Mediterranean world

“ The Mediterranean is by no means as smooth as a lake. Storms somewhat violent arise suddenly, but rarely last over a day or two.
Our first glimpse of Africa was far from pleasing—nothing but dreary barren sand, or rather mud-looking mounds, formed its frontier, with very few traces of habitation except numerous windmills on the hilltops—which are of no great elevation. Vegetation there appeared to be none. By-and-by, however, we entered upon the magnificent Bay of Alexandria, for shipping one of the largest and finest in the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Mediterranean held its place as an inland sea, as one might well expect, since it was sea during the Permian times when most of the world was high, but all through the Triassic—which is the first Period of the Mesozoic Era—the land began to fall, and before it was over, the Mediterranean joined the Atlantic once again. ”

“ Indeed, with the old-fashioned study of the humanities, which tended to keep the Mediterranean too exclusively in the centre of one's field of vision, it was not always easy to get one's historical perspective correctly adjusted. Scenes and events that come within the direct line of our spiritual ancestry, which until yesterday was all in the Old World, thus become unduly magnified, so as to deaden our sense of the interest and importance of the things that have happened since our forefathers went forth from their homesteads to grapple with the terrors of an outlying wilderness. ”

“ It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on the strange value to the world's history of the two peninsulas which we know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that Mediterranean Sea, which was itself so remarkable as a centre and 'medium' of the western world, binding its many nations together. ”

“ 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 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 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 Nile greatly relieves this monotony, but its sources lie within tropical regions far beyond the limits of the desert. Alexandria possesses almost the only natural harbour on this flat coast of early formation. The old-world characteristics of the land, its inhabitants, and their language at once strike the traveller on landing at Tripoli. Yet even this part of the Mediterranean, especially the Levant Basin, beyond the passage between Crete and Barca, contains recent formations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the Old and New Testament world extended fully sixty degrees from east to west, but at the most not more than fifty degrees from north to south. With the exception of Arabia, all of these lands gather about the Mediterranean, for although the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates ultimately find their way into the Indian Ocean, the people living in these fertile valleys ever looked toward the Mediterranean and for the most part found their field for conquest and commerce in the west rather than in the east and south. ”

“ But it is our commercial Mediterranean. The time is not distant when this corner of the United States will produce in abundance, and year after year without failure, all the fruits and nuts which for a thousand years the civilized world of Europe has looked to the Mediterranean to supply. We shall not need any more to send over the Atlantic for raisins, English walnuts, almonds, figs, olives, prunes, oranges, lemons, limes, and a variety of other things which we know [Pg 19] commercially as Mediterranean products. We have all this luxury and wealth at our doors, within our limits. ”

“ No part of the earth’s surface can offer so marvellous an intellectual feast. Land where he may, the traveller is almost invariably struck with the beauty of the scenery, the richness of the vegetation, and the wealth of historical memories. For three thousand years the Mediterranean was the theatre of all history, the cradle of all culture, to which the whole of humanity more or less directly owes its modern civilization. ”

“ You have lunched between Calais and Paris, dined at the Gare de Lyon, turned into your narrow sleeping berth between Paris and the frontier, lunched in the wagon-restaurant between Modane and Busseleno, scrambled through your dinner in the big buffet at Genoa, and cursed those stifling tunnels between Genoa and Spezia, where between them you get your first glimpses of the moonlit Mediterranean, and you have alighted at old marble-built Pisa, the quaint dead city that contains one of the wonders of the world—the Leaning Tower. ”

“ During those three centuries the Mediterranean was a peaceful avenue of imperial administration, of trade, of civilizing intercourse. Its great ports teemed with a medley of people in whom the blood of all races from the Sahara to the German forests, and from Gibraltar to the valley of the Euphrates, was transfused. The little clans of high-bred men who had laid the foundations of this huge international empire had practically disappeared. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While nominally belonging to three different quarters of the globe, the Mediterranean with its shores, being bounded on the north by a long wall of high mountains and on the south by a vast and even more impenetrable expanse of desert, possesses quite a unique individuality of its own. ”

“ In the beautiful and luxuriant gardens, especially in Italy, on the French Riviera, and in Algeria, the flora of almost every quarter of the globe is represented.
No less varied and interesting are the Inhabitants of the Mediterranean lands, who belong to three distinct continents, and who differ widely in race and language, in religion and culture. In remote mountain-regions there still exist peoples, like the Basques and the Albanians, who belong to the oldest races in Europe. ”

“ 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.
“The Mediterranean is beautiful above all in two respects—harmonious setting and transparency of light and atmosphere. Such as it is, it is an admirable temperer of man. It gives him a hard, unyielding strength: it produces the most substantial races.” ”

“ About the same time a new Mohammedan sea power arose in the Moors of the African coast, and for a century and more the Mediterranean was a no-man's land between the rival peoples and the rival religions. ”

“ It is only after the sun begins to turn the lights out, and you are able to compare it with the great ships at its base, and you see the battlements and the mouths of cannon, and the clouds resting on its top, that you understand it; and then when the outline of the crouching lion, that faces all Europe, comes into relief, you remember it is, as they say, the lock to the Mediterranean, of which England holds the key. ”

“ Looking down, the Mediterranean is at your feet. There go the ships, with boats from either shore which dip their long lateen-sails as sea-gulls dip their wings, and sometimes fly over the waves as a bird flies through the air, even while large ships labor against the wind. As the current from the Atlantic flows steadily into the Mediterranean, if perchance the wind should blow from the same quarter, it is not an easy matter to get out of the Straits. Ships that have made the whole course of the Mediterranean are baffled here in the throat of the sea. ”

“ The great oceans open up broad areas for historical movements, and through their instrumentality peoples are enabled to spread from coast to coast in all directions; the inland seas, on the contrary, cause the political life of the nations bordering upon them to be concentrated within a limited area. The Mediterranean will ever remain a focus towards which the interests of almost all European Powers concentrate. ”

“ In the midst of this vast ‘Eurasian’ (European-Asiatic) region of folded rock formation, some 930 miles in length, bounded on the north by the solid primæval rocks of the continent of Europe, and on the south by the great plateau of the desert, lies the Chief Basin of the Mediterranean, embracing the Adriatic and the Greek Archipelago, where the highly indented coast and the numerous islands and peninsulas display a most striking variety of picturesque scenery. ”

“ The Mediterranean has given rise to so many great and powerful nations, only from the superior advantages which it afforded for commerce during the long infancy of navigation. The number and fertility of its islands, the serenity of its climate, the smoothness of its waters, the smallness of its entrance, which although of itself sufficient to indicate to the skilful pilot the proximity of the ocean, is still more clearly defined by the Pillars of Hercules, towering on each side of it, and forming land-marks not to be mistaken by the timid, the inexperienced, or the bewildered. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Morocco, from political causes, is less civilized than any other part of the northern part of Africa; and it can be seen, and with it the southern cities of Spain and the Rock of Gibraltar, in five or six weeks, and at a cost of a very few hundred dollars. This was to me the most interesting part of the Mediterranean, chiefly, of course—for it possesses few of the beauties or monuments or historical values of the other shores of that sea—because it was unknown to tourists and guide-books. ”

“ At that very remote period, when sacred and profane history first displays the situation, and narrates the transactions of the human race, the countries, few in number, and comparatively of small extent, that were washed by the waters of the Mediterranean, comprised the whole of the earth which was then known. ”

“ Certainly, I have nowhere known cloud beauty excelling that in the Mediterranean and Ionian seas, viewed from the Spanish coast, from the Balearic Isles, over against the mountain-bastions of Sardinia and Corsica, from the headlands of Sicily, where Ithaka and Zante are as great galleys in a magic ocean, where for weeks at midsummer the wine-dark waters are untroubled between the cliffs of Hellas and the sands of Alexandria. Perhaps. It is difficult to say of any region that there beauty is more wonderfully revealed than elsewhere. ”