Ernest Ingersoll

“ The thousand men on sea and shore had never before heard strains of music at such a time as that. An indescribable feeling came over the Americans on the beach who listened to the notes of the national song mingled with the howling of the storm.
But the collision of the Trenton and Vandalia, instead of crushing the latter vessel to pieces, proved to be the salvation of the men in the rigging. When the Trenton’s stern finally struck the side of the Vandalia, there was no shock, and she swung around broadside to the sunken ship. ”

“ On a calm day in 1782 the great hundred-gun line-of-battle-ship Royal George sank at her anchors in the harbor of Spithead, carrying down almost a thousand souls; thirty years ago the Captain, then one of the finest of England’s steam turret-ships, capsized at sea, and not a man survived. Each of these vessels was perhaps the best of its kind in the world. No better navigators exist than naval officers, yet they ran the historic old steam-frigate Kearsarge on Roncador Reef, in the Caribbean Sea, in broad daylight, and left her there a total wreck. ”

“ In many places bells are rung, but often the place to be avoided is so situated that the roar of the surf would drown a bell’s note, and then fog-horns are blown. These fog-horns are of a size so immense, and voices so stentorian, that it requires a steam engine to blow them, and they utter a booming, hollow blast, a dismal note as we hear it when we are safe on the land, but sweet to the anxious captain whose vessel is laboring through the gloom under close-reefed topsails, and uncertain of her exact position. ”

“ The Japanese and other Asiatics of the western shore of the North Pacific have dared to go out in rowboats and attack the largest whales since the origin of their traditions, and they had a method of entangling these leviathans in nets, which must have produced exciting scenes, as the monster struggled amid the bloody turmoil of waters to free himself from the innumerable connected cords that embarrassed his movements, rather than subdued his strength, until his life ebbed away through a hundred wounds. ”

“ WAVES, TIDES, AND CURRENTS
Now that we have studied the ancient ocean, it is time to study its present characteristics and understand the great and important part it plays in the world.
A very striking thing about the ocean is its flatness. Being water, it seeks always to find its level; and we commonly assume that it everywhere does so, and take the sea-level as the standard from which to calculate all heights above or depths below its surface; that is, we assume that every part of the surface of the ocean when calm and at mean tide is exactly the same distance from the center of the globe. ”

“ If you will look at a map that has marked upon it the line of one thousand fathoms’ depth along the shores of the various continents, you will find it reaching far out from the eastern shores of both Americas, the western and northern shores of Europe, the eastern shores of South Africa, prolonging India hundreds of miles, and embracing great spaces among the East Indies, while even the hundred-fathom line would connect many an island with the mainland or with some other island, as they actually have been connected in times gone by. ”

“ When the leaves reach the surface, the shore wind, sweeping down from the hills, lifts them from the water, and they flutter in the air like mimic sails. Each leaf is a study. Many are encrusted with a delicate bryozoön, which presents the effect of white lace upon the surface, while a close inspection will reveal minute anemones, coiled tubular worms, which throw out flower-like organs of exquisite beauty; while flat shells lie among them, and crawling here and there are marvels of animal life, shell-less mollusks, which so mimic the weed that it is almost impossible to distinguish them. ”

“ The average yachting man, if he be of that stuff of which good seamen are made, soon finds his chief delight in being master of his own vessel. He likes to feel that it is his skill, his prowess, his intellect, that rule the ship in which he sails; and finding this complete mastery of the vessel to be impossible aboard a big boat, he longs for one which he can handle alone. ”

“ Of all these currents none is as well marked as the Gulf Stream. Its blue water is in such contrast to the darker, greenish hue of the remainder of the ocean that sailors can often tell when they enter the edge of the current, half their vessel being in and half out of the stream. If you approach from the west you find that the water at first shows a warmth of only fifty or sixty degrees near the surface; but as you sail on, this increases until, opposite Sandy Hook, you may get as high a reading on the thermometer as eighty degrees, and opposite Florida above one hundred degrees. ”

“ There the winds complete their circuits, and the currents of the sea their round in the wonderful system of interoceanic circulation. There the Aurora Borealis is lighted up, and the trembling needle brought to rest; and there, too, in the mazes of that mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power and vast influence upon the well-being of man are continually at play.... Noble daring has made Arctic ice and waters classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor vain ambition that leads man there. ”

“ A fine day on the Banks of Newfoundland is a rare thing; fog and snow and icy gales are the rule, and only the boldest courage, endurance, and skill will enable a man to resist that ocean and wrest from it his self-support. A vivid picture of the hardships and dangers of fishing on the Banks is to be found in Rudyard Kipling’s story, “Captains Courageous.”
The intrepid and skilful voyages of our whalers and fishermen, daring every fatigue and danger in the open sea, have been schools for the best seamen of the world. ”

“ Pierre, which is one of the most important centers in the world for the marketing, curing, and export of sea-caught fish.
Of all waters those of the North Atlantic seem to excel in useful fishes; from the oil-shark hand-lining off the coast of Lapland, or the sardine-catching of Spain, to Yankee sword-fishing, this ocean is alive with fish and fishermen, on both sides and at all seasons of the year. ”

“ Hundreds of people were on the beach by this time, and the work of destruction had occurred within full view of them all. They stood for a moment appalled by the awful scene, and a cry of horror arose from the lips of every man who had seen nearly a hundred of his fellow-creatures perish in an instant. Then with one accord they all rushed to the water’s edge nearest the point where the Eber had foundered. The natives ran into the surf far beyond the point where a white man could have lived, and stood waiting to save any who might rise from the water. ”

“ The ocean was the home of the first living thing, either plant or animal, that appeared on our planet; seaweeds and salt-water animals are found in much older rocks than any that contain the fossils of land life. Moreover, though called a “wide waste of waters,” and seeming a complete desert as we gaze upon its restless surface on a dull morning, there is a greater number of animals and plants by count, and quite as large a variety, under the waves as above them, and the bottom of the sea—at all events near its margin—is more populous than any bit of woods you ever saw. ”

“ Life in the ocean in those old geologic days was a long guerrilla warfare—every animal guarding against attack, and at the same time watching sharply for an opportunity to seize and prey upon some weaker companion. As for the foraminifers and other microscopic creatures, they were countless, and their skeletons, singly invisible, have by accumulation built up great masses of rock, like the chalk-beds of England and France. ”

“ At the right hour the Mexicans go out in their canoes, one man of the four or five in each canoe paddling, while the rest scrutinize the bottom. It may be rocky and weed-grown, but the water is clear, and their practised eyes detect a single round oyster where you or I certainly would overlook a dozen of them. Then down a man goes and brings up his prize, with perhaps some additional ones. Sixty or eighty feet is not too deep for these adventurous divers, who will stay a whole minute upon the bottom. ”

“ An artist could hardly wish a better subject for his pencil than one of these wild harvestings—the plunging horses, forced far out into the surf, their slow return, half swimming, half wading, dragging the heavily loaded rakes which leave behind them a long furrow of foam, the heaped-up kelp glistening in the sunshine, the oxen,255 yoked by fours, waiting for their load, the shouts of the men, the dash, the excitement, and beyond and above all, the wonderful blues and iridescent greens which are the peculiar property of Newport waters and the Newport sky. ”

“ Little, if any, part of the world has yet been found where the evidences of man’s residence in the long-forgotten past do not exist. So long ago that all tradition of it is forgotten, and only the imperishable stone implements they used remain as traces of their presence, mankind had reached and settled the farthest northern and eastern coasts of Europe and Asia, and the southern extremities of Africa and India. ”

“ Since life first began, these diatoms, and other microscopic plants much like them, have swarmed not only in the fresh waters, but in all the oceans of the globe, furnishing food for mollusks and all the lowly animals whose food is brought into their mouths by the currents. Innumerable, and as wide-spread as the salt water itself, every one of these myriads of minute plants has left a record; for its delicate, glass-like shell was indestructible, and when the bit of life was lost, it sank slowly down to the bottom. ”

“ To polar explorers we owe not only the discovery of the waters, coasts, and archipelagoes that now are accurately outlined upon our maps within the Arctic and Antarctic circles, but vast and valuable products—whale-fisheries, seal-fisheries, cod-fisheries, and many other additions to the wealth of the world from the sea, while the Arctic lands have yielded furs and other valuable things in great quantity. The study of the people living under those adverse northern conditions has been highly instructive, assisting us to reconstruct the life in the primitive world ”

“ From the simplicity of diatoms the vegetation of the sea can be traced upward through larger and more complicated kinds of plants until we reach the enormous algæ that break the gloom of black headlands by their brilliant tints, and furnish a lurking-place under their wide-spreading and dense foliage for hosts of marine animals—some hiding for safety, others to watch for prey.
Seaweeds grow in all latitudes, even close to the pole, but mainly along the shore, for below the depth of about one hundred fathoms none but microscopic forms are known. ”

“ But this eerie notion has no foundation in fact. “No other fate,” we are assured by those who know, “awaits the drowned sailor or his ship than that which comes to the marine creatures who die on the bottom of the sea. In time their dust all passes into the great storehouse of the earth, even as those who receive burial on land.” Wooden wrecks probably last much longer than those of iron. ”

“ As the sea has furnished opportunities for so much good,—for manly exertion, knowledge of the world, and acquaintance with people outside of one’s own country, and for gaining wealth,—so it has given a chance for unscrupulous men to show the worst that is in them; and the guarding of shore towns and merchant vessels from piratical attacks has always been a part of the usefulness and duty of a nation’s naval force. ”

“ Even the Spaniards and Portuguese, in their insane rush for gold and silver, to the neglect and ruin of everything else, had to pay some little attention to fishing and allied industries in both the East and West Indies; while in the case of the exploitations of new regions by the calmer, more prudent people of western Europe—the British, French, Dutch and Scandinavians,—the value of the harvest of the sea was really more in view, at first, than that of the land, at least when they began to visit and colonize North America. ”

“ A ship-captain may be an excellent navigator, but he is not expected to know every rock and sandbar crouching under the waves, and all the twistings and turnings of the entrance and channel of a foreign harbor, especially as these channels are subject to constant change. In this country, indeed, although coasting-vessels may refuse a pilot, the law will not permit captains coming from or bound to a foreign port to do so; and if any accident happens when no pilot is aboard the insurance money will not be paid, and the ship’s officers may be punished. ”