Front matter (continued 4)

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 vast height 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 joy they 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 far more 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 from the 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, pass under 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 assert that 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 made without 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 the panting blower seems 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 sorely beaten 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 which also 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 interposing land, 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 and his 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 Garden at 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 nurse their 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, the Sea Mama as 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 were monsters." 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 a monster, 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 such collections, 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 exhibit these monsters in 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, which knows 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 their breath. 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 have wood, 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 hidden beneath 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 and sinews 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, are weak 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 were Whale 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 sixty to 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 Norman wariness, 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! Especially affecting, 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 the true 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 might much 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 the Invincible. 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 was not 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 the Arabian 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 a rehash 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 to collect 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 the Castilians settled 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 crusade and 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 vessel Nina, 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 the southward, 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, throughout the 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.

All had quite enough of this at a single glance, and bold Magellan's word was—"Onward!" He filled away his sails, steered now to starboard, now to larboard, then to starboard again, and at length found himself in that boundless sea which was then so Pacific that it then received the name which it has ever since borne; though all who have sailed upon it, well know that at times, it can comport itself in an anything rather than pacific style.

Magellan at length perished in the Philippines. Four vessels were lost. The only one which survived, was the Victory, whose crew was reduced to thirteen men. But among them was the great and intrepid Pilot, the Basque, Sebastian, who, in 1521, returned to Spain, the first of mortal men who had been completely round the globe.

Nothing could be grander. The sphericity of the globe was thus made matter of certainty. That physical marvel of water uniformly extended over a globe, and constantly adhering to it, that strange mechanical postulate, was fully demonstrated. The Pacific was at length known, that grand, and till then mysterious laboratory, in which, far from our ken, Nature so profoundly labors in life-creating and life-nurturing, making new rocks, new islands, new continents.

A revelation, that, of immense significance; and not only of material, but also of moral significance, which gave a hundred fold increase to man's daring, and sent him forth on another daring voyage, on the boundless Ocean of the Sciences, to circumnavigate,—with more or less of success, as it may chance,—the INFINITE!

CHAPTER III.

THE LAW OF STORMS.

It is but yesterday, as it were, that we have built ships fit for southern navigation; for navigation in those seas where the long, strong, rollers, pile themselves, each upon each, into absolutely mountainous masses of storm-lashed waves. What, then, shall we say of the early navigators who ventured into such seas with their clumsy leewards, heavy, and yet scarcely sea-worthy cock-boats?

Especially for the polar seas, whether arctic or antarctic, we need ships expressly built for such rude service. They were bold men, those who, like a Cabot, a Brentz, a Willoughby, ventured in their clumsy, ill-found, badly rigged, and scarcely sea-worthy tubs to navigate the icy seas; to dare Spitzbergen, to make Greenland by that funereal cape Farewell, and to coast the thousand giant icebergs in sight of which, men in our own day, a hundred Whalers have gone to pieces.

What chiefly rendered those ancient heroes so sublime was their very ignorance, their blind courage, their desperate resolution. They knew but little of the sea, and of the Heavens they knew still less; the compass, their only instructor and their only reliance, they dared the most alarming phenomena without being able even to guess at their causes. They had none of our instruments which speak to us so plainly and so unmistakably. They went blindfolded towards, and fearlessly into, the uttermost darkness. They, themselves, confess that they feared, but also, they would not yield. The sea's tempests, the air's whirlwinds and water spouts, the tragic dialogues of those two Oceans, of air and water, the striking, and, not so long since, ominous phenomena of the Aurora Borealis, all this strange and wild phantasmagoria seemed to them the fury of irritated Nature, a veritable strife of Demons against which man could dare all—as they did—but could do what they also did—nothing.

During three centuries but little progress was made. Read Cook, read Peron, and you will readily comprehend how difficult, uncertain, and perilous was navigation, even up to an hour so near our own.

Cook, that man of immense courage, but also, of most lively imagination, himself confesses, as his Journal testifies, that he knew how uncertain and perilous was the profession of the seaman even so lately as his day. In his Journal, we read; "The dangers are so great, that I venture to say, that no one will dare to go farther than I have gone."

Now it is precisely since then that voyages have become, at once, more distant, more regular, and less dangerous.

A great age, a Titanic age, the 19th century, has coolly, intelligently, and sternly noted all those phenomena which the old navigators braved, but did not examine. In this century it is that we, for the first time, have dared to look the Tempest squarely, and fearlessly, and scrutinizingly, in the eyes. Its premonitory symptoms, its characteristics, its results;—each and all have been calmly watched, and carefully and systematically registered; and, then, from that registration, necessarily come explanation and generalization, and thence, the grand, bold—and, as our not very distant ancestors would have said, impious system—the Law of Storms.

So! What we took, what we in the old, bold, but blind day, took for matter of caprice, is really, after all, reducible to a system, obedient to a Law! So! then, those terrible facts, that made the brain swim, the boldest quail, because they fought shadows and walked in the darkness, so! then, those terrible facts have a certain regularity of recurrence, and the seaman, resolute and strong, calmly considers whether he cannot oppose to those regular attacks a defence no less regular. In brief, if the Tempest has its science, can we not create and use an art? An art not merely to survive the Tempest but even to make it useful?

But our science and our art cannot be called into life and activity until we shall have laid aside our old and ill founded notion that Tempests are caused by "the caprice of the winds." Attentive observation has taught us that the winds are not capricious, that they are the accident, sometimes, also, the agent of the Tempest, but that, generally speaking, the Tempest is an electrical phenomenon, and often occurs in the absence of gales.

Romme (brother of the Conventionalist, principal author of the Calendar) laid the foundations of our very important science. English seamen had remarked that in the tempests in the Indian Seas, they sailed for days together, and yet made no headway. Romme collected and systematized all their observations, and pointed out the important fact that the same occurred in the tempests of China, Africa, and the Antilles. He also first pointed out that rectilinear winds are of rare occurrence, and that, usually, tempests have a circular character,—are, literally, a whirl wind. The great whirling tempests of the United States in 1815, and that of 1821 (the year of the great eruption of Hecla) when the winds blew from all points to a common centre, aroused philosophical attention, both in America and Europe. Brande, in Germany, and at the same time, Redfield in New York, were the next after Romme in profiting by these facts to lay down the law that, generally, the tempest is a Whirl-wind, advancing, and at the same time revolving on its own base. In 1838, the English engineer, Reid, being sent to Barbadoes after the too celebrated tempest which killed fifteen hundred people, ascertained, with mathematical precision, this double movement of advance and rotation. But his still more important discovery was that in our northern hemisphere the tempest turns from right to left, that is to say from East to North, and round the compass, back to East; while in southern tempests it turns from left to right. A most important fact to regulate the seaman's course.

Reid very rightfully gave his book the bold title of—"On the Law of Storms."

But it was the law of their Motion, not the explanation of their cause; it told nothing, either, of what Storms do, or of what they are.

Here France came to the rescue. In 1840, Peltier published his Causes of Whirlwinds, and his ingenious and numerous experiments established the fact that whirlwinds, whether at sea or on shore, were electrical phenomena, in which the winds play only a secondary part. Beccaria, a full century earlier, had suspected that fact, but it was reserved for Peltier to establish the fact, by making miniature storms.

Electrical whirlwinds readily take their rise in the neighborhood of volcanoes,—those ventilating pipes of the subterranean world, and therefore they are more common in the subterranean world, than in ours.

The Atlantic, open at both ends, and swept in all directions by the winds, should necessarily, have more rectilinear, and fewer circular tempests; but Piddington quotes a great number of the latter.

From 1840 to 1850, the immense compilations of Piddington and Maury were made, at Calcutta and New York. Maury is rendered illustrious for his charts, his Directions, and his Geography of the Sea. Piddington, less artistical, but not less learned, in his Seaman's Guide, that Encyclopedia of storms, gives the results of an infinite experience, the minutest and most precise means of calculating the distance of the whirlwind, its rate of speed, and the nature of its various waves. He confirmed the ideas of Peltier, as to the electric theory, and showed that those who had dwelt on the caprice of the whirlwind, had, in truth, completely mistaken the effect for the cause.

The old art of auguries, and science of presages, never contemptible, was most happily revived by that excellent book.

The setting of the Sun, is by no means an indifferent augury. If he set red, and if the sea retain the reflection of his blood-red rays, rely upon it, a storm is brewing, in that other Ocean—the air; if around him you see a lurid red within a white circle, and the stars are flickering, and seeming to fall, be sure that the upper regions of the atmosphere are threatening.

Still worse, it is, if, upon a dirty sky, you see small clouds marshalling, like so many purple arrows, flying from all quarters to one common point, and if, at the same time, the larger masses assume the shape of strange buildings, ruined bridges, broken rainbows, and a hundred other eccentricities; then rely upon it, the storm has already commenced in the upper region. At present, all is calm, here below, but, on the horizon, you may discern the faintly flashing, and silent lightnings. Listen attentively, and, from time to time, you shall hear the low mutterings of the distant thunder; and the waves, as they break upon the beach, seem to sob. Look out! The sea tells you, plaintively, of the coming storm. "What are those wild waves saying?" They are warning you, I repeat, of the coming storm. The wild, free birds have already taken warning, and hasten to their secure shelter in the clefts of the rocks. If they are far from land when they see, and feel, and hear, the first threatenings of the rising storm, they settle down upon your masts, and yards, and shrouds. And first among them comes that bird of evil omen, the "Mother Carey's Chicken," the Stormy Petrel. Look out, my brothers; I assure you the tempest approaches.

Does it thunder? Be very glad of that, brother seaman; the electric discharge is taking place far above us, and we shall have the less of the tempest. It is an old popular observation, but confirmed by the science of Peltier and by the experience of Piddington and others.

If the electricity, accumulated on high, discharges itself here below, it will create circular currents, and we shall have whirlwind, fierce tempest, and, probably water spout.

This last sort of storm not uncommonly attacks you when you are seemingly quite safe in harbor. In 1698, Captain Langford, in port and well anchored, saw that he was about to be thus assailed, slipped his cable, and found safety on the open sea. Other craft, whose commanders had less freight or less daring, remained at anchor and were destroyed.

At Madras and at Barbadoes, warning signals are given to the ships at anchor. In Canada, the electric Telegraph, swifter than Nature's own electricity, sends warning of the coming storm from port to port.

To the sailor when on the broad Ocean, the great friend and adviser is the Barometer; its perfect sensitiveness gives you the most exact information of the weight with which the storm-laden atmosphere oppresses it. Usually, it tells you of nothing but fine weather; it almost seems to sleep. But at the first and most distant note of the rising storm, it suddenly awakens, is agitated, and its mercury descends, ascends, redescends. The barometer has its own tempest. Peron when at the Mauritius observed that flashes of pale light escaped from the mercury, and filled the whole tube. During gales, the sensitive instrument seems actually to breathe. "In its fluctuations," say Daniel and Barlow, "the water barometer breathed, blew, like some wild animal."

But the Tempest advances and occasionally illuminates the horizon all around with its electric lightnings. In 1772, during the great storm in the West Indies, when the sea rose seventy feet above ordinary high water mark, the dense darkness of the night was dissipated by balls of lurid fires that lighted up every shore.

The approach of the storm may be more or less rapid. In the Indian Ocean, thickly studded with islands and obstacles, the whirlwind and the water-spout approach you only at the rate of some two miles an hour; while when they come along the course of the warm current, that comes to us from the Antilles, they travel at the rate of from forty to fifty. Their speed would, in fact, be incalculably great but for their oscillation, beaten as they are by the winds, both internally and externally.

Slow or rapid, the fury of the tempest is the same. In 1789, in a single instant and with a single rush, the tempest dashed to pieces every vessel in the port of Ceringa; at a second rush the town was flooded; at the third it was in ruins, and twenty thousand of its inhabitants were dead. In 1822, off Bengal, a water spout was for twenty-four hours sucking up air and water, and, when it burst, fifty thousand people perished.

In different localities, different aspects of the Tempest. In Africa you have the upas, the fierce compound of simoom and tornado. The atmosphere seems calm and clear, and yet you feel a strange oppression of the lungs and a general anxiety as terrible as it is strange. Then a black cloud, "no bigger than a man's hand," appears on the horizon, approaches with lightning speed, lengthening, widening, and deepening as it approaches (vires acquirit eundo) the storm descends, and in a quarter of an hour all around is devastated, utterly ruined, and ships have utterly disappeared. Nature takes no heed of such small matters. About Sumatra and Bengal, you see in the evening or night (never in the morning) a dark arched cloud in the sky. It rapidly increases, and presently, from that dark cloud, come down flashes and sheets of pale and ghastly lights. Woe to the mariner who shall encounter the first wind that rushes from that sinister cloud; he will pretty certainly go down.

But the ordinary form is that of a huge funnel. A sailor, who was caught in one of these terrible storms, says: "I found myself, as it were, at the bottom of an enormous crater of a volcano; all around was darkness, above a glimmering of lurid lights." That light is what is technically termed "the eye of the Tempest."

When the Water spout, the horrible Typhoon, empties itself, human science and human daring are of no avail. Roaring, howling, shrieking, hissing, the storm fiends are at work above, below, around the luckless vessel. Suddenly there is a dead, a quite horrible silence, and there comes forth, seemingly, from the very centre of the water spout, a blinding flash, and a deafening report, and when you, at length, recover power to look aloft, you find that mast and spars have been shivered.

Seymour tells us that, sometimes, after being caught in one of those horrible Typhoons the sailors, for a long time, have blackened nails and weakened sight. Sometimes, too, this terrible Typhoon sucks up not only air and water, but also the luckless ship, holds it suspended in the air, and then dashes it rudely down into the watery abyss. From this terrible action and pitiless power of the Typhoon, the Chinese derived their notion of the terrible mother Typhon, who, hovering in the sky, picks out her victims and is ever conceiving and bearing the Ken Woo, whirlwinds of fire and iron. To that terrible Typhon they have erected temples and altars, adoring her and praying to her in the vain hope of humanising her.

The brave Piddington had no adoration to spare for her; on the contrary, he gives her a marvellously ill name. He calls her an only too strong corsair, a pirate so strong and so tricky that there is no dishonor in getting out of her way.

That perfidious enemy sometimes sets a snare for you; tempts you with a good wind. Avoid that same good wind, turn your back to it if you possibly can. Give that dangerous companion the widest possible berth. Steer very clear of the storm cloud or it will suddenly sink you; ship, crew and cargo.

Such is the advice of the brave and skillful Piddington, and, assuredly, one would gladly take such advice. But how? It would be utterly useless if the storm cloud and the ship were brought together within narrow and land locked waters. But, in general, this enormous compound of whirlwind and water spout embraces a circle of ten, twenty, or even thirty leagues, and this gives every ship, on which a constant and intelligent look out is kept, a fair chance of keeping at a respectful distance from so redoubtable a foe. The great point to be ascertained is, where is the centre, the nucleus, the terrible home, of this terrible Typhon. And then to ascertain its rate of progression and its line of approach.

The sailor of the present day has two excellent lights to steer by; his Maury and his Piddington. On the one hand, Maury teaches him the general laws of the air and sea, and the art of selecting and using the currents, directing him, as it were, along the streets and highways of the Ocean. On the other hand, Piddington in his small, but instructive volume, sums up for him, and places in his hands, the Experience of Tempests; not only how to avoid them, when possible, but sometimes when to make them useful.

And this it is that at once explains and justifies the fine sentence of the Dutch Captain Jansen. "At sea," says he, "the first impression is that of the power of nature, the profundity of the depths—and our own nothingness. On board of the largest ship, we still feel that we are constantly in danger. But when the mind's eye has penetrated the depths and surveyed the expanse, man no longer fears the danger. He rises to the true sense of the situation. Guided by Astronomy, shown by Maury along the highways and byways of the Ocean, he steers his course safely and confidently."

This is truly sublime. The Tempest is not abolished, it is true; but ignorance, bewilderment, that terrible bewilderment which is born of danger and darkness, are abolished. At least if the seaman of the present day perish, he will know the why and wherefore. Great, oh, very great is the safeguard of having the calm, clear presence of mind, with our soul and intellect unruffled and resigned to whatever may be the effect of the great divine laws of the world which, at the expense of a few shipwrecks, produce Equilibrium and Safety.

CHAPTER IV.

THE POLAR SEAS.

What most tempts man? The difficult, the useless, the impossible. Of all maritime enterprises, that to which the most persistent energy has been given, is the north western passage, the direct line from Europe to Asia. And yet, the plainest common-sense might anticipatively have told us that, given, the existence of such a passage, in a latitude so cold, so blocked up by ice, it would, practically, be useless; few would, none could, make any regular use of it. Open this year, it is quite sure to be closed up next year.

Remember that that region has not the flatness of Siberia; it is a mountain of a thousand leagues, horribly broken, with deep chasms, with seas, that, thawed one hour, are frozen up the next, passages between icebergs, which shift their position from time to time, open to invite you, and close to crush you. At length, in 1853, that passage was found, by a man who had got so far in, that it was safer to go ahead, than to recede, and who, therefore, went daringly and desperately forward, till he found that which he sought. Now we know what that passage is; men's minds are calmed down; we know that there is such a passage, and we have not even the smallest desire to make use of it.

When I spoke of that passage, as being useless, I spoke of it as a commercial highway. But in following this commercially useless enterprise, we have made many very useful discoveries for Geography, Meteorology, and the magnetism of the Earth; just as silly Alchemy, has done so much for wise, and admirably useful Chemistry.

What was the original idea? To open a short way to the land of gold, to the East Indies. England, and other powers, jealous of Spain and Portugal, reckoned upon surprising them in the very heart of their distant possessions, in the very sanctuary of wealth. From the time of Queen Elizabeth of England, adventurers having found, or stated that they found, some portions of gold in Greenland, searched into, and made bold use of the old Northern legend of treasure hidden beneath the Pole; mountains of gold, guarded by Gnomes, &c., &c. And the legend inflamed men's minds. Upon so reasonable a notion, sixteen ships were sent out, having on board the sons and hopes of the noblest families. There was quite a competition as to who should have leave to go in quest of that Polar Eldorado; and those who sought it, succeeded in finding only hunger, icy barriers, suffering, and—Death! But that check was unavailing; during three hundred years, explorers, with a perfectly marvellous perseverance, continued to explore, to fail, to be martyrized, and to die. Cabot, the earliest of them, was only saved by the mutiny of his crew, who would not allow him to go any farther. Brentz died of cold, and Willoughby of famine. Cortereul lost all, property, and life; and Hudson was set adrift by his men, and, as he had neither sails nor provisions, it is but too probable that he perished miserably, though his fate was never precisely ascertained. Behring, in finding the strait which separates America from Asia, perished of fatigue, cold, and want, on a desert island. In our own day, Franklin perished, in the ice; he and his men having been reduced to the most horrible cannibalism.

Every thing that can discourage man, is combined in these Northern voyages. Considerably before the Polar circle is reached, a cold fog freezes upon the sea, and covers you with hoar frost; sails and ropes are icy and stiffened, the deck is one sheet of glare ice, and every manœuvre is a work of immense difficulty; and those moving shoals, the icebergs, that are so much to be dreaded, can scarcely be made out at the distance of the ship's length. At the mast-head, the look-out man, an actual living stalactite, every now and then warns the watch upon deck of the approach of a new enemy, a huge white phantom, a terrible iceberg, often from two to three hundred feet out of the water.

But these preliminary horrors, which announce to the seaman his approach to the world of ice and suffering, so far from deterring, increase his desire and determination to proceed. In the mystery of the Pole, there is, I know not what, of sublime horror and heroic suffering. Even those who have only gone as far North as Spitzbergen, retain in memory a profound impression of its drear and horrible sublimity. That mass of peaks, chains, and precipices, which, for four thousand five hundred feet, rears its icy front, is like a gigantic apparition, in that gloomy sea. Its glaciers flash forth living lights, dazzling flashes of the most brilliant colors, green, blue, and purple, contrasting marvellously with the uniform whiteness of the snow. During the nights, whose duration is not of hours, but of months, the Aurora Borealis, every now and then lights up the dreary scene in the strange splendors of a sinister illumination; vast and terrible bale fires, that, from time to time, light up the whole horizon, forming, with their magnificent jets of lurid lights, a fantastic Etna, that throws temporary and illusive light on that scene of eternal winter.

All is prismatic in an atmosphere surcharged with icy particles, where the air is full of mirrors and little crystals. Hence, the most astonishing mirages, rendering one uncertain whether he may take the evidence of his own eyes as to the reality of any thing that he thinks he sees. Merely aërial reflections and colored mists appear solid masses, castles, cathedrals, islands,—anything; and what you see upright at one moment, is upside down a moment afterwards. The strata of air which produce these effects, are in constant revolution, the lightest ascends above the others, and in an instant the mirage changes form, color, size, and character. The slightest variation of the temperature, lowers, raises, or slopes, the huge mirror; the image becomes confounded with the object; they separate, disperse, another succeeds, and then a third, pale and feeble, appears, to disappear in its turn.

It is a world of illusion. If you love to dream; if, especially, you love day-dreaming, with fancies wild or tender, go to the North, and there you will see real, yet no less fugitive, all that your waking dreams have ever painted. In that world of mirages, the atmosphere will put all your "castles in the air" to utter shame. No style of architecture but that magical atmosphere can imitate. Now you have the classic Greek, with its porticos and colonnades; anon, Egyptian obelisks appear, the one pointing high and sharp, towards the sky, the other lying prostrate, and in twain, at the base of the former. And, then, mountain upon mountain appears, Pelion upon Ossa, a whole city of giants, with Cyclopean walls, which change into the circular sacrificial stones of the Druids, with dark, mysterious caves beneath. Finally, all disappears; the wind rises, and the mists and atmospheric reflections are dispersed. In this veritable world of the upside down, the law of gravitation is repealed, or, at the least, disregarded; the weak and the light, carrying the strong and the heavy; a spacious church is seen on the top of a slender spire, an Egyptian pyramid whirls, dances, upon the sharply pointed apex; it is an eccentric, a mad, school of art, where you pass at once from the beautiful to the terrible, from the terribly sublime to the absurdly fantastic.

Sometimes a terrible incident occurs. Against the great stream, which flows majestically and slowly from the north, there suddenly comes, from the south, a huge iceberg, whose base is some six or seven hundred feet below the water. It is impelled by the strong under-tow, and advances so swiftly that it dashes aside, or to pieces, whatever it happens to encounter. Arrived at the plain of ice, this moving giant, this terrible iceberg is not at all embarrassed. Thus, Duncan, writing in 1826, describes a scene of the kind—"The field-ice was broken up for miles in less than a minute, with reports loud as those of a hundred pieces of artillery. As the mountainous heap approached us, the space between it and us was filled with the mighty masses, into which the shock of her collision had broken up the massive field ice. We should assuredly have perished, but the huge mass suddenly sheered off to the northeast, and we were saved."

It was in 1818, after the European war, that this war against nature, this search after the north-western passage was resumed. It opened with a serious and singular event. The gallant Captain Ross, being sent with two ships into Baffin's Bay, was completely deceived by the phantasmagoria of that world of spectral delusions. He distinctly saw, as he thought, a land which has never existed, maintained that if he proceeded he would certainly lay the bones of his ships on that non-existent shore, and actually returned to England. There he was laughed at, and accused of timidity, and he was refused by the Admiralty, the command of another expedition, which he solicited, in the interest of his honor. Sir Felix Booth, a London distiller and liquor merchant, more liberal than the British Government, presented Ross with a hundred thousand dollars, and Ross returned to the North, determined to pass or die. Neither the one nor the other was granted to him! But he remained during I know not how many winters, forgotten, in those terrible solitudes. He had all the appearance of a mere savage, so long and so horrible was his destitution, when he was saved by some whalers, who, when they first saw him, asked him if he had, by any chance, fallen in with the late Captain John Ross!

His Lieutenant, Parry, who confidently believed that he could pass, made four attempts to do so; trying first by Baffin's Bay and the West, and then by Spitzbergen and the North. He made some discoveries by boldly pushing forward in a sledge-boat; a sledge on the ice, and a boat in the water. But the ice always defeated his bold attempts, and he was no more successful than Ross.

In 1882, a brave young Frenchman, Jules de Blassville, conceived that France, in his person, might win the glory of discovering the north-west passage. He risked, at once, money and life; and purchased death. He could not even get the selection of a proper ship. They gave him the Lilloise, which sprang a leak on her very first day out, and he had her repaired and refitted, at his own cost of about eight thousand dollars. In this unsafe vessel, he sailed for the iron-bound coast of Greenland. According to all appearance, he did not get even as far out as that. He has never since been heard of, nor has any portion of his unseaworthy vessel been picked up. Most likely she foundered, with all hands on board.

The English expeditions have been fitted out in a very different style; every thing was provided that prudence could suggest or liberal-expenditure supply; yet they succeeded no better. The gallant, scientific, and ill fated, Franklin, was blocked in by the ice in 1845. For twelve years from that date the English, with an honorable persistence, sent out expeditions in search of him. And not England alone; France and America no less honorably assisted, and both those great nations lost some of their brightest and best in the brave, though fruitless, search. Side by side with the name of Franklin, as connected with the icy peaks and capes of that desolate region, our Belliot, and others, must be named, who devoted themselves in hope to save him. And, on the other hand, Captain John Ross offered to organize and lead an expedition to search for Blainville. Dark Greenland is connected with a host of such brave, sad reminiscences, and the desert is no longer quite a desert when connected with such touching testimonies of human brotherhood.

There is something very touching in the persistent belief, the inflexible affection, of Lady Franklin. She could not, would not, believe herself widowed, but incessantly besought for further search after her brave husband. She vowed that she was quite sure that he still lived for his country and for her; and so well did she impress her own belief upon the Admiralty board, that, seven years after he was completely missing, he was officially named, not as Captain, but as Vice Admiral. And she was right; he was then still living. The Esquimaux saw him in 1850, and he had then sixty of his men with him. Very soon after he had only thirty, and those so worn by fatigue and want that they could not hunt, or even walk, and as each one died he was eaten by his far more wretched survivors. If Lady Franklin's advice had been duly attended to, her brave husband and most, perhaps all, of his men would have been Saved. For she said—and the soundest sense dictated her words—that he should be sought for to the southward, inasmuch as it was to the last degree improbable that in his desperate situation he should aggravate it by proceeding towards the North. But the Admiralty, perhaps more anxious about the north-west passage than about the lost Franklin, persisted in sending expeditions to the North, and the afflicted lady did for herself what the Admiralty would not do for her. At a great expense, she fitted out a vessel to search to the southward of his last known or presumed position. But it was already too late. Only the bones of Franklin were found.