Seabed

“ On the left, at a depth of a hundred feet, lies the sea flecked with foam, from the little round bays along the shore to the hazy horizon where the blue of the sea and the blue of the sky melt together; red or white sails, like birds with a single wing spread to the breeze, the slender silhouettes of steamers with a little smoke trailing behind like a farewell, and along the beaches, of which you catch glimpses as the road winds, fishermen no larger than sea-mews in their boats, lying at anchor, which look like nests. ”

“ In northern seas I weep alone, alone,
In winter seas.
Death’s hounds are on the waves, with many moans
Death’s voice comes with the breeze;
My helpless boat, rocked in the wind, obeys no steadfast hand. ”

“ The little boats that lie tethered to the rings and stanchions of the old sea-wall are gaily painted as those I clambered in and out of in my own childhood; the salmon leap on the flood tide, schools of mackerel flash and play past quay-sides and foreshores, and by the windows the great vessels glide, night and day, up to their moorings or forth to the open sea. ”

“ The sail, spreading to the breeze, filled, pressing the little boat gently over. Like a gull she passed the opening in the reef to the far fair freedom of the Pacific, like a gull she showed in the light of the sunset, and like a gull she vanished in the gloom of night, leaving the island to the viewless ones who preside over the silent places of the earth. ”

“ Here at the edge of the Atlantic is a most beguiling stretch of water, filling innumerable bays—water so clear and calm and deep-hued far away that it is hard to realise that it makes a cruel and treacherous sea in which only on the gentlest of days dare a swimmer plunge and feel his way among the underlying rocks, or upon the roaring waves of which dare a hardy sailor venture his boat. ”

“ Save for this, there is nothing to show that white men ever visit these seas, and, sailing up the coast in a native craft, you may almost fancy yourself one of the early explorers skirting the lovely shores of some undiscovered country. As you sprawl on the bamboo decking under the shadow of the immense palm leaf sail—which is so ingeniously rigged that, if taken aback, the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed eyelids at a very beautiful coast. ”

“ Resting upon our oars, or only using them to keep the boat's head to the break of the sea, and to prevent her being swamped—an operation during which they were as often flourished in the air as in the ocean, when we rose on the crest of one vast heaving wave, or sank into the dark vale of water between two—resting thus, we gazed in silence and with aching hearts at the destruction of our home upon the sea. ”

“ On the coast most of our travelling is done in a whale boat, and at night, to save the glare of the sun. Few experiences could be more enjoyable than such a journey when the night is fine and the sea calm, and there are willing boys at the oars or a gentle breeze filling the sail. ”

“ But still the Headland seems a weary way;
My boatmen, too, are old, and oft an oar
Slips from a feeble hand, but yet the shore
Upon whose forehead beams the evening star,
Is nearer still and nearer every day.
What matters that my boatmen now are old,
Why should I grieve that with a feeble hand
I hold the swaying helm? The waves no more
Rise o'er the prow to keep me from the shore,
The silken sail at last the breezes hold,
The tide of Love sets toward the Heavenly Land. ”

“ So they went about, and presently the little boat was engaged, in the darkness and the high wind, among that archipelago of dreary and dangerous reefs, of which some rose like needles out of the sea, and some, more deadly still, were only visible at low water. ”

“ As we 'reached' out the sea grew weightier. Never before had I known a greater sea in that bay. The ridges seemed to stand up to twice the height of our masts; every peak boiled, and as we rose to the summit of it, the boat was smothered in the foam of her own churning, and in the headlong, giddy, dazzling rush into which she soared, with the whole weight of the gale in her fragment of lug bowing her over and sending her, as you might have believed, gunwale under down the long, indigo slant of the under-running billow. ”

“ The little fleet will soon appear yonder betwixt the ocean and God’s sky with its white or brown sails. To-day the sky is unclouded, the sea calm; the flood tide floats the fishers gently to the shore. But the Ocean is a capricious old fellow, who takes all shapes and sings in many voices. ”

“ Still are the slim, gray masts of fishing boats dry on the flats.
Ah, how well I remember those wide red flats, above tide-mark
Pale with scurf of the salt, seamed and baked in the sun!
Well I remember the piles of blocks and ropes, and the net-reels
Wound with the beaded nets, dripping and dark from the sea!
Now at this season the nets are unwound; they hang from the rafters
Over the fresh-stowed hay in upland barns, and the wind
Blows all day through the chinks, with the streaks of sunlight,
and sways them
Softly at will, or they lie heaped in the gloom of a loft. ”

“ Here there are bays and harbors seldom visited by the great stream of cruising yachts, where, over dense forests of spruce that rise from the water’s edge along a rugged shore line, great ospreys wheel and scream, and in countless mossy nooks in the depth of the wood close by the sound of the surf, the witchery of Nature’s solitude casts a spell over the lonely wanderer. ”

“ The deep blue sea is certainly beautiful, and it is interesting to watch the fish playing below the ship’s keel, far down in the clear water; the sunrise and sunset, too, are very glorious, when ship and rigging seem to be turned to gold, and the sea, far as the eye can reach, one mass of glorious molten metal, gently heaving, or here and there broken by a ripple. ”

“ Of the thunder of the foam;
[Pg 115]
For the grass is full of slumber
In the twilight world for me,
And my tired hands are slackened
From their toiling on the sea.
[Pg 116]
OUTBOUND
A lonely sail in the vast sea-room,
I have put out for the port of gloom.
The voyage is far on the trackless tide,
The watch is long, and the seas are wide.
The headlands blue in the sinking day
Kiss me a hand on the outward way.
The fading gulls, as they dip and veer,
Lift me a voice that is good to hear.
The great winds come, and the heaving sea,
The restless mother, is calling me. ”

“ All the wonders of the great deep were about them—strange fish, sea porpoise, and whales, by day, and ever-new phosphorescent gleams and starry heavens by night. Then the wonderful interest of a sail at sea, or a distant steamship; some other humanity than that on their own ship passing them on the limitless ocean! ”

“ The men who tar the boat to-day may have turned their hands to something else by to-morrow. On fine days the old sails are spread out on the beach to dry or stood to flap-in-the-breeze from the mast-hole of some old boat on the beach, long ago condemned as unseaworthy and gradually being disintegrated by the elements. Oh what lovely seats these old gunwales make for the audience of men and boys, eyes aflame with imagination, as some old grandfather of the beach, in the role of raconteur, makes the details of a noted gale live anew in the vision of his listeners. ”

“ The very bottom of the deep bays near shore—dark and eternally silent, prisoned under the restless waste of waters—is thickly carpeted with strange and many-coloured forms of animal and vegetable life. But the beaches and tide-pools over which the moon-urged 130 tides hold sway in their ceaseless rise and fall, teem with marvels of Nature’s handiwork, and every day are restocked and replanted with new living objects, both arctic and tropical offerings of each heaving tidal pulse. ”

“ But how lovingly the eye rests on that tranquil sea with its hither shore, the "white wings" floating above, the energetic steamboat defiantly crossing their track, the asthmatic tug pulling at something it has picked up at some little port down the Sound, and a few oar-boats rippling the water near shore. The air comes fresh from the northwest with an odor of the sea in it, a little cool, us if it had touched in passing the silvery snowline of the Olympics. ”

“ On the clearing away of the mists of early morning we find the air on the Sound very bright and bracing. A slight breeze just ripples the blue waters of this Mediterranean sea; the summer sky is delicately mottled with flecks of foam-white clouds; seals sport below; birds flit from shore to shore above; a golden silence, only broken by the paddle-wheels of our steamer, wraps all together in a dreamy unreality very charming to the tourist. Occasionally a white sail, gleaming in mid-distance, adds an interest to the scene ”

“ The Tug-steamer lying a little off the shore, the Lighter lying still nearer to the shore, the boat alongside the Lighter, the regularly-turning windlass aboard the Lighter, the methodical figures at work, all slowly and regularly heaving up and down with the breathing of the sea, all seemed as much a part of the nature of the place as the tide itself. ”

“ As I have looked from one of the northern windows of the street which commands our noble estuary,—the view through which is a picture on an illimitable canvas and a poem in innumerable cantos,—I have sometimes seen a pleasure-boat drifting along, her sail flapping, and she seeming as if she had neither will nor aim. ”

“ Meanwhile the tide having turned, little sister boat made fine way of it down the river, and, burrowing in the fog, holding her breath as it were, and greatly assisted by the tide, slipped past the town unseen, and put for open sea, where it is to be supposed she enjoyed herself hugely and, finally, becoming a little skeleton of herself on unknown shores, was gathered up by somebody who wanted a pretty fire with green lights in it. ”

“ But in the summer time Jack and Seimke sat together on the headland in the warm evenings, and the gnats buzzed and the fishes spouted close ashore in the stillness, and the eider-duck swam about.
"If only some one would build me a boat as swift and nimble as a fish, and able to ride upon the billows like a sea-mew!" ”

“ Neither tree nor shrub can be seen in this wild but picturesque spot: rock, water, sand, and sky, are the only component parts of the landscape. At the time I speak of a few small light boats were drawn up on the beach, and two crafts of considerably larger size lay moored in the basin or cove. They were long, low vessels, entirely decked over, and fitted to pull some twenty oars; they had thick stumpy masts, and long tapering yards, for lateen sails, now stowed fore and aft in the boats. ”

“ Upon a sea renowned for its storms, and off a coast that bristles with dangers, these adventurous and often beautiful little boats—sea-butterflies in appearance, sea-housewives in utility, sea-heroines in pluck—flit continually back and forth, and succeed in carrying, month after month, and with a degree of punctuality surprising under the circumstances, cargoes of commodities, passengers, and news, to the tiny settlements or single homesteads which they serve as flying bridges between solitude and the world. ”

“ The best spectacle is when they are taken out at or near sunset in fair weather, when the subdued light gives a touch of tenderness and mystery to sea and sky, and the boats, singly, in twos and threes, and in groups of half a dozen, drift out from the harbour and go away in a kind of procession over the sea. The black forms on the moving darkening water and the shapely deep-red sails glowing in the level light have then a beauty, an expression, which comes as a surprise to one unaccustomed to such a scene. ”

“ Over the further bank dance the sparkling waters of a broad estuary, flashing in the glance of the sunshine or tossing its white-capped billows in angry mimicry of the sea. The gleam of white sails is never lacking to add variety and picturesqueness to the scene. ”

“ It was as peaceful an ocean night as any man could imagine of the weather up in the seas which our yacht was still stemming; moonless, for the planet rose late now, but spacious and radiant with stars. There was the phantasm of a craft when I went on deck about a mile on the bow of us, in the spangled dusk looking like ice, so fine and delicate was the white of her canvas ”

“ In the afternoon we saw smoke rising up from the shore, when I took charge of a boat's crew, in order to effect a landing, with our spirits somewhat revived, for I concluded if there were men on the island there must be water also.
Coming near to the shore, we found it to be a steeply-rising coast, full of rocks and stones, with a violent surf running. Nevertheless, two of our men swam ashore, and succeeded in drawing the pinnace close to the reef, upon which we landed. ”

“ The official individual shouts and waves, the old man backing his oars in the gulf below yells expostulation, the boat from the open carries off its prey, our ship begins slowly to puddle-puddle-puddle, working her screw, the man in the gulf of green water rows for his life—we are floating into the open basin. ”

“ Thrashing its way between far-sweeping marshes and wooded sea islands, the boat would burst suddenly into lagoon after lagoon, that lay strewn along the coast, that blazed in the noon like great fire-opals held in silver mesh. ”

“ Two human forms, a sailor and a sailor-boy, lying side by side upon a raft scarce twice the length of their own bodies, in the midst of a vast ocean, landless and limitless as infinity itself both softly and soundly asleep,—as if reposing upon the pillow of some secure couch, with the firm earth beneath and a friendly roof extended over them! Ah, it was a striking tableau, that frail craft with its sleeping crew,—such a spectacle as is seldom seen by human eye! ”

“ The fresh vigour of the breeze filling the sail with life, the waves swirling up about the sides of the boat, the dancing motion of their little craft upon the water, the changing tints, the shadows and ripples of the bay gave them a quiet yet keen delight. ”