. So the remainder of his life was spent in wars and government,
and the world was denied an adventure instinct with romance and
pregnant with the potencies of great discovery.
With the voyage of Polybius in the fleet of Scipio along the west
African coast, the campaigns of Cæsar in Gaul and Britain and the
reduction of both into imperial provinces, even the incurious Roman
became possessed of adequate geographical knowledge of the western
coasts of Europe and the waters near them. This knowledge, however, was
tinctured with the marvelous, and was not long retained. Strabo, for
example, pictures the men of the Scilly, or Tin, Islands as wearing
black cloaks and tunics reaching to the feet, and as walking with
staves, thus “resembling the Furies we see in tragic representations.”
He must have meant the Druids.
In the same century in which the legions were withdrawn from Britain,
Procopius, the foremost historian of the Eastern Roman Empire, was
born. Yet in that century of dissolution most of what the ancient world
had learned of the coasts and waters of the Atlantic was forgotten.
The western ocean had been a domain over which mists of ignorance and
superstition hovered, sometimes rising for a moment of distant vision,
sometimes falling like a blank curtain. In the sixth century A.D. they
drew so closely to the shores of Europe that even England was lost
behind them. It had ceased to be a Roman province and was become a land
of ghosts.
Procopius tells his story with due note of its dreamlike quality; and
yet, he says, numberless men vouch for its truth. It is the story of
the English Channel become the ferry of souls. The fisher folk on the
continental side are subject to the Franks, but pay no tribute, because
it is their task in regular turn to transport the souls of the dead to
Britain. Those on duty for each night keep indoors until a knocking is
heard and a mysterious voice summons them. Arising from sleep, they go
down to the beach, where they find strange boats awaiting them. These
seem to be empty, but when they seize the oars and push off they find
the gunwales only an inch above the water. In silence they make the
journey and in an hour find themselves on the opposite shore, although
their own skiffs could scarcely cross in a night and a day. When the
keels grate on the beach, suddenly the boats ride high on the waves.
There is none to greet them, but again a voice is heard, announcing the
name and station of the spectral passengers.
Thus the end of the ancient world found men knowing only a little more
about the western ocean than they did at the beginning. The chief
advance over the Homeric age was that they knew it was an ocean and not
a circumfluent river. The old idea was not dead that it was a morass
made unnavigable by seaweed and mud, too thick and too shallow for
sailing ships to venture upon. This notion was fostered by observing
the unfamiliar phenomena of ebb tides, with the long windrows of weed
and the wide expanses of muddy flats they laid bare upon the coasts.
Plato had deepened the belief and provided a reason for it in his story
of Atlantis. “That is the reason,” he concludes, “why the sea in those
parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is such a quantity
of shallow mud in the way.”
Men had no such notions, or fears of the open seas to the east,
although they were careful not to get too far from their shores.
They knew that inhabited lands were beyond them, and that by not
impossible shores and islands they could reach these. The Periplus of
the Erythræan Sea had full accounts of the coasts from Aden clear
to the mouth of the Ganges, and reports also on Indo-China and China
itself. There were pirate-haunted archipelagoes and islands tenanted
by the monsters of Oriental fancy. But these were Eastern waters and
it behooved men to know something about them and to take a chance upon
them, for a great traffic moved across them--silken fabrics, spices,
pepper, gold and silver and precious stones from the hidden storehouses
of Asia. Wherefore men faced the seas of sunrise with no such fears as
invaded them when they looked out upon the empty and spectral Atlantic.
Another race beside the Phœnician was unafraid of the western sea. This
was the Northmen, of whom it was said that they never slept under a
smoke-blackened roof, nor ate and drank at any hearth. Their tradition
looked outward, where that of the Mediterranean races looked inward.
The ocean was the whale path of their skalds, and their hearts sang
along it. Its waters carried the challenge and promise of the present,
not the glooms or pallors of the hereafter. When their long boats drove
through the Straits of Gibraltar into the old Roman world to pillage
and rule there, it was the return visit of the men of the outer spaces,
ferocious and blithe sea-rovers who thus requited the trafficking and
timid excursions of Phœnician and Roman into the seas that washed the
continent.
The very names of Viking chieftains--Sigurd Snake-eye, Thord the
Yeller, Ottar the Swart, Harold Blue-tooth, Eric Blood-ax, Thorfinn
Skull-cleaver, Sweyn Split-beard--sketched a hardihood that made light
of supernatural terrors upon the sea and knew none other. These men of
the viks or fjords rid the coasts of Europe in the eighth and ninth
centuries of every fear except of themselves. Then they went westward
to America.
There is a bolder note in their geographical tradition than in aught
that had been before. One catches the swing of the Atlantic surges and
the pulses of people at home there in the chapter, “On the Situation of
Countries,” which begins the chronicle of the _Heimskring’la_: “It is
said that the earth circle which the human race inhabits is much cut
asunder with bights and bays, and that great seas run into the land
from the outer ocean. Of a certainty, it is known that a sea goes in at
the Norva Sound (Gibraltar) right up to the land of Jerusalem; and from
that sea, again, a long bay, which is called the Black Sea, goes off
to the northeast, and it divides the two World-Ridings, that is to say,
Asia on the east from Europe on the west. To the north of the Black
Sea lies Sweden the Great, or the Cold (Russia); and this is reckoned
by some as not less in size than the Great Saracen Land, or even the
Great Land of the Bluemen (the Moors). And the northern parts of this
Sweden are unpeopled, by reason of the frost and the cold, just as the
southern parts of Blue-Land are waste because of the sun’s burning.
Mighty lordships are there in this Sweden, and people of manifold kind
and speech; there are giants and there are dwarfs--aye, and Bluemen,
and folk of many kinds and marvellous, and wild beasts, and dragons
wondrous great.”
When the pagan Northmen became Christians their ferocity was moderated,
and their spirit of enterprise, as it seemed, almost extinguished.
Their old contempt of the sea did not pass into the veins of the
peoples over whom for a time they had dominion. Rather the confused and
credulous views of the churchmen became their own, henceforth occupying
the entire field of European thought. Adam of Bremen, eleventh-century
churchman, pictures the sea as his time conceived it--the old
forbidding canvas of classic legend framed with the icicles of Gothic
discovery.
Terra Firma, says Adam, is entirely surrounded by the infinite and
terrible ocean. The northern spaces of the deep are covered with ice
and darkness and this expanse is called the frozen, glutinous, or
darkling sea. It is stiff with salt and covered with black ice, formed
long before and so dry that it will burn like peat.
The German bishop even borrows a tale from the Northmen to engender
terrors to which they had been stranger. Their king, Harald Hardrada,
the most daring of men, had reports from Frisian mariners which caused
him to set sail for the limits of the earth. In the darkness he
arrived at the North Pole--a profound vortex into which the ebb tides
were sucked and out of which the flood tides were disgorged. His ship
plunged down into the boiling chaos, but the sea which took could also
give, and the outward heave of its vast bosom flung the vessel back
again beyond the clutch of the whirlpool.
[Illustration: ROARING FORTIES _By_ F. J. Waugh]
As late as 1406 a chronicler tells of English ships, bound for
Bordeaux, which penetrated an unfrequented sea where four vessels from
Lynn were swallowed up in a whirlpool, which thrice a day drew in and
cast out the flood. When fishermen of that time went a few miles from
land they used only haaf-words--a sea speech in which persons, animals,
and things had other names than what they bore ashore; so might they
avoid offense to whatever was astir in the deep.
It is refreshing to turn from the gloomy imaginings of the West to
Indian and Chinese legends of the Seven Seas. In the quainter fancy
that animates them, at least the note of fear is missing. From the
Puranas, Gerini has made these identifications: The Sea of Salt Water
surrounds India. The Sea of Sugar Cane Juice surrounds Burma. The Sea
of Wine surrounds the Malay Peninsula. The Sea of Clarified Butter
surrounds the Sunda Archipelago. The Sea of Milk surrounds Siam and
Cambodia. The Sea of Curds or Whey surrounds South China. The Sea of
Fresh Water surrounds North China and Mongolia.
Fear of the ocean, and above all of the Atlantic, is, however, the
distinctive note in mediæval Arab geography. This was perhaps a native
growth of the desert, and its spirit is in the Koran passage which
speaks of “black night upon the deep, which wave on wave doth cover,
cloud upon cloud, gloom upon gloom.” Arab merchants and pilgrims
ranged to the ends of the Moslem world. Save Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta
was the earth’s greatest and most curious traveler. To the Arab port
of Bassorah, sailors from the Nile, the Mediterranean, and even the
China Sea brought the gossip of mankind. Yet a dread of the deep sounds
through the works of Arab geographers, as through the saga of Sindbad,
with the effect of a refrain.
Around the fair meadows of the world swung the terrible ocean, the Sea
of Darkness as the Arabs called it. To Massoudy the Atlantic was the
Green Sea of Gloom. None dwelt there, none could sail there, none knew
to what infinite distances it reached. Ibn Khaldun described it as
the boundless, impenetrable limit of the west. Other lights of Islam
spoke of the whirlpools into which vessels were drawn, and argued that
even if sailors knew the direction of the winds they did not know
whither the winds would carry them; nor could they carry them anywhere,
for there was nowhere to go, and in the realms of mist no prospect
of getting back. Sane men would not attempt a venture out of sight
of land, said certain of the doctors. To plan such a journey, it was
asserted, was evidence of an unsound mind; to embark upon it was ground
for depriving a man of his civil rights.
Idrisi, Mohammedan savant in the service of King Roger of Sicily in
the twelfth century and the greatest of Arab geographers, utters the
authoritative Arab word upon the sea: “The ocean encircles the ultimate
bounds of the inhabited earth, and all beyond it is unknown. No one
has been able to verify anything concerning it, on account of its
difficult and perilous navigation, its great obscurity, its profound
depth and frequent tempests; through fear of its mighty fishes and its
haughty winds; yet there are many islands in it, some peopled, others
uninhabited. There is no mariner who dares to enter its deep waters; or
if any have done so, they have merely kept along its coasts, fearful of
departing from them.”
Whether this was in some part a literary convention--a gesture of
geography--or the expression of an unshakable dread, the sentiment
limited the service of Islam to mankind. The Arab coasting trade had
reached as far as China and as far down the eastern side of Africa
as Zanzibar. But this people, so resourceful on land, never pushed
their coasting adventures around the Cape of Good Hope, as Prince
Henry and his Portuguese successors did from a farther north on the
other side of Africa. Nor did they attempt, as Columbus did, the
crossing of a great sea. Nor did they essay, as Magellan did, to prove
by a circumnavigation the rotundity of the earth on which their own
geographers had spoken with the clearest voices of the Middle Ages.
A group of remarkable legends illustrates the later annals of the
western ocean and carries them on to the Columbian adventure. Idrisi
tells a story of the eight Deluded Folk, or Lisbon Wanderers, who went
out to sea when the wind blew from the east and for more than a month
were carried before it. They reached an island supposed to be one of
the Canaries, where they found a people who spoke Arabic and who sent
them back when a wind arose from the west. St. Brendan voyaged for
seven years among seven islands of the west, according to a story
widely circulated in the eleventh century. The tenth-century tale of
the island of the Seven Spanish Bishops who had left Spain to escape
Moslem rule was revived by a Portuguese ship captain who claimed to
have reached the island; but when Prince Henry bade him go back for
proofs, the romancer took refuge in flight.
It may have been that the Phœnicians made atonement at last for the
fables of paralyzing fear which they had spread abroad, and on the
outer verge of the Old World in the days of their decline left their
secret as a legacy for the bold to profit from. The scene is Corvo,
westernmost of the Islands of the Sun, as the Azores were called;
and the passage, though from a Portuguese writer of the seventeenth
century, refers to events a generation before the Columbian discovery.
Says Manoel de Faria y Souza: “On the summit of a mountain called
the Crow was found the statue of a man on horseback, without saddle,
bareheaded, the left hand on the horse’s mane, the right pointing to
the west. It stood on a slab of the same stone as itself; beneath it,
on a rock, were engraved some letters in an unknown language.”
One explanation of the legend is given by a traveler of the last
century, who said that the superstitious folk of the island fancied
they saw in a promontory which reaches far into the sea the semblance
of a person with his hand stretched out toward the New World. This,
they declared, was the work of Providence, and Columbus read the sign
aright. But the tale may not so easily be interpreted and dismissed.
A hoard of Carthaginian coins, so runs a report which Humboldt
accepts, was discovered in Corvo in 1749; and there are other stories
of equestrian statues of Carthaginian design erected upon Atlantic
islands. Against the utter drama of the legend--the parting gesture of
good will of a bold and subtle race of ancient time--may be set another
legend, more in keeping with the superstition and fears of the Middle
Ages. This was no equestrian statue pointing westward, if the Pizzani
map of 1367 was to be believed. It was the figure of a saint with his
back to the sunset and his outstretched hand warning mariners away from
the unnavigable seas behind him.
The monkish monument was the parable of a twilight time. To the
fifteenth century the deep was an eerie domain where the creatures of
pagan and Christian story couched upon the ocean floor, showed their
unholy shapes among the waves, chattered on desert island strands,
and wove their enchantments in the mists. In the north the witches of
Lapland raised storms and wrecked the ships that passed their shores.
To the south none might sail beyond Cape Bojador on the African Gold
Coast. Who did so was turned from white to black, and never came
back. There the flaming sword of the sun was laid across the paths of
the sea. What was beyond it was boiling brine and air heated into a
flame--a landless firmament of water and a starless firmament of sky.
Looking westward, men cowered before visions of the Hand of Satan,
thrust upward from far horizons to drag ships into the depths. Or “the
wind that blows between the worlds” might carry mariners away on a
journey from which was no returning. Or currents, setting always in one
direction, might sweep them into illimitable space. If the world was
flat, one might sail off its edge. If it was round, its very rotundity
would present a sort of mountain up which no ship could climb on the
backward voyage. As to the Atlantic races, the mediæval maps told
one what to expect. What chance of succor, or agreeable converse,
or a profitable traffic from spouting monsters, satyrs, sirens and
conch-blowing tritons? Could one warm his hands at the witch-fires of
the sea?
Out of these gray forebodings the ships of Columbus, with one stout
heart and many questioning ones aboard, sailed into the unknown, as
vessels move through the sluggish dark before the dawn breeze springs
up and the sky reddens toward sunrise. Ere long the caravels were
steering among isles fanned by soft breezes and bathed in tropical
sunshine, and naked, kindly peoples were hailing the mariners as
visitors from the skies. Morning had broken at last upon the western
ocean, and in its level rays a path lay sparkling clear across the
sea--the path of enterprise, of conquest, of gold, the path of
victorious dreams. Along that highway hardy spirits soon would press
on great adventures. In the stead of ghost-ridden hearth-keepers,
mumblers of old fable, shrinkers from the outer surges, there were
men who dared go round the earth in flimsy barks and lead a handful of
followers against the haughty empires of the Cordilleras.
Terror was dead upon the deep. Somewhat of fable remained.