Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made an adventurous voyage; and there is
no such sea for adventurous voyages as the Mediterranean—the inland sea
which the ancients looked upon as so vast and so full of wonders. And,
indeed, it was terrible and wonderful; for it is we alone who, swayed by
the audacity of our minds and the tremors of our hearts, are the sole
artisans of all the wonder and romance of the world.
It was for the Mediterranean sailors that fair-haired sirens sang among
the black rocks seething in white foam and mysterious voices spoke in the
darkness above the moving wave—voices menacing, seductive, or prophetic,
like that voice heard at the beginning of the Christian era by the master
of an African vessel in the Gulf of Syrta, whose calm nights are full of
strange murmurs and flitting shadows. It called him by name, bidding him
go and tell all men that the great god Pan was dead. But the great
legend of the Mediterranean, the legend of traditional song and grave
history, lives, fascinating and immortal, in our minds.
The dark and fearful sea of the subtle Ulysses’ wanderings, agitated by
the wrath of Olympian gods, harbouring on its isles the fury of strange
monsters and the wiles of strange women; the highway of heroes and sages,
of warriors, pirates, and saints; the workaday sea of Carthaginian
merchants and the pleasure lake of the Roman Cæsars, claims the
veneration of every seaman as the historical home of that spirit of open
defiance against the great waters of the earth which is the very soul of
his calling. Issuing thence to the west and south, as a youth leaves the
shelter of his parental house, this spirit found the way to the Indies,
discovered the coasts of a new continent, and traversed at last the
immensity of the great Pacific, rich in groups of islands remote and
mysterious like the constellations of the sky.
The first impulse of navigation took its visible form in that tideless
basin freed from hidden shoals and treacherous currents, as if in tender
regard for the infancy of the art. The steep shores of the Mediterranean
favoured the beginners in one of humanity’s most daring enterprises, and
the enchanting inland sea of classic adventure has led mankind gently
from headland to headland, from bay to bay, from island to island, out
into the promise of world-wide oceans beyond the Pillars of Hercules.