The shore: A frontier of geological destruction and philosophical renewal

“ But the billows of the ocean again agitate the loose material upon the shore, wearing away the coast with endless repetitions of this act of power and imparted force; the solid portion of our earth, thus sapped to its foundations, is carried away into the deep and sunk again at the bottom of the sea whence it had originated, and from which sooner or later it will again make its appearance. We are thus led to see a circulation of destruction and renewal in the matter of which the globe is formed, and a system of beautiful economy in the works of Nature. ”

“ A variation in the direction of winds of successive storms may be responsible for the piling up of the beach sand in a peculiar “plunge and flow” or “cross-bedded” structure, a structure which is extremely common in littoral deposits, though simulated in rocks of eolian origin.
The order of deposition during a transgression of the sea.—Many shore lines of the continents are almost constantly migrating either landward or seaward. When the shore line advances over the land, the coast is sinking, and marine deposits will be formed directly above what was recently the “dry land.” ”

“ The western coast of Hudson bay is low and flat. It rises very slowly inland from swampy shores, while the water deepens slowly, and there are numerous shoals and bars that extend for a considerable distance from the shore-line and render coastwise navigation dangerous. This character of coast extends from the southern end of James bay to beyond the mouth of Churchill harbour. ”

“ The outline of the shores is much diversified: to the northeast lie low lands and swampy marshes; to the north and northeast extends a bold range of elevated grounds; southward the coast becomes again flat for some distance inland, till it rises into the ridge of heights that marks the position of Niagara. ”

“ From this I form my judgment of the direction of this Coast, which is nearly South-South-East 3/4 East and North-North-West 3/4 West, and must be nearly a Strait Shore. In about the Latitude 35 degrees 45 minutes is some high land adjoining to the Sea; to the Southward of that the land is of a moderate heigth, and wears a most desolate and inhospitable aspect. Nothing is to be seen but long sand Hills, with hardly any Green thing upon them, and the great Sea which the prevailing Westerly winds impell upon the Shore must render this a very Dangerous Coast. ”

“ The effect of this over-balance of sinking, or resultant shrinking of the earth’s shell, may be to compress the mountain district and so cause the shore line to move landward at the same time that it moves upward (Fig. 280) .
The sunk or embayed coast.—When now, upon the other hand, a section of the coast line sinks with reference to the sea, the water invades all the near-shore valleys, thus “drowning” them and yielding the drowned river mouth or estuary. ”

“ He will thus perceive that along the shore line, though the provision of victuals is most abundant, the store is made from the animals and plants which are ground up in the mill. In a word, while the coast is a place of rapid growth, it is also a region of rapid destruction; only in the case of the coral animals, which associate their bodies with a number of myriads in large and elaborately organized communities, do we find animals which can make such head against the action of the waves that they can build great deposits in their realm. ”

“ Quite as striking an example of similar movements is afforded by notched cliffs in hard limestone upon the shore of the Island of Celebes (Fig. 275) . But the coast of California furnishes the other characteristic coast features in the high sea arch and the stack as additional monuments to the recent uplift. Let one but imagine the stacks which now form the Seal Rocks off the Cliff House at San Francisco to be suddenly raised high above the sea, and the forms which they would then present would differ but little from those which are shown in Fig. ”

“ Know ye now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
But as in landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! ”

“ Francis and his paupers, who have nothing and yet possess all things. That's your gaiety; the gaiety that plays the fool, as you put it, looking into the very eyes of agony and death; that loses and laughs and makes others laugh in the last ditch; the gaiety of those who drop all cargoes, fortune and good name and love, overboard lightly, and still spread sail to the winds and voyage, and when they're driven by the winds at last onto a lee shore, derelicts clinging to a broken wreck, find on the shore coloured shells to play with and still are gay. ”

“ For these—Peter analysed the distinction—are, or may be, for all alike. There is no grabbing here; a man may share the overflowing sun not with one but with all. The down-at-heels, limping, broken, army of the Have-Nots are not denied such beauty and such peace as this, if they will but take it and be glad. The lust to possess here finds no fulfilment; having nothing, yet possessing all things, the empty-handed legion laughs along its way. The last, the gayest, the most hilarious laughter begins when, destitute utterly, the wrecked pick up coloured shells upon the lee shore. ”

“ The eastern coast of Baffin island is generally high and rocky. The land rises quickly from the sea, often in abrupt cliffs, to elevations of a thousand feet or more, after which the upward slope is more gentle as the land rises towards the interior tableland. The general elevation of the tableland, to the south of Cumberland gulf, ranges from 2,000 to 3,000 feet, while to the northward this wide coastal area is much higher, reaching a general elevation of 5,000 feet, with hills rising above that perhaps one or two thousand feet higher. ”

“ By the beginning of January, James bay is frozen across, and at the same time solid ice usually extends from the east coast of Hudson bay to the outer line of islands, some sixty or seventy miles from that coast. In other parts of Hudson bay, and in Hudson strait a margin of solid ice usually extends from one to five miles from the shore, except where the coast is high and bold with deep water close to the base of the cliffs. In such places, especially at headlands, solid ice does not form, and the natives in winter often have to make long and difficult detours inland to pass them. ”

“ Earth, air, and water teemed with life, in endless varieties of beauty and ugliness. A half-tropical forest shadowed the low shores, where the palmetto and the cabbage palm mingled with the oak, the maple, the cypress, the liquid-ambar, the laurel, the myrtle, and the broad glistening leaves of the evergreen magnolia. Here was the haunt of bears, wild-cats, lynxes, cougars, and the numberless deer of which they made their prey. In the sedges and the mud the alligator stretched his brutish length ”

“ Upon the continents, on the contrary, the running water, taking advantage of every slight difference in elevation and searching out the hidden structure planes within the rock, soon etches out a surface of the most intricate detail. The effect of elevation of the sea floor into the light of day will therefore be to produce an even shore line devoid of harbors (Fig. 270) . If the coast has risen along visible planes of faulting near the sea margin, the coast line, in addition to being even, will usually be made up of notably straight elements joined to one another. ”

“ LOUISIADE: the dangerous reefs which front and surround the western, southern, and northern coasts of this so-called peninsula and archipelago, seem evidently to belong to the barrier class. The land is lofty, with a low fringe on the coast; the reefs are distant, and the sea outside them profoundly deep. Nearly all that is known of this group is derived from the labours of D’Entrecasteaux and Bougainville: the latter has represented one continuous reef ninety miles long, parallel to the shore, and in places as much as ten miles from it ”

“ No theory worthy of notice has been advanced to account for those barrier-reefs, which encircle islands of moderate dimensions. The great reef which fronts the coast of Australia has been supposed, but without any special facts, to rest on the edge of a submarine precipice, extending parallel to the shore. The origin of the third class or of fringing-reefs presents, I believe, scarcely any difficulty, and is simply consequent on the polypifers not growing up from great depths, and their not flourishing close to gently shelving beaches where the water is often turbid. ”

“ Altho' we keept at no great Distance from the Shore, yet the weather was so Hazey that we could see nothing distinct upon the land, only that there were a ridge of Pretty high Hills lying Parrallel with, and but a little way from, the Sea Coast, which lies South by West and North by East, and seem'd to End in a high Bluff point to the Southward, which we run the length of by 8 o'Clock, when, being dark, and not knowing which way the Land Trended, we brought too for the night, having run 15 Leagues upon a South-West 1/2 West Course since Noon. ”

“ Resolution island lies on the north side of the eastern entrance to Hudson strait. It is nearly forty miles long, and averages twenty-five miles in breadth. The general elevation of the interior is under five hundred feet, and the land appears to rise quickly from the shores. The island is fringed by many rocky islets, and a number of good harbours are said to occur on all sides of it, but owing to the strong currents about the coast it has been rarely visited, except by ships caught in the ice. ”

“ When the tide is in, the breakers dash against these rocks even in calm weather with a force that sends the spray very many feet high, and any one then attempting to get round the point does so at the imminent peril of his life; the river also becomes swollen by the tidal inflow, and although a ferryman lives on the opposite bank, he wisely forbears from venturing to cross in his canoe until the tide has well run out again. ”

“ Passing northward along the eastern coast of Baffin island, the snow patches upon the hills become larger and more numerous, but it is not until Cumberland gulf is passed that real glaciers appear in the valleys leading down to the sea. These are not very active, and seldom shed icebergs except on the northern part of the island. Active glaciers are found along the southern side of North Devon westward to the neighbourhood of Cuming creek, west of which the ice-cap retreats, and the shores and cliffs are free of ice. ”

“ Pushing back the water, it makes its own coast line; and, moving still onward, accommodating itself to every inequality of the bed of the sea, as it had before done to the surface of the land, filling up the wide bay or fiord, expanding where it expands, narrowing where it narrows, swallowing up the islands in its slow and - 143 - steady course, it finally reaches many miles beyond the original shore-line. ”

“ What we may term the littoral or shore zone of the sea occupies a belt of prevailingly shallow water, varying in width from a few score to a few hundred miles. Where the bottom descends steeply from the coast, where there are no strong off-shore setting currents, and where the region is not near the mouth of a large river which bears a great tide of sediment to the sea, the land waste may not affect the bottom for more than a mile or two from the shore. ”

“ In many regions, where the earth has worn down so as to reveal the zone of dikes which was formed at a great depth, the surface of the country is fairly laced with these intrusions. Thus on Cape Ann, a rocky isle on the east coast of Massachusetts, having an area of about twenty square miles, the writer, with the assistance of his colleague, Prof. R.S. Tarr, found about four hundred distinct dikes exhibited on the shore line where the rocks had been swept bare by the waves. ”

“ As we pass from the shore to the deeper sea, the share of land detritus rapidly diminishes until, as before remarked, at the distance of five hundred miles from the coast line, very little of that waste, except that from volcanoes, attains the bottom of the sea. By far the larger part of the contributions which go to the formation of these deep-sea strata come from organic remains, which are continually falling upon the sea floor. ”

“ The tide outside now rises and falls some 12 or 15 feet; on the marsh within its influence is only felt under exceptional circumstances. A road across the marsh at a level four or five feet below high-water, as this one stood, would still be passable, except during unusual floods.
Eccles Church is an excellent example of the way in which an ancient land-surface may now be found below the level of high-water, and yet no subsidence of the land has taken place. But this coast can give even more curious examples. It does not need a sand-dune to deaden the rise and fall of the tides ”

“ Implements made by man have only been found in the higher layers, and there seems to be no record in this area of a stone implement found below a submerged forest
Submerged forests of the ordinary type are often to be seen between tide-marks on the flat shores of Lincolnshire; but as they still await proper study they need not here detain us, and we will pass on to the next large indentation of the coast-line, the estuary of the Humber. ”

“ Whatever the immediate cause of their ill-fortune may be, its underlying, fundamental cause is their own inherent faculty for failure and loss, their incompetence to take and hold the good things of life. You know the stale old hackneyed cry of the anti-socialists, how it would be no use equalising conditions because each man would soon return again to his original state. It's true in a deeper sense than they mean. You might equalise economic conditions as much as you please, but you'd never equalise fundamental conditions; you'd never turn the poor into the rich, the Have-Nots into the Haves. ”

“ It's an undoubted fact, and one there's no getting round, that some people are born with the acquiring faculty, and others with the losing. Most of us, of course, are in the half-way house, and win and lose in fairly average proportions. But some of us seem marked out either for the one or for the other. I know personally a good many in both camps. Many more of the Have-nots, though, because I prefer to cultivate their acquaintance. There's a great deal to be done for the Haves too; they need, I fancy, all the assistance they can get if they're not to become prosperity-rotten. ”

“ The Have-Nots haven't that danger; but they've plenty of dangers of their own; and, well, I suppose it's a question of taste, and that I prefer them. Anyhow, I do know a great many. People, you understand, with nothing at all that seems to make life tolerable. Destitutes, incapables, outcasts, slaves to their own lusts or to a grinding economic system or to some other cruelty of fate or men. ”

“ I can't help thinking of all the down-below people, the disreputable, unlucky people, who fail and don't get things, and I know that's where I really belong. It's like being born in one family and going and living in another. ”

“ I don't know when, or how soon; but I do know that sometime you will be happy again, with the things, the coloured shells, so to speak, that you find still when all the winds and storms have done their worst and all your cargoes are broken wrecks at your feet. It will be then, in that last emptiness, that you'll come to terms with disaster, and play the fool again to amuse yourself and the other derelicts, because, when there's nothing else left, there's always laughter. ”

“ On the shore all things may be given up; there is no need to hold with effort any possession, even life itself, for all things become gifts, easily bestowed and tranquilly received. You may live on extremely little there, and win that little lightly. You may sell things along the road for some dealer, or for yourself—plaster casts, mosaic brooches, picture postcards, needlework of divers colours. ”

“ A population cosmopolitan and shifting, living from hand to mouth, vagrants of the road or of the street corner, finding life a warm and easy thing in this long garden shut between hills and sea. So warm and lovely and easy a garden is it that it has for that reason become a lee shore ”