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 twoquite 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 hotpulse-beatis 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. Thatlacunarycirculation supplies the want of, and at the same time prepares, thevascular; 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 theforce 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 linethe 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 correctedsome 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 betweenbiblical literalismand the modern sentiment thesympathy 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 personalityof 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 vitalcirculusof the marine animality is not the starting point of all physicalcirculus? 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'sspasms." 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 atthe 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 mostonly 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 thingsui 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. Itseems 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, andgo 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 muchhave 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 shouldnotlightly 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 thenarrow 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 alwaysto 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 onethereabout 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 inlanddowns 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 brilliantharmony. 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 Iknew 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 forthinto 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 manybeautiful 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 ofthistempest, 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 thatHeu, 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 desperateeffort, 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 hadshippedone 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 ofennui. 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 someterriblemob, 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 intelligentperson. 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 stormof 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 howmany 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 peoplecared 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; thenobleand thewreckerwere 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 thatstrait 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 SouthAmerica 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 sosolidly 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 callspluckhave 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 thatfirmament above, the seaman hails this art-created light as the star of brotherhood;
"Bids its ruddy lustre hailAnd 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! TheHerring 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 willand 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 andaway, 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—thepatoisof 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,isfecund, 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 throughthis 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.