There is yet another privilege of the fish. Many species, as Salmon, Shad, Eels, Sturgeon, &c., can liveequally in fresh water or sea water, and regularly migrate from one to the other. Many families of fish include both sea fish and fresh water fish, as for instance, the Thornback.
Nevertheless, peculiar degrees of heat, peculiar food, and peculiar habits, seem to confine them within certain limits in the seas, free as that element is. The warm seas are as a confining wall beyond which the polar species cannot pass; and on the other hand, the fish of the warm seas are stopped by the cold currents at the Cape of Good Hope. We know of only two or three species that can be properly called cosmopolitan. Few of them frequent the open sea; most of them hug the shore, and have favorite shores to frequent. Those of the United States are not those of Europe. Then, too, fish have peculiarities of taste which attach them to certain localities, though they do not actually confine them there. The Thornback grovels in the mud, Soles in sandy bottoms, the Bullhead loves the high bottoms, and the Sea Eel the rocks. The Scorpene, or flying fish, swims and flies by turns; when pursued by fish, she darts from the water, and for some distance sustains herself in the air; and when pursued by birds she drops back into the water.
The popular phrase, "As happy as a fish in water," is founded on a truth. In fine weather he floats at his ease, enabled as he is to rise or sink at pleasure, tomake himself a balloon more or less filled with air, and therefore lighter or heavier. He moves in peace, rocked and caressed by the wave, and, if he so chooses, even sleeps as he floats. He is at once surrounded and isolated by the unctuous substance which renders his skin and his scales slippery and impenetrable by the water. His temperature varies but little and is neither too hot nor too cold. What a difference between a life so convenient, and that which is allotted to us dwellers upon the land; where at every step we meet with asperities and obstacles, which fatigue and exhaust us as we toil up or down our hills and mountains! The atmosphere varies, and often most cruelly, with our various seasons. For days and nights together, the cold rains pour pitilessly down, penetrating us; at times frozen, and piercing us with its sharp crystal points.
The felicity and fullness of life of the fish is shown at the Tropics by the splendor of his colors, and at the North by the swiftness of his motion. In Oceania and the Indian Sea they rove and sport in the oddest forms and colors, taking their pleasure among the corals, and living flowers. Our fish, of the temperate and cold seas, are potent rowers; thorough sailors. Their slender and elongated figures give them an arrowy swiftness and grace of movement, which might serve as ensample to our ship builders. Some of them have as many as ten fins which serve them, at will, as sails oroars, and may be kept wide spread or close-reefed. Their tail, that marvellous rudder, is also the principal oar. The best swimmers have it forked, the entire spine ends there and which contracting its muscles gives the fish his swift motion. The Thornback has two immense fins, two great wings to cleave the waves. His long, supple, and slender tail is a weapon with which to lash and divide the waters. So slender and displacing so little water, this fish has no need of the air bladder which supports the thicker fish. Thus each has the peculiar provisions that fit it for its peculiar locality and surroundings. The Sole is oval and flat that it may glide in the sand, the Eel long and slender that it may glide through the mud, and the Lophies, that they may cling to the rocks, have hand like fins that remind one rather of frogs than fish.
Sight is the great sense of the bird; scent is that of the fish. The Hawk, from above the clouds, pierces, with his glance, the deep space and marks the scarcely visible prey below; in like manner the Shark, from the depths of the water, scents his tempting prey, and darts upward upon it. Those that, like the Sturgeon, rummage the mud for food have exquisite touch. In the watery world half darkened, and having only uncertain and delusive lights, scent, and, in some cases, touch, must be relied on. The Shark, the Thornback and the Cod, with his great eyes, see badly, but have an exquisitesense of scent. The Thornback has that sense in such excess that he is provided with a veil for the express purpose of deadening it at will, when it probably affects his brain unpleasantly. To this powerful means of chasing their prey, we must add admirable teeth, sometimes like those of a saw. Some species have several rows of them, lining the mouth, the palate, the throat, and even the tongue. These teeth being so fine are, therefore, fragile; and behind, therefore, are others ready to replace them if they break.
At the commencement of this second book, we said that it was necessary that the sea should produce these terrible and mighty destroyers to combat her own too great fecundity. Death by persevering excision and bleedings relieved her of a plethora which, otherwise, would have destroyed her. Against that alarming torrent of production which we have instanced in the case of the Herring and the Cod, those frightful multiplying machines which would have choked up the ocean and desolated the earth, she defends herself by the machine of Death, the armed swimmer, the fierce and voracious fish. Great, splendid, impressive spectacle! The universal combat between Death and Life, which we witness upon the land, fades into insignificance when we compare it to that which is going on in the depths of the sea. There, its surpassing grandeur, at first, almost alarms us, but when we examine moreclosely we see that all is harmonious and in marvellous equilibrium. That fury is necessary; that dazzlingly rapid exchange of substance, that prodigality of slaughter, are safety. Nothing of sadness, but a wild fierce joy seems to reign in all this. In this opposition in the sea of two forces, that seem so inevitably destructive of each other, the sea finds her marvellous health, her incomparable purity, and a beauty at once sublime and terrible. She triumphs alike in the living and in the dead, giving to them and receiving from them the electricity, the light which beams, flashes, sparkles everywhere, even in the long, dark, polar night.
What is melancholy in the sea is not her carelessness to multiply death, but her impotence to reconcile progress with the excess of movement.
She is a hundred times, a thousand times richer, and more rapidly fecund than the earth. She even builds up for earth. The increase of the land, as we have seen in the case of the Corals, is given by the sea; the sea is no other than the parturient and laboring womb of the globe. Her sole obstacle is in the rapidity of her births; her inferiority appears in the difficulty, which, so rich in generation, she finds in organizing Love. It is melancholy to reflect that the myriads upon myriads of the inhabitants of the sea have only a vague, elementary, and imperfect, Love. Those vast tribesthat, each in its turn, ascend and go in pilgrimage towards pleasure and light, give in floods the best of themselves, their very life, to blind and unknown chance. They love, and they will never know the beloved creature in which their dream, their desire, was incarnated; they produce multitudes, but never know their posterity. A few, a very few of the most active, warlike, and cruel species love after our human manner. Those terrific monsters, the Shark and his female, are obliged to approach each other. Nature has imposed upon them the peril of embracing. A terrible and suspicious embrace. Habitually they devour, eagerly and blindly, everything that comes in their path—animals, wood, stone, iron—anything, but in their fierce love, they restrain their hunger. They approach each other with their sawlike and fatal teeth, and the female intrepidly allows the male to seize her with his, and thus fastened together, they sometimes roll furiously about for weeks, unwilling to separate, even though famishing, and invincible in their fierce embrace, even by the fiercer tempest.
It is affirmed that even after they have separated, they lovingly pursue each other, the faithful male following his mate till the birth of his heir presumptive, the sole fruit of that marriage, and never, never devours him, but follows and watches over him. In fact,in case of peril to the sharkling, the excellent farther takes him into his vast throat, but to shelter, not digest him.
If the life of the sea has a dream, a wish, a confused desire, it is that of fixity. The violent and tyrannical embrace of the Shark, the fury of his union with the female give us an idea of a perfectly desperate love. Who knows if in other species, gentler and better fitted for families, who knows if this impotence of union, this eternal fluctuation of an objectless voyage, is not a cause of sadness? These children of the sea become owners of the land. Many of them ascend the rivers amorous with the fresh water, which they find so poor and possessed of so little nutriment, that they may deposit there, far from the raging waves, the hope of their posterity. At the very least they approach the shore in search of some sinuous and land locked creek. At this time they even become industrious, and with sand, mud, and grass endeavor to make little nests. A touching effort! They have none of the implements of the insect, that marvel of animal industry. They are far more destitute than the bird. By sheer dint of perseverance, without hands, or claws, or beak, and solely with their poor bodies, they yet pass and repass over it till they have pressed it into a sufficient cohesion, as Coste informs us in his description of the Sticklebacks. And what obstacles still await them! The female,blind and greedy, threatens the eggs, the male will not quit them, but guards and protects them, more motherly than the mother herself. This instinct is found in several species, especially in the humblest, the Gobies, a small fish, unfit for food, held in such contempt that if, by chance, caught, it is thrown back again to the water. Well, this lowest of the low is a tender father. Weak, small, destitute as he is, he, nevertheless, is the ingenious architect and laborious workman of the nest, and constructs it unaided, save by his tenderness and his strong will.
It moves one to pitying reverie, to perceive that such an effort of the heart is arrested at the first effort of art, and by the fatality of the world, in which its nature detains it. We feel that that world of waters is not all sufficient for itself.
Great mother that hath commenced life, thou canst not perfect it; allow thy daughter, the Earth, to continue the work. You see it, even in your bosom; your children think of Earth and long for its fixity; they approach her, offer her their homage.
It is for thee still to commence the series of new beings, by an unexpected prodigy, a grandiose rough draft of the warm amorous life, of blood, of milk, of tenderness which will have its development in the terrestrial races.
CHAPTER XII.
THE WHALE.
"The fisherman belated at night in the North Sea," says Milton, "saw an isle, a shoal, which, like the back of an enormous mountain, lay upon the water, and in that isle or shoal he fastened his anchor. The isle fled and carried him away. That isle was Leviathan."
An error only too natural. D'Urmont Durville was similarly though not so fatally deceived. He saw at a distance what seemed a bank with breakers and eddies all around it, and certain patches upon it looked like rocks. Above and around this seeming bank the swallow and the stormy petrel raced and sported. The bank looked venerably grey, covered as it was with shells and madrepores. But the mighty mass suddenly moved, and two enormous columns of water which it threw high into the air, revealed the awakened Whale.
The inhabitant of another planet who should descend towards ours in a balloon and survey it from a vastheight would say to himself, "The only creatures that I can discover there are from one hundred to two hundred feet long, their arms are only twenty feet long, but their superb tail, thirty feet, magnificently beats the Sea, and enables them to advance with a speed and a majestic ease which make it very evident that they are the sovereigns of that planet."
And by and bye he would add: "It is a great pity that the solid part of that globe should be deserted, or at best peopled only by creatures so small that they are invisible. The sea alone is inhabited and by a kind and gentle race. Here the family is held in honor, the mother nurses and suckles her young ones with tenderness, and although her arms are very short she contrives during the raging of the tempest to protect her little one by pressing it to her vast body."
Whales are given to companionship. Formerly they were seen sailing along not only in pairs, but occasionally in large families of ten or twelve in the solitary seas. Nothing exceeded the grandeur of those vast and living fleets, sometimes lighted up by their own phosphorescence, and throwing to the height of thirty or forty feet in the Polar seas columns of water which smoked as it rose. They would approach a vessel, peaceably and in evident curiosity; looking upon her as some specimen of a new and strange species of fish; and they sported around and welcomed the visitor. In their joythey raised themselves half upright and then fell down again with a huge noise, making a boiling gulf as they sank. Their innocent familiarity went so far that they sometimes touched the ship or her boats. An imprudent confidence which was most cruelly deceived! In less than a century, the great species of the Whale have almost disappeared.
Their manners and their organization are those of our herbivora. Like our ruminating animals they have a succession of stomachs where their nourishment is elaborated; they need no teeth and have none. They easily graze the living prairies of the sea, I mean the gigantic, soft, and gelatinous, fucus, the beds of infusoriæ, the banks of the imperceptible atoms. For such aliments the chase is not necessary. Having no occasion for war, they have no necessity for the sawlike teeth or the frightful jaws of the Shark and other destructive creatures. Boitard tells us that they never pursue. Their food is borne to them on every wave. Innocent and peaceable, they engulf a world of scarcely organized creatures which die ere they lived, and pass unconsciously into the crucible of universal change.
Not the slightest connection between this gentle race of mammiferæ, which, like our own, have milk and red blood, and the monsters of an earlier age,—horrible abortions of the primitive mud! The Whale, of farmore recent origin, found a purified water, a free Sea, and a peaceful globe.
He had finished, the Globe had, his old discordant dream of lizard-fishes, and flying dragons, the frightful reign of the reptile; he had got out of the sinister fogs and mists into the lovely dawn of harmonious conceptions. Our carnivorous creatures were not yet in existence. There was a brief time (a hundred thousand years, perhaps,) of great gentleness and innocence, when the Opossum and other pouched animals were on the earth; excellent creatures, that tenderly loved their families, that carried their young, and, in case of the fatigue or danger of those little creatures, sheltered them in their pouches. In the Sea appeared vast and gentle giants.
The milk of the sea, its superabundant oil, its warm animalized mucus, saturated with a marvellous power tending to life, swelling at length into those gigantic creatures, those spoilt children of nature which she endowed with an incomparable strength, and with the yet greater gift of the beautiful and warm red blood, which now for the first time appeared.
That is the true flower of the world. All the pale and cold blooded creation is languid and seemingly heartless, when compared with the generous and exulting life which boils with anger or love in the rich purple.
The strength of the superior creation, its charm, its beauty, reside in that blood. With it commenced a new youth in nature, a flame of desire, of love, and the love of family and race; to be completed and crowned in man by divine Pity.
But with this magnificent gift of red blood, the nervous sensibility was enormously increased; the being became more vulnerable, more sensitive alike to pleasure and to pain. The Whale having scarcely any sense of scent or hearing, every thing in his organization is favorable to the sense of touch. The thick blubber which so well protects him from the cold, does not at all guard him against hurts. His finely organized skin of six tissues shudders and vibrates in them all at every blow, and their papillæ are most delicate instruments of touch. And all this is animated and made vivid by rich, red blood, which, even allowing for difference of bulk, is infinitely more abundant than that of the terrestrial mammiferæ. The Whale, when wounded, ensanguines the ocean to a great distance; the blood that we have in drops, is lavished upon him in torrents.
The female is pregnant nine months. Her milk is sweetish and warm, like that of the human female. But as she has always to breast the wave, her front mammæ, if placed on the chest, would be exposed to all shocks; they are, therefore, placed a little lower on the belly. Here the young one is sheltered and safe fromthe shock of the wave, which is already broken, ere it reaches him. The form, inherent to such a life, contracts the mother, at the waist and deprives her of that adorable grace of woman, that beauty of settled and harmonious life, where all is tenderness. But the Whale, the great woman of the sea, however tender she may be, is forced to conform, in every thing, to her continual battle with the waves. For the rest, beneath that strange uncouth disguise, the organization, and the sensitiveness, are the same; fish above, the Whale is woman beneath. She is infinitely timid, too; the mere flight of a bird will sometimes terrify her so much that she dives so violently as to hurt herself by striking the bottom.
Love with the Whale being subject to difficult condition requires a profoundly peaceful place. Like a noble elephant, who fears profane eyes, the Whales love only the desert. Their meeting place for pairing is towards the poles, in the solitary bays of Greenland, among the fogs of Behring, and, also, no doubt, in the warm sea which is known to exist close to the pole itself. A solitude they must have to mate in, be it arctic or antarctic.
Will that warm sea be found again? It is only to be reached by traversing the horrid defiles which open, close, and change, with every succeeding year, as though to prevent the return. The Whale, it is believed, passunder the ice from one sea to the other; a bold and perilous journey by that dark road. Compelled to rise to breathe every quarter of an hour, though they have reserves of air which will last them a little longer, they are much endangered as they pass through that enormous crust with only here and there a breathing hole. If one of these cannot be reached in due time, the ice is so thick and solid every where else, that no strength of the Whale could break through it; and he would be as helplessly drowned as Leander in the Hellespont. But the Whales know nothing about the fate of Leander; so they boldly venture, and for the most part pass safely.
The solitude is great, it is a strange scene of death and silence for this festival of ardent and passionate life. A white Bear, a Seal, or, perhaps, a blue Fox, respectful and prudent, looks on from a distance. Fantastically brilliant chandeliers and mirrors are not wanting. Bluish crystals, huge and dazzling peaks of ice, and masses of virgin snow, are all around.
What renders this Elephantine Hymen the more interesting, is, that it is one of express consent. They have not the tyrannous weapons of the Shark by which he subdues his female, for on the contrary their slippery skins separate them. In their struggle to overcome this desperate obstacle to their happiness, one might suppose them to be fighting. The whale-men assertthat they have seen this strange spectacle. The couples in their burning transports rear themselves upright like two vast towers, and endeavor to embrace with their short arms. They fall down again with an immense crash; and Bear and Man alike retreat, astounded by the deafening sobs of the vast creatures.
The solution is unknown; those explanations, which have been given, are simply absurd. What is certain is, that, whether in the act of love or of suckling, or of defence, the unfortunate Whale suffers under the double oppression of its weight and its difficulty of breathing. She can only breathe with her head above water; if she remain below she will be choked. Is the Whale, therefore, a terrestrial animal? Not so. If by chance she be stranded on the coast, the enormous weight of her flesh and blubber overwhelms her respiring organs and she is strangled.
Placed wholly in the only element in which she can respire, she is asphyxiated just as surely as if kept beyond a certain space of time wholly beneath the water.
Let us speak plainly. This vast mammiferous giant is an incomplete creature, the first poetic offspring of creative power, which first contemplates the sublime and then reverts to the possible and the durable. The admirable animal was well provided as to size, strength, warm blood, sweet milk, and good disposition. It needed nothing but the means of living. It was madewithout respect to the general proportions of this globe, without respect to the imperative law of weight. In spite of his enormous bones, beneath, his gigantic sides were not strong enough to keep his chest sufficiently expanded and free. Escaping from his enemy, the water, he found another enemy in the land, and his mighty lungs were overwhelmed, and collapsed. His magnificent blowing apertures throwing up columns of water thirty feet into the air, are, in themselves, proofs of an organization infantine and rude. In throwing up that column towards the sky thepanting blowerseems to say, "Oh, nature, why hast thou made me a serf?"
The life of this creature was a problem, and it seemed that this splendid but imperfect first draft of the vast and the warm-blooded could not endure. Their furtive and difficult love, their suckling amidst the roar and the rush of the tempest, in the hard choice between shipwreck and strangling; the two great acts of their life rendered almost impossible, and performed only by mightiest effort and most heroic will;—what conditions of existence are these!
The mother has never more than one little one, and that is much for her to achieve. Both she and it have three great annoyances, the difficulty of breasting the waves, the suckling, and the fatal necessity of rising to the surface to breathe. The education of the young one is a real combat. Tempest-tossed and sorelybeaten by the waves, the young one sucks, as it were, by stealth, when the mother can throw herself on her side. Here the mother is admirable. She knows that the young one in endeavoring to draw the teat will be forced to leave its hold; and, therefore, seizing the favorable moment, she, as from a piston, discharges a tun of milk into the gaping and craving mouth.
The male seldom quits the female. Their embarrassment is great when the eager and cruel fishers attack them in the person of their young one. The whale-men harpoon the young one, well knowing that the parents will follow it. And, in fact, they do make almost incredible efforts to save it and carry it off; they rise to the surface and expose themselves to the utmost danger. Even when it is dead, they still defend it; though so well able to dive and save themselves, they remain upon the water in full peril to follow the floating body of their little one.
Shipwrecks are common among them, for two reasons. In the first place they cannot, like the fishes, remain during tempestuous weather in the lower and peaceable depths; and in the next place, whatever the danger, they will not separate; the strong nobly share the fate of the weak; the whole family drowns together.
In December, 1723, at the mouth of the Elbe, eight females perished, and near their carcasses were their eight males; and a similar scene was witnessed in 1784,at Andierne in Brittany. In the latter instance, fish and frightened porpoises were driven on shore by the tempest, and strange and terrible bellowings were heard from a great family of Whales, tempest-driven, and struggling for life. There, again, the males perished with the females. Many of the latter were with young and defenceless against the pitiless waves; they were cast upon the shore to die. Two of them, in this situation, brought forth their young with piercing shrieks, and groans most harrowingly human.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE SYRENS.
Behold me once more on shore. I had enough, and to spare, of shipwreck. I want durable races. The Cetaceæ must disappear. Let us moderate our conceptions, and, of that gigantic faëry of the first-born mammalia, of milk and warm blood, let us preserve all except the giant.
Above all, let us preserve the gentleness, the love, and the love of family. Let us preserve them completely in those humbler but kindly races into which both elements infuse their spirits.
The benedictions of the Earth already begin to be felt. On quitting the life of the fish, many things impossible to it, easily become harmonized.
Thus the Whale, tender mother if ever there was one, could grasp her nursling, but could not press it to her breast, the arms being too high and short, and the breast, as we have already shown, being, perforce, placed far back. In the new creatures, which swim, but whichalso creep upon the land, such as seals, sea cows, &c., the breast, lest it should be hurt by the ground, is placed upon the chest, thus foreshadowing woman, and giving to the form and attitude, a grace most illusive at a distance.
In reality, even closely examined, if it has less of charming whiteness, the breast of the new creatures is a true feminine breast; that globe which, swelling with love, and with the sweet necessity of giving suck, exhibits, in its gentle heavings, all the sighs of the heart beneath, and invites the child to nourishment and soft repose. All this is denied to the mother that swims and floats, but is enjoyed by her who rests. The fixity of the family, the constant tenderness, let us at once say, Society, all these commence from the moment that the child reposes on the maternal breast.
But how is organization to pass from creatures of the sea to creatures of both sea and land? Let us try to divine that transition.
At the outset, the parentage of the amphibious race is evident. Many, amphibious still, to their great inconvenience, have the heavy tail of the Whale. And this latter, in one species, at least, conceals in its tail the rude outlines and distinct commencements of the two hind feet of the highest of the amphibious creatures.
In the seas studded with islands, continually interposingland, the cetaceæ, so frequently interrupted in their passage, had to modify their habits accordingly. Their less rapid motion, and confined life, diminished their bulk, and from the Whale they were reduced to the sea Elephant, and reserving the memory of the superb which had armed certain of the cetaceæ, in their grand sea life, the sea Elephant still has strong, but very harmless fore teeth. Even its masticating teeth are not precisely either herbivorous or carnivorous. They are but ill adapted to either diet, and must needs operate but slowly.
Two things tended to lighten the Whale; his mass of blubber, that vast mass of concentrated oil, which floated him on the water, and that powerful tail whose alternate strokes to right and left, urged him onward. But all this was unfitted for the amphibious creature, grovelling in shallow waters, or crawling on the rocks. The fish, so agile, scorns a creature that cannot catch him, and he consequently gets little other prey than the molluscs, as slow as himself. By degrees, he learns to eat the abundant and gelatinous sea wrack, which nourishes, and fattens, but without giving the strength of animal food.
Such a one we may see in the Red Sea, the Malay isles, and those of Australia. Crawling or sitting, that rare collossus, the Dugong, displays its chests and breasts. He is sometimes called the Dagon of the Tabernacles,an inert idol, which in spite of its imposing aspect, cannot defend itself, and which will soon disappear, and enter into that region of fable which already contains so many realities, at which we as stupidly, as presumptuously, laugh. What has caused this great change, created the terrestrial Dugong, and his brother the Walrus? The plentiful alimentation of the generous and fertile earth, truly pacific before the coming of man, and doubtless, also, Love, so difficult to the Whale, so easy in the quiet and settled life of the amphibious.
Love, to these latter, is no longer a thing of flight and danger; the female is no longer the shy giant that must be followed to the end of the world, but is content, on her bed of sea-weed, to obey the will of her master, whose life she makes pleasant. Few mysteries here. The amphibious live frankly and honestly in the face of day. The females being very numerous, voluntarily form a seraglio. From wild, fierce poetry, we descend to patriarchal manners and pleasures too facile. The male, good patriarch, notable for his large head, his moustaches, and his great front teeth, sits proudly between his Sarah and Agar, Rebecca and Leah, and his little flock of young ones, to all of which he is most kind. In his quiet life, the great strength of this sanguineous creature, turns wholly to family tenderness; he embraces all his family, and is willing to die, if need be, in their defence. But, alas! his strength andhis fury serve him but feebly for even his own defence: his enormous mass delivers him over to the enemy. He bellows, and crawls, and is willing to combat, but unable—gigantic failure as he is; an abortion belonging to neither world, a poor disarmed Caliban.
Weight, so fatal to the Whale, is still more so to these. Let us, then, still farther reduce the bulk, make, the spine more supple, and above all, either do away with that tail, or rather, let us fork it into two fleshy appendages, which will be much more useful. This new being, the Seal, lighter, a good fisher, getting his subsistence in the sea, but living on the land, will employ his life in endeavoring to return to it, to climb the rock to which his females and their offspring await his return from fishing. Having no tusks, like those with which the Walrus assists himself in climbing, he presses into the service his front and back members, clings to the sea-weed, distending his members continually, until they form into fingers.
What is finest in the Seal, what strikes you the moment you catch sight of his round head, is the great capaciousness of brain. Boitard assures us that, with the exception of man, no creature has so fine a cerebral development as the Seal. We are strongly impressed by the aspect of the Seal, far more so than by that of the ape tribe, whose grimaces never fail to revolt us. I shall never forget the Seals in the Zoological Gardenat Amsterdam, admirable museum, so rich, so beautiful, so well organized, decidedly one of the finest establishments in the world. I was there on the twelfth of last July, just after a great rain fall. The atmosphere was heavy and sultry, and two Seals sought shelter and coolness, swimming and playing in their pond. When they rested they looked up at me with their velvety eyes, and there was a mixed intelligence and melancholy in their fixed gaze. There was no language which we could mutually understand. Pity that, between soul and soul, there should be that eternal barrier!
The earth is the world of their greatest affection. There they are born, there they love; thither, when wounded, they retire to die. Thither they take their pregnant females, form for them their beds of sea-weed, and provide them with fish. They are very affectionate, good neighbors, mutually defending each other; only at their season of amours they are a little apt to fight. Each male has two or three females that he finds a home for on some mossy rock of sufficient extent. That is his estate, and he suffers no intrusion upon it. He knows how to maintain his right of proprietorship. The females are gentle and defenceless. If ill treated, they weep, are agitated and cast despairing glances upon the assailant.
They are parturient during nine months, and nursetheir young during five or six months, teaching them to swim, fish, and select the best food. No doubt they would keep them still longer, but the husband is jealous of his own progeny, fearing that the too weak mother will give him a rival.
No doubt this brevity of education has limited the progress which the Seal would otherwise have made. Maternity is only complete when we come to the Sea Cow, an excellent family in which the parents have not the sad courage to drive away their young. The mothers nurse them for a long time; even while suckling a second, the mother still keeps by her the eldest, which, though it be a male, the father never ill treats, but seems to regard him with a love only second to that of the mother.
This extreme tenderness, peculiar to that species, is exemplified in the physical progress made in the organization. In the Seal, a great swimmer, and in the heavy and clumsy sea Elephant the arms still continue to be fins; closely attached to the body are incapable of extension. But at length the Sea Cow, theSea Mamaas the negroes call her, accomplishes the miracle. All extend and becomes pliant by a continuous effort. Nature exerts all her ingenuity upon the fixed idea of holding, pressing, caressing the young. The ligaments yield and extend, the fore arm appears and by and by appears the hand.
And then the mother has the great, the supreme pleasure to press her young one to her breast. Here, then, are two things which may enable these amphibious creatures to make great progress. Already they have the hand, that organ of industry, that essential instrument of future toil. It must be supplied, must aid the work of the teeth as with the Beaver, and the Ant, will commence, at the outset, with building a home for the family.
On the other hand, education, also, has become possible. The young one rests on the maternal bosom and, slowly drinking in her life, remains there a long time, and to an age when he can learn every thing,—all this depends on the kindness of the father who protects the innocent rival. And it is that which allows of progress.
And, if we might give credence to certain traditions, progress did marvellously continue. The developed amphibious creatures, according to those traditions, approached nearer and nearer to the human form and became Tritons and Syrens, men and women of the Sea. Only, in contradiction to the fables of the melodious Syrens, these are dumb in their utter impotency to find a language in which to address themselves to man and obtain his pity. These races will have perished, as has the unfortunate Beaver which cannot speak, but weeps.
It has been very lightly affirmed that these men and women of the Sea were Seals. But how is it possible that such a mistake could be made? Every species of the Seal has been known from very early times; even as early as the seventh century the Seal was hunted, not only for his skin, but also for his flesh, which was then eaten.
The men and women of the Sea which are spoken of in the writings of the sixteenth century, were seen, not merely for an instant, and on the water, but brought to land, shown, and kept in the great cities of Antwerp and Amsterdam in the time of Charles V. and Philip II., and, therefore, under the very eyes of Vesale and other learned men and eminent naturalists. Mention is made of a marine woman who, for several years, wore the dress of a nun and lived in a Convent where any one might see her. She could not speak, but worked, and could spin, knit, and sew. Only one peculiarity, they could not cure her of,—her great love of the water, and her incessant efforts to return to it.
But it will be asked—"If these creatures really existed, how is it that we do not see them now?" Alas! We need not seek far for the reply. They were so generally killed! It was considered a sin to let them live, "for they weremonsters." This we are expressly told by the old writers.
Whatever had not the known form of animality, and,especially, whatever approached to the form of man passed for amonster, and was pitilessly dispatched. Even the human mother of a greatly deformed child, could not protect it; the poor creature was smothered, as being a child of the Devil, an invention of his malice to outrage the creation and calumniate the Deity. On the other hand, those Syrens, too analogous to humanity, were all the more taken and detested for a diabolic mockery. In such horror and hate were they held in the eyes of the middle ages that their appearance was considered a prodigy, an omen that God permitted to terrify sinners. People scarcely dared to name them, and made haste to get rid of them. Even the bold sixteenth century still believed them to be men and women in shape, but Devils in reality, and not even to be touched, excepting with the harpoon. They had become very rare when miscreants made a profit of keeping and exhibiting them.
But do there now exist any remains, any whole, or even partial, skeletons of these creatures? We shall know that, when the Museums of Europe shall throw open to our view the whole of their immense collections. I am aware that room is wanting for that; and it is always likely to be wanting, if we need a palace. But the most simple building, if it only be sufficiently spacious and weather tight, would serve to hold suchcollections, and needs not to be at all costly. Hitherto, we have only seen mere specimens and selections.
Let us add that stuffed amphibious creatures, to give us a real idea of them, should be so placed as to exhibitthese monstersin the attitudes of their actual life. Let the maternal Seal, or the Sea Cow, be seen on its rock, as a Syren, in the first use of her hand and pressing her little one to her breast.
Is this to affirm that these creatures might have ascended to us? Or that we have descended from them? Mallet supposed so, but I cannot see the least probability in either.
The Sea, no doubt, commenced everything. But it is not from the highest marine animals, that has proceeded the long parallel series of terrestrials that is culminated and crowned in Man. They were already too fixed, too special, to form the first rude sketch of a nature so different. They had carried far, almost exhausted, the fecundity of their species. In that case the elders perish; and it is very low down in the obscure juniors of some parent class that the new series commences that is to ascend so much higher. [See notes at the end of the volume.]
Man was not their son, but their brother—a terribly tyrannical brother.
See him at length arrive, the active, the ingenious,the cruel monarch of the world! My book grows brighter, clearer. But what does it now proceed to exhibit? Alas! What sad things must I now draw into that broad, bright light! This creature, this tyrannical sovereign, can create a second nature within Nature. But what has he done with the first, with his mother, and his nurse? With the very teeth that she has given him, he has cruelly gnawed her bosom!
How many animals that lived peaceably, were becoming civilized, began even to practise some of the arts, are now hunted and terrified into the condition of mere brutes? The Ape-kings of Ceylon, whose sagacity was so well known in India, and that Brahmin of the creation, the Elephant, have been chased, subdued into the state of mere beasts of burthen.
The freest of beings, that formerly sported so joyously and harmlessly in the sea, those affectionate Seals, those gentle Whales, the pacific pride of the Ocean, have fled to the polar seas, the terrible world of ice. But they cannot all support, for long, so hard a life; in a brief time they will all have disappeared.
An unfortunate race, the Polish peasants, have learned to understand the intelligence of the dumb exile which has taken refuge in the lakes of Lithuania. The Poles say—"Woe to him who makes the Beaver weep."
That artist-animal has become a timid beast, whichknows nothing and can do nothing. The few that still survive in America, still retire farther and farther from the vicinage of man. A traveller lately found one, far, very far off, beyond the great lakes. It was timidly resuming its traditional labors, and had commenced building a house for its family. When it saw a man, it dropped the wood on which it was working; it did not even dare to escape, but burst into tears.
BOOK THIRD.
CONQUEST OF THE SEA.
CHAPTER I.
THE HARPOON.
"The Sailor who sights Greenland," says Captain John Ross, with a grave simplicity, "finds nothing to delight him with the sight." I can very well believe it. In the first place, it is an iron-bound coast of most pitiless aspect, whose dark granite does not even preserve a vestment of snow. Everywhere else, Ice; not a trace of vegetation. That desolate land which hides the Pole from us, seems a veritable land of Famine and of Death.
During the brief time when the water remains unfrozen, one might contrive to live there; but the place is frozen up for nine months in the year, and during all that time, what is to be done? And what can one get to eat? One can scarcely even search for food. The night lasts for months together, and at times the darkness is so dense that Kane, surrounded by his dogs, could only discover them by the humid warmth of theirbreath. In that long, long, darkness, on that sterile land, clothed in impenetrable ice, there wander, however, two Hermits, who persist in living in that land of horror. One of these is the fishing Bear, a bold and eager prowler, in rich fur, and in so thick an under vestment of fat, that he can for a long time defy both cold and hunger. The other, a grotesque creature, looks, when seen from a distance, like a fish reared upwards, standing on the tip of its tail; a fish clumsily and awkwardly built, and having long hanging fins. But this seeming fish is a man. Each scents the other, the brute and the man; both are fierce with hunger, yet the Bear sometimes declines the combat, and retreats before the fiercer, and still more famished, man.
A famishing man is very terrible in his cruel courage. With no other weapon than a sharpened bone, our Greenlander pursues the enormous Bear. But he would have long since perished of famine, had he no other food than his terrible compatriot. He saved himself from death only by a crime. The earth affording nothing, he turned his attention to the Sea, and as it was closed by the ice, he found nothing there to kill except his gentle acquaintance the Seal. In him he found the oil without which he would be dead of cold, even sooner than of hunger.
The day dream of the Greenlander is that at his death he will pass to the Moon, where he will havewood, fire, the light of the hearth. Here below, in Greenland, oil supplies the place of all these. He drinks it, in huge draughts, and is at once warmed and nourished.
A great contrast between that man and the somnolent, amphibious creatures, that, even in that climate, can live without any very severe suffering! The gentle eye of the Seal, sufficiently indicates that. Nursling of the Sea he is always, in connection with her, and there are always clefts in the ice, at which the excellent swimmer knows how to provide himself with food. Heavy and clumsy as we may take him to be, he can adroitly mount on a piece of ice and steer himself in search of a convenient fishing place. The water, thick with molluscs, and fat with animated atoms, richly nourishes the fish, for the use of the Seal, who, having well filled himself, returns to his rock, and sleeps too soundly to feel the cold, or to fear anything.
The man's life in Greenland, is the very contrary of this. He seems to be there in spite of Nature, an accursed being, upon whom everything makes pitiless war. Looking upon the photographs that we have of the Esquimaux, we can read their terrible destiny in the fixity of their gaze, and in the harsh, dark eye; black as midnight. They look as though petrified by perpetually seeing before them the vision of an infinite wretchedness. That gazing upon eternal terror, has hiddenbeneath a mask of iron the man's strong intelligence, which, however, is rapid and full of the expedients suggested by the endless dangers and sufferings of such a life.
What was he to do. His family was famishing, his children cried for bread, and his wife shivered upon the snow. The North wind, pitilessly assailed them all with mingled hail and snow, that horrid pelting which blinds, stupefies, deprives one of sense and voice. The Sea was frozen up; so, fish was out of the question. But the Seal was there, and how many fish there were in one Seal; what an accumulation of the richest oil! The Seal was there, defenceless, sleeping. Nay, had he even been awake, he would not have tried to escape. He is like the Sea Cow; you must beat him if you wish to drive him away. Take one of their young and it is in vain that you throw him into the Sea, he will get out and still follow you, gentle and attached as your favorite dog. This facile, this affectionate, trait in the creature's character, must have terribly troubled the man who first thought of killing such a creature; must have made him hesitate and resist the temptation. But at length cold and famine got the upper hand, and he committed the assassination; from that moment he was rich.
The flesh nourished the famishing people, the oil served to warm and cheer them, and the bone andsinews served for many domestic uses, while the skin served to clothe them. And what was still more useful was, that by industriously sowing the skins together they made a vehicle, at once light, and strong, and water proof, which the man called his canoe, and in which he dared to put out to sea.
A miserable little vehicle it was; long, slender, and weighing scarcely anything. But it was every where very firmly closed up, except an opening in which the rower seated himself, drawing the skin tightly around his waist. One would suppose that such a craft must upset and be swamped; but nothing of the sort occurs. It darts like an arrow over the crest of the wave, disappears, reappears, now in the eddies, now between the icebergs.
Man and boat are one; a marine entity; an artificial fish. But how inferior is this artificial fish to the true one! He has not the floating bladder, which enables the fish to make itself lighter or heavier as the occasion may demand. Still more, the man has not the vigorous motion, the lively contraction and expansion of the spine to communicate such power to the strokes of the tail, nor has he the oil which, being so much lighter than water, will always ride above the waves. What the man best imitates is the fin, but even that only imperfectly. The man's fins, his oars, are not attached to his body, but, moved by his long arms, areweak compared to the fin, and, moreover, soon fatigue the rower. What is it that makes amends for so much of inferiority in the means of the man? His terrible energy, his vivid reason which, from beneath that fixed and melancholy countenance, flashes out from time to time, invents, resolves, and finds an instant remedy for all the deficiences which, in this floating skin, momentarily threaten him with death.
Frequently our rower is stopped by a mass of ice which peremptorily refuses him a passage. Then comes a new expedient, the parts are changed on the instant. Hitherto the canoe has carried the man; now the man carries the canoe. He takes it on his shoulder and traverses the icy portage till he comes again to open water, the ice crackling beneath him as he crosses it. Occasionally icebergs, floating, and terrible mountains, are so close that they leave between them only a narrow passage which our man passes through at the risk of being in an instant crushed, flattened between them. Those icy walls now widen, now contract, the space between them; they may, at any moment, come together with a force that would crush a seventy-four, to say nothing about our poor Greenlander in his poor skin canoe. Such a fate did, in fact, once occur to a tall ship; she was cut in two, flattened, crushed; by the coming together of two icebergs.
These Greenlanders tell us that their ancestors wereWhale fishers. They were less wretched then, more ingenious, and better provided. No doubt they had iron; procured probably from Norway or Iceland. Whales have always been very numerous in the Greenland seas. A grand object of desire to those to whom oil is a thing of the very first necessity! The fish give it by drops, the Seal in waves—the Whale in mountains! He was truly a man, and a bold one, who first, with his poor weapons, with the sea howling at his feet, and the darkness closing around him, dared to pursue the Whale! A bold man, he, who trusting to his courage, the strength of his arm and the weight of his harpoon, first believed that he could pierce that mighty mass of blubber and flesh and convert it to his own profit!—the man who first imagined that he could attack the Whale and not perish in the tempest that would be raised by the plunges and terrific tail-blows of the astonished and suffering monster! And, as if to crown his audacity, the man next fastened a line to his harpoon, and braving still more closely the frightful shock of the agonized and dying giant, never once feared that that giant might plunge headlong into the deep, taking with him harpoon, line, boat,—and man!
There is still another danger, and no less terrible. It is that instead of meeting the common Whale, our man should fall in with the Cachalot, that terror of the seas. He is not very large, perhaps not more than from sixtyto eighty feet. But his head alone measures about a third; from twenty to twenty-five feet. In case of such a meeting, woe to the fisher; he would become the chased instead of the chaser, the victim instead of the tyrant. The Cachalot has horrible jaws, and no fewer than forty-eight enormous teeth; he could with ease devour all; both boat and man. And he seems always drunk with blood. His blind rage so terrifies all the other Whales that they escape, bellowing, throwing themselves on the shore, or striving to hide themselves in the sand. Even when he is dead they still fear him and will not approach his carcass. The fiercest species of the Cachalot is the Ourque or Physetene of the ancients, which is so much dreaded by the Icelanders, that when they are on the sea they will not so much as name him lest he should come and attack them. They believe, on the other hand, that a species of Whale, the Jubarte, loves and protects them, and provokes the monster in order to save them from his fury.
Many think that the first who undertook so perilous a task as that of Whale fishing must have been eccentric hot heads. According to those who think so, that perilous chase could never have originated with the prudent men of the North, but must have been initiated by the Basques, those daring hunters and fishers who were so well accustomed to their own capricious sea, the Gulf of Gascony, where they fished the Tunny.Here they first saw the huge Whales at play and pursued them, frenzied by the hope of such enormous prey, and pursued them still, onward and onward, no matter whither; even to the confines of the pole.
Here the poor Colossus fancied it must needs be safe, for it could not fancy any one would be desperate enough to follow it thither, and so it went tranquilly to sleep. But our Basque mad-caps approached it stealthily and silently. Tightening his red belt around his waist, the boldest and most active of the Basque sailors leaped from the deck right on to the back of the sleeping monster, and, fearlessly or carelessly, drove the harpoon home to the very eye. Poor Whale!
CHAPTER II.
DISCOVERY OF THE THREE OCEANS.
Who opened up to men the great distant navigation? Who revealed the Ocean, and marked out its zones and its liquid highways? Who discovered the secrets of the Globe? The Whale and the Whaler!
And all this before Columbus and the famous gold seekers, who have monopolized all the glory, found again, with much outcry about their discovery, what had so long before been discovered by the Whalers.
That crossing of the Ocean which was so boastfully celebrated in the fifteenth century, had often been made, not only by the narrow passage between Iceland and Greenland, but also by the open sea; for the Basques went to Newfoundland. The smallest danger was the mere voyage, for these men, who went to the very end of the then world, to challenge the Whale to single combat. To steer right away into the Northern seas,to attack the mighty monster, amid darkness and storms, with the dense fog all around and the foaming waves below, those who could do this, were, believe it well, not the men to shrink from the ordinary dangers of the voyage.
Noble warfare; great school of courage! That Fishery was not then, as it is now, an easy war to wage, made from a distance, and with a potently murderous machine. No; the fisher then struck with his own strong hand, impelled and guided by his own fearless heart; and he risked life to take life. The men of that day killed but few Whales, but they gained infinitely in maritime ability, in patience, in sagacity, and in intrepidity. They brought back less of oil; but more, far more, of glory.
Every nation has its own peculiar genius. We recognize each by its own style of procedure. There are a hundred forms of courage, and these graduated varieties, formed, as it were, another heroic game. At the North, the Scandinavian, the ruddy race from Norway to Flanders, had their sanguine fury. At the South, the wild burst, the gay daring, the clear-headed excitement, that impelled, at once, and guided them over the world. In the center, the silent and patient firmness of the Breton, who, yet, in the hour of danger could display a quite sublime eccentricity. And lastly, the Normanwariness, considerately courageous; daring all, but daring all for success.
Such was the beauty of man, in that sovereign manifestation of human courage.
We owe a vast deal to the Whale. But for it, the fishers would still have hugged the shore; for almost every edible fish, seeks the shore, and the river. It was it that emancipated them, and led them afar. It led them onward, and onward still, until they found it, after having almost unconsciously, passed from one world to the other. Greenland did not seduce them, it was not the land that they sought, but the sea, and the tracks of the Whale. The Ocean at large is its home, and especially the broad and open Sea. Each species has its especial preference for this or that latitude, for a certain zone of water; more or less cold. And it was that preference which traced out the great divisions of the Atlantic.
The tribe of inferior Whales, that have a dorsal fin, (Baleinopteres) are to be found in the warmest, and in the coldest seas; under the line, and in the polar seas. In the great intermediate region, the fierce Cachalot inclines towards the South, devastating the warm waters. On the contrary, the Free Whale fears the warm waters; we should rather say that they did, formerly, fear them;—they have become so scarce! Especiallyaffecting, for their food, the molluscs, and other forms of elementary life, they sought them in the temperate waters, a little to the northward. They are never found in the warm, southern current; it was that fact that led to the current being noticed, and thence to the discovery of thetrue course from America to Europe. From Europe to America, the trade winds will serve us.
If the Free Whale has a perfect horror of the warm waters, and cannot pass the Equator, it is clear that he cannot double the southern end of America. How happens it, then, that when he is wounded on one side of America, in the Atlantic, he is sometimes found on the other side of America, and in the Pacific?It proves that there is a north-western passage.Another discovery which we owe to the Whale, and one which throws a broad light alike on the form of the globe, and the geography of the seas!
By degrees, the Whale has led us everywhere. Rare as he is at present, he has led us to both poles, from the uttermost recesses of the Pacific to Behring's strait, and the infinite wastes of the Antarctic waters. There is even an enormous region that no vessel, whether war ship or merchantman, ever traverses, at a few degrees beyond the southern points of America and Africa. No one visits that region but the Whalers.
Had they chosen, the magnates of the earth mightmuch earlier have made the discoveries of the fifteenth century. They should have addressed themselves to the sea rovers, to the Basques, to the Icelanders, to the Norwegians, and to our Normans. For very many reasons, they could not venture to do so. The Portuguese were unwilling to employ any but men of their own nationality, and formed in their own school. They feared our Normans, whom they chased and dispossessed from the coast of Africa. On the other hand, the kings of Castile always felt suspicious of their subjects, the Basques, whose privileges rendered them a kind of republic within a monarchy, and who, moreover, were well known to be both bold and dangerous. It was this feeling which caused these princes to fail, in more than one enterprise. We need mention only one of them, the miserably ruined Armada, so proudly and absurdly called theInvincible. Philip II, who had two veteran Basque Admirals, gave the command of the Armada, to a Castilian. The advice of the veterans was neglected, and thence the disaster.
A terrible disease broke out in the fifteenth century. The hunger, the thirst, the raging thirst for gold. Kings, priests, warriors, people, all cried aloud for gold. There was no longer any means of balancing income and expenditure. False money, cruel persecutions, atrocious wars, all and every thing, were employed, but still the cry was for gold, and the gold wasnot forthcoming. The alchemists confidently promised that they would soon make it; but it was to be waited for, that gold; still, still, it was not forthcoming. The treasury became furious as a hungry Lion, devoured the Jews, devoured the Moors, and of all that mighty devouring there was not a morsel left between the teeth of the still gold-hungry nations.
The peoples were quite as eager as the kings. Lean and sucked to the very bone, they begged, they prayed, they implored, for a miracle that would bring down gold from Heaven.
We all know the story of Sinbad the Sailor, that capital story in theArabian Nights. The poor porter, Hindbad, bending under a load of wood, stops before the doors of Sinbad's palace, to listen to the music, and bitterly complains of the contrast between the lot of the poor porter Hindbad, and that of Sinbad, the returned, renowned, and magnificently rich Sinbad. But when the enriched sailor related all the perils he had undergone, and all the sufferings he had endured, Hindbad stood aghast at the tale. The entire effect of the story is to exaggerate the dangers of the great game, the vast lottery of travelling, but also to exaggerate the profits that may be made by it, and to discourage steady and humble industry.
The legend, which, in the fifteenth century, influenced so many hearts, and turned so many brains, was arehash of the fable of the Hesperides, an Eldorado, a land of gold, which was located in the Indies; a terrestrial paradise, still existing here below. The only difficulty consisted in finding that same golden land. They did not care to seek it in the North, which was the reason why so little use was made of the discovery of Newfoundland and Greenland. In the South, on the contrary, gold dust had already been found in Africa. That was encouraging.
The learned dreamers of a pedantic century heaped up texts and commentaries, and the discovery, by no means difficult in itself, was rendered so, by dint of lectures, reflections, and utopian dreams. Was this land of gold, Paradise, or was it not? Was it at our antipodes? and, in fact, have we any antipodes? And at this last question all the Doctors, all the men of the black robe, stopped the learned quite short, and reminded them that upon that point, the Church was quite positive; the heretical doctrine of the Antipodes having been formally and expressly condemned. Behold a serious difficulty! Our learned dreamers were stopped short.
But why was it so difficult to discover the already discovered America? The reason seems to be that the discovery was at once hoped for and dreaded.
The learned Italian bookseller, Columbus, felt quite satisfied upon the subject. He had been in Iceland tocollect traditions, and on the other hand the Basques told him all that they knew about Newfoundland. A Gallician had been cast away there and had lived there. Columbus selected for his associates the Pinçons, Andalusian pilots, who are with much probability supposed to be identical with the Pinçons of Dieppe. We say that this is very probable because our Basques and Normans, subjects of Castile, were intimately connected. They are the same who, under the name of Castilians, were led by the Norman Bethencourt to the famous expedition of the Canaries. Our kings conferred privileges on theCastilianssettled at Honfleur and Dieppe; and, on the other hand, the men of Dieppe had trading establishments at Seville. It is not certain that a Dieppois found America four years before Columbus, but it is about certain that these Pinçons of Andalusia were Norman privateers.
Neither Basques nor Normans could obtain authority to act under the commission of Castile. It was an able and eloquent Italian, a persistent Genoese, who seized upon the fitting moment, and used it, and set all scruple aside,—that moment when the ruin of the Moors had cost so dear to Castile, and when the cry of Gold, Gold, or we perish, became louder, more piteous, and more unanimous, than ever. That moment was when victorious Spain shuddered as she counted the cost, paid and unpaid, of her wars of the crusadeand the Inquisition. The Italian seized upon that lever and used it most unscrupulously; becoming most devout among the devout. More apparently bigoted than the Bigots themselves, he pressed the very Church into his service. Isabella was reminded of the great sin and scandal of leaving whole nations of Pagans still in the valley of the shadow of death; and it was particularly pressed upon her observation, that to discover the golden land, was the one thing needful to acquiring the ability to exterminate the Turk and to recover Jerusalem.
It is well known that of three ships the Pinçons shipped two, and commanded them, and they led the way. One of them, indeed, mistook his course, but the others, Francis Pinçon and his younger brother Vincent, pilot of the vesselNina, signalled to Columbus, on the 12th of October, 1492, to steer to the south-west. Columbus, who was on a westerly course, would have encountered the gulf stream in its fullest force, and directly thwart hawse, and he would have crossed that liquid wall only with the greatest difficulty. He would have perished, or would have made such little way that his discouraged crew would have mutinied. On the contrary, the Pinçons, who probably had collected some traditions on the subject, steered as though they were well acquainted with the current; they did not attempt to cross it in its force, but keeping well to thesouthward, crossed without difficulty and made the exact spot where the trades blow directly from Africa to America in the latitude of Haiti. This is proved from the journal of Columbus himself, who candidly avows that he was guided by the Pinçons.
Who first saw America? One of Pinçon's sailors, if we may put any confidence in the report of the royal enquiry of 1513.
From all this it would seem pretty plain that a good share of both the glory and the gain ought to have been awarded to the Pinçons. They thought the same, and commenced legal proceedings, but the king decided in favor of Columbus. Why? Apparently because the Pinçons were Normans, and Spain preferred to recognize the right of a Genoese, without national feeling, than that of French subjects of Louis XII, and of Francis I, to whom, as French subjects, they might some day, from fear or favor, transfer their rights. One of the Pinçons died of despair, caused by this very manifestly unjust decision.
But still, who had overcome the great obstacle of religious repugnance? Whose eloquence, tact, and perseverance, in fact set the expedition fairly afloat? Columbus, and Columbus alone. He was the real author of the enterprise and he was also its heroic conductor, and he merits the glory which his posterity preserves and ever will preserve for him.
I think with M. Jules de Blosseville (a noble heart and a good judge of great and heroic things) that in all these discoveries the only real difficulty was the circumnavigation of the globe, the enterprise of Magellan and his pilot, the Basque, Sebastian del Cano. The most brilliant, but at the same time the easiest, was the crossing the Atlantic, catching the trade wind, and thus getting to America far south of the point at which it had long before been discovered at the North.
The Portuguese did a far less extraordinary thing in taking an entire century to discover the Western coast of Africa. Our Normans, in a very brief space had discovered the half of it. In spite of all that is said about the laudable perseverance of Prince Henry, in establishing the Lisbon school, the Venetian Cadamosto clearly proves the want of ability of the Portuguese pilots. They no sooner had one at once bold and highly gifted, in the person of Bartholomew Diaz, who doubled the Cape, than they replaced him by Gama, a noble of the king's household, and, above all, a soldier. The truth is, that the Portuguese cared more about conquests to make, and treasure to gain, than about discoveries, properly so called. Gama was brave as brave could be, but he was only too faithful to his orders to suffer no other flag in the same seas. A ship load of Pilgrims from Mecca, whom he barbarously murdered, exasperated all the hates, and augmented, throughoutthe East, that horror of the very name of Christian, which more and more closed Asia, alike against discoverers, for the sake of discovery, and adventurers for the sake of plunder.
Is it true that Magellan, before his great enterprise, had seen the Pacific laid down upon a globe by the German, Behaim? No; that globe has never been produced. Had he seen, in the possession of his master, the king of Portugal, a chart which had it so laid down? It has been said, but never proved. It is far more probable that some of the adventurers who, already, for twenty years, had been traversing the American continent, had seen the Pacific, not on globes or charts, but with their own eyes. That report, which was circulated, spread admirably well with the theoretical calculation of such a counterpoise, necessary to our hemisphere, and to the equilibrium of the globe.
There is not a more terrible biography than that of Magellan. Throughout, we have nothing but combat, far voyages, flights, trials, attempted assassination, and at length, death, among the scourges. He fought in Africa, he fought in the Indies, and he married among the brave but ferocious Malays;—whom, by the way, he seems not a little to have resembled.
During his long residence in Asia, he collected all possible information, preparatory to his great expedition, to find the way by America, to the Spice Islands,the Moluccas; thus getting spices so much cheaper than by the old course. His original idea of the enterprise, was, thus, an altogether commercial one. To lower the price of pepper, was the primitive inspiration of the most heroic voyage ever made on this globe!
The true court spirit of intrigue, reigned in Portugal in full power over everything. Magellan finding himself ill treated there, went over to Spain, where Charles V. magnificently furnished him with five ships, but not choosing to put full confidence in a Portuguese malcontent, the king associated with Magellan a Castilian. Magellan sailed between two dangers, the jealousy of the Castilian, and the vengeance of the Portuguese, who sought to assassinate him. He soon had a mutiny in the fleet, and displayed, in crushing it an indomitable heroism, and no less barbarity. The mutineers he savagely put to death, and his Castilian colleague he put into irons. To increase his troubles, some of his vessels were wrecked. His people were unwilling to proceed with him, when they saw the desolate aspect of Cape Horn, the truly discouraging aspect of Terra-del-Fuego, and Cape Forward. The islands, which form, under the name of Cape Horn, the southern point of America, seem to have been violently rent from the continent by the fury of many volcanoes, and suddenly cooled. As the result, they present a frightfully heterogeneous mass of sharp peaks, huge blocks of granite,of lava, and of basalt, all these, grotesquely, yet frightfully, arranged, in frowning confusion, and clothed in ice and snow.