Mediterranean Sea

“ As the sun went down over the shining shoulders of the Western Atlantic, flashing its golden rays over the moving, liquid floor of the heaving ocean and Mediterranean Sea, William and myself stood on the topmost crag of giant Gibraltar, and the Bard sent forth this impulsive sigh from his romantic soul:
How I long to roam o'er the bounding sea,
Where the waters and winds are fierce and free,
Where the wild bird sails in his tireless flight,
As the sunrise scatters the shades of night;
Where the porpoise and dolphin sport at play
In their liquid realm of green and gray. ”

“ The sky is dull and sad to-day, and so the Mediterranean is grey. Even where the low-lying horizon clouds have parted a little to let through a far-away memory of sunlight, it is only a whiter grey light that outlines the margin of water and sky, and where the sea’s surface is broken into ripples by the softest of stirring breezes, the harmonies of shadows and relief are still in faint and faded colour-scales. ”

“ The Mediterranean Sea with its various branches, penetrating far into the great Continent, forms the largest gulf of the ocean, and, alternately narrowed by islands or projections of the land and expanding to considerable breadth, at once separates and connects the three divisions of the Old World. The shores of this inland sea were in ancient times peopled by various nations belonging in an ethnographical and philological point of view to different races, but constituting in their historical aspect one whole. ”

“ The history of the ancient world is, for us, to a large extent, the history of civilisation among the nations around the Mediterranean Sea. Its name perpetuates the recognition of it from remote times as the great inland sea which kept apart and yet united, in intercourse and exchange of experience and culture, the diverse branches of the human family settled on its shores. ”

“ Still, I had not seen the Mediterranean. The great coup was yet unachieved: so, getting five words of instruction from a waiter, I hurried through some narrow streets, crossed two or three more swing-bridges, skirted half-a-dozen boat-building yards, very like similar establishments in Wapping, and then suddenly emerged upon the open beach, with sand-hills, and long bent, or seagrass, rustling in the soft southern wind, with the blue of the great inland sea stretching away, deep and lovely, before me; and with the hissing water and foam-laced inner wavelets of the surf creaming to my feet. ”

“ The Mediterranean forms a curious and beautiful feature in the picture of the commercial world. By dint of money and shipping we laboriously bring to England the produce of the most distant regions, but the commerce of the whole globe seems to have a natural or instinctive tendency to flow, almost of its own accord, into the Mediterranean Sea. Beginning with the great Atlantic Ocean, which connects the old world with the new, we know that, over that vast expanse, the prevailing wind is one which blows from America towards Europe ”

“ THE cradle of oversea traffic and of the art of naval combats, the Mediterranean, apart from all the associations of adventure and glory, the common heritage of all mankind, makes a tender appeal to a seaman. It has sheltered the infancy of his craft. He looks upon it as a man may look at a vast nursery in an old, old mansion where innumerable generations of his own people have learned to walk. ”

“ For there is not even here what represents the life of the Mediterranean, the jutting rocks, the sucking in of sea, by the cliffs, the sudden squalls of the stony coasts where sea and land really play and fight together, waves leaping tower-high, and battering at hillsides and swirling in and out of creeks. ”

“ Then, again, in that blue sea of seas, the Mediterranean, where more than half the year one may sail over level water, with none of the ocean swell, with delightful breezes only strong enough to fan the light and lofty sails to sleep, the shores of Italy or Spain lifting their green-clad hills along the beam, or the ever varying islands of the Grecian Archipelago coming and going, as you dart rapidly through their straits. Ah! in those times, and in those seas, ships are possibly endurable, but of all monotonies, that of shipboard is the dullest, most wearisome and detestable. ”

“ Crete touched the far shores of the Mediterranean because she was an island and her people were forced upon the sea. Similarly, Phœnicia, driven to sea by mountains and desert at her back, spread her sails beyond the Pillars of Hercules. And England, hemmed in by the Atlantic, has carried her goods and her language to every nook and cranny of the earth. Thus the ocean has served less to separate than to bring together. As a common highway it has not only excited quarrels, but established common interests between nations. ”

“ It can furnish dangerous enough storms upon occasion, and, far worse than storms, the terrible white-squall which lies ambushed under sunny skies, and leaps unawares upon the doomed vessel. But the Mediterranean is not the deep sea, nor has it produced the best and boldest navigators. ”

“ A summer cruise in the Mediterranean is certainly the perfection of sight-seeing. With a sea as smooth as a river, and cities of interest, classical and mercantile, everywhere on the lee, I can conceive of no class of persons to whom it would not be delightful. A company of pleasure, in a private vessel, would see all Greece and Italy with less trouble and expense than is common on a trip to the lakes. ”

“ Every one has heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea-sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial before professing to have suffered every thing of which human nature is capable. Our steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not large—no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves tossed her to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her cabins and over her decks. ”

“ The Mediterranean fell but little on the confines of Syria, in consequence of the Gaditanean passage, but a great deal in this passage, because before this cutting was made the Mediterranean sea flowed to the South East, and then the fall had to be made by its run through the Straits of Gades.
At a the water of the Mediterranean fell into the ocean.
All the plains which lie between the sea and mountains were formerly covered with salt water.
Every valley has been made by its own river; and the proportion between valleys is the same as that between river and river. ”

“ The sea inshore will be of that rippling blue that one associates with the Mediterranean of the poets and painters, while perhaps a league distant it will roll up into those choppy whitecaps which only the Mediterranean possesses in all their disagreeableness. Truly the wind-broken surface of the Mediterranean in, or near, the Golfe de Lyon is something to be dreaded, whether one is aboard a liner bound for the Far East or on one of those abominable little boats which make the passage to Corsica or Sardinia. ”

“ Europe is bounded on the north by the frozen ocean, south by the Mediterranean sea, east by Asia, and west by the Atlantic ocean. Seas being smaller collections of water than oceans, I have selected them for our first consideration, and, thinking the Mediterranean the most important of Europe, I have placed it at the head of my list. This sea separates Europe from Africa, and is the largest inland sea in the world. ”

“ In olden times it was thought that all the world centred round the Mediterranean Sea, that the earth consisted only of those lands bordering the Mediterranean. In bygone days, long before the dawn of history, it is possible that Crete dominated the known world of that day just as the Island of Great Britain dominates the world of our own day. ”

“ The Mediterranean sea, opening directly into the Atlantic ocean at the straits of Gibraltar, and washing the shores of many countries of different sovereigns, has, excepting such portions thereof as the gulf of Venice or the straits of Messina, been recognized and considered by all nations, for centuries, as part of the high seas, free to all mankind. ”

“ The Mediterranean is a great gulf running from west to east, penetrating the old world almost to its very centre, and separating its most civilized from its most savage communities. Its southern shores are inhabited, for the most part by an anti-commercial and thriftless people. ”

“ As it is with elevations of the earth's surface, so it is with bodies of water; they may be connected together without being the same thing. The Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea are connected together at the Straits of Gibraltar ”

“ Why, the Mediterranean's nothing but oil or sugared water, while this sea is terrific with its crests of foam and its wild waves. And think of those men who have just gone off on it, and who are already out of sight. ”

“ The Mediterranean Sea between Sicily and Greece is also especially liable to submarine activity. New islands appear and disappear so frequently that in this region they are almost regarded as common phenomena. ”

“ The Mediterranean itself, though an inland sea, is subject to gales, which, on exposed coasts, raise breakers quite large enough to give a vivid impression of the power of ocean waves. The countries that surround this great sheet of water display in many places widely-spread deposits full of sea shells, like those that still live in the neighbouring bays and gulfs. Such a region was not only well fitted to supply subjects for mythology, but also to furnish, on every side, materials which, in their interest and suggestiveness, would appeal to the reason of observant men. ”

“ The former represents the shield of Achilles as depicting the countries of the globe; on it the earth was figured as a disk surrounded by the ocean; the centre of Greece was represented as the centre of the world; the disk included the Mediterranean Sea, much contracted on the west, and the Egean and part of the Euxine Seas. The Mediterranean was so much contracted on this side, that Ithaca, and the neighbouring continent, or at the farthest, the straits which separate Sicily from Italy, were its limits. ”

“ The voyager who sails from the dark waters of the restless Atlantic into the deep blue Mediterranean, notices at sunset a rich purple haze which rises apparently from the surface of that fair inland sea, and drapes the hills and vales along the beautiful shore with a glory that fills the heart of the beholder with unutterable gladness. ”

“ The Mediterranean seems at first sight a poor substitute for the rivers that have given their waters to make it. Those were living waters, whether they ran muddy or clear; the sea seems just salt and still and dead. But as soon as we study the sea, we find movement and life there also. There are silent currents circulating perpetually from one part to another, and the surface-water that seems to be lost by evaporation is not really lost, but will descend in distant places and seasons, with its bitterness all distilled away, as life-giving rain. ”

“ MEDITERRANEAN FUND. A special fund provided by the United States Congress, in 1803, for the War with Tripoli. H. Adams, History of the United States, volume 2, chapter 7. MEDITERRANEAN SEA: When named. "For this sea ... the Greeks had no distinctive name, because it had so long been practically the only one known to them; and Strabo can only distinguish it as 'the Inner' or 'Our' Sea. ... The now familiar appellation of Mediterranean is in like manner first used by Solinus [third century] , only as a convenient designation, not as a strictly geographical term. ... ”

“ What is now a great convexity thrust into the Mediterranean, perpetually gaining ground on the sea, was at the commencement of the present geologic epoch a great bay, and the waves of the Mediterranean broke against the cliffs of les Monts Garrigues, at Lodève, the heights of Nimes and Beaucaire, against the limestone crags of the Alpines, and swirled against that calcareous spur that now separates the lagoon of Berre from the desert of la Crau. ”

“ The movement of paquebots and courriers is incessant, not only those that go to the Mediterranean ports of Algeria, Spain, Tunis, Corsica, Italy, Greece, Turkey, the Black Sea, and all those queer and little known ports of the near East as well, but also the great liners, French, English, German, Dutch, and Italian, which make the round voyages to the Far East and Australia with the regularity of Atlantic liners, but with vastly more romance about them, for the death-dealing pace of twenty-two or twenty-three knots an hour is unknown under the sunny skies of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. ”

“ The Red sea is a narrow branch of the ocean, and does not receive into it a single river on the side of Egypt, and very few on the opposite coast; it will not therefore be subject to diminution, like those seas and lakes which are constantly receiving slime and sand from those rivers that flow into them. The [46] ocean supplies the Red sea with all its water, and the motion of the tides is very evident in it, of course it must be affected by every movement of the ocean. But the Mediterranean must be lower than the ocean, because the current passes with great rapidity through the straits ”