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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Gift of

YALE DIVINITY SCHOOL

OLD OCEAN

BY

ERNEST INGERSOLL

ILLUSTRATED

CHICAGO
The Interstate Publishing Company
BOSTON : 2° FRANKLIN STREET

Copyright, 1883.
D. Lothrop & Company.

CONTENTS.

I. 146,000,000. Square Miles of Water
II. Waves and Currents ....
III. Early Voyages, and the South Pole
IV. The polar Regions
V. Ships and their Rigging .
VI. War-ships and naval Battles
VII. Robbers of the Sea
VIII. The Merchants of the Sea
IX. The Dangers of the Deep -
X. Life under the Waves
XL Sea Animals — the lesser Half
XII. Sea Animals — the greater Half

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170.85
204

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Page.
Hauling in the life-saving Car. . . . Front.
Over the ever-restless Surface  19
In the same Latitude  35
Ocean Currents and Trade-winds . . . .39
Eruption of Mt. Erebus  57
" It is by means of Sledges, and not of Ships " . 75
Ship with all Sails set  80
3-Mast-schooner, Tow-boat, Brig, etc . . . .83
Sloop ...  86
Cat-boat, Fishing Schooner  96
The Battle of Trafalgar  113
A robber Ship  123
Taking Pilot in rough Weather; and Boston
Harbor  141
Gathering Sea-weed  175
Lobster-fishing; Pearl-oyster-fishing . . .191
Cod-fishing  209

OLD OCEAN.

L—146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER.
OFTEN things familiar to us present an entirely
different picture if only we change our point of
view. I used to know a boy who, whenever he had
gazed for a time at a bit of landscape, would turn his
back upon it, bend over, and try how it appeared seen
from between his feet. The effect was certainly very
novel. Suppose, now, we take a globe, or a map of
the world, and, neglecting the continents, whose out
lines are well remembered, study the area occupied by
water. I warrant you a new impression of our globe
will be forced upon us. Very likely we never before
have really appreciated the vastness of this vast, blank,
intervening space between the lands. Spread out a
map of the whole world, stand back and look at it.
The largest continents become simply islands ; the
7

8 OLD OCEAN.
great islands dwindle to islets, and the little ones
disappear altogether —
" . . . and, poured round all,
Old ocean's gray and melancholy waste.'"
Looking at the land, we divide the surface of the
earth into eastern and western hemispheres ; but look
ing at the water, we make an opposite classification.
Encircle the globe in your library with a rubber band,
so that it cuts across South America from about
Porto Allegre to Lima on one side, and through
southern Siam and the northernmost of the Phil
ippine islands on the other, and you make hemis
pheres, the northern of which (with London at its
centre) contains almost all the land of the globe,
while the southern is almost entirely water, Australia
and Patagonia being the only lands of consequence
in its whole area. Observing the map in this way,
noticing that, besides nearly a complete half-world of
water south of your rubber equator, much of the
northern hemisphere also is afloat, you are willing to
believe my assertion that there is almost three times
as much of the outside of the earth hidden under the

146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 9
waves as appears above them — one hundred and
forty-six million square miles of endlessly restless
surface. But in bulk, as well as in space, the ocean is
mightier than the land. There are very few mountain
peaks whose topmost pinnacles tower as high above
the tide level as incredibly wide areas of ocean-bottom
are sunk below it; and, while the great majority of
land everywhere is only a few hundred feet above the
surface of the sea, the average depth of the Atlantic is
over ten thousand feet, and that of the Pacific and
Indian oceans even greater. If, then, Nature were to
plane down the earth with its mountain-ranges, in
order to fill the ocean-valleys and make a perfectly
smooth surface all over the globe, she would find it
needful to dig away all the dry land of the globe, and
also much which is submerged ; and then salt water
would cover everything with a uniform depth . of
more than a mile — just as I think it used to. That
was long ago. Though we speak of ancient rocks
and everlasting rivers and hoary mountains, the ocean
is older than any of them — older than anything else,
except, perhaps, the atmosphere, which is the ocean's

10 OLD OCEAN.
mother. Many scientific men believe that when our
planet first went circling swiftly in its orbit it was a
glowing mass of molten, mixed-up metals, minerals
and gases, which only held its shape, because it was
spinning so rapidly and racing on with such speed
that no one particle of it had time to get the start of any
other. They believe it was enveloped in thick masses
of fiery vapors, and if there was any solidity about it
anywhere, it certainly was not near the surface. But
as time went on, the icy chill of space cooled these
vapors slowly down; and all the time chemical
changes went on within their masses, bringing this
and that element together and separating others ;
causing some gaseous materials to make their way
towards the centre and others to seek the outside,
until, finally, water came into existence.
After that — let us picture it — what deluges of
rain were poured out of and down through those
murky clouds where thunders bellowed and light
nings warred! At first, all the- rains that fell were
turned to steam again, as would be a cupful of
water thrown into a blast furnace ; but by and by
the steady down-pour cooled the shaping globe so

146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. II
that all the water was not evaporated, but some
stayed where it fell, and this increased in amount
more and more, until finally, between the hissing
core of the half-hardened planet and the dense clouds
which kept out all the sunlight, there rolled the
heated waves of the first ocean — an ocean not only
shoreless from pole to pole, but boiling hot, and
sending up ceaseless volumes of steam.
Yet all the while the cooling of the planet went
slowly on, and presently a crust or skin like the leather
covering of a ball formed over the hitherto almost fluid
surface of the mass. Now when any heated substance
cools, it contracts. The world, being of huge size,
contracted on a large scale ; and as the cooling went
on faster in some parts than in others, and unequally
at various seasons, and was disturbed by explosions
and swelling from underneath, the contraction was
highly irregular, and produced great cracks and ridges.
These were most prominent around the North Pole,
as is shown by the fact that the land of the globe is
mainly grouped around that pole, and their range
was in general north and south lines. Such were
the results of contraction upon this first weak crust

12 OLD OCEAN.
of the earth ; those parts which were stiffest resisting
contraction, or simply bulging up, while great areas
of thinner crust sank inward. Into these huge
depressions which were constantly changing, but
with less and less frequency, as the warping heat
continually decreased, poured the wide waste of
waters, the ridges between forming the earliest shores
of this black primeval sea.
How different from these beliefs of scientific men
are the fanciful notions about the ocean in the
writings that have come down from the days of
those great empires in Egypt and Arabia and Syria ;
from the kingdom of Phoenicia, the elegant civili
zation of Greece and the battle times of the Romans.
The old Greeks, for example, regarded the earth
as a flat space having a circular border, around
which there was perpetually flowing a river that had
no visible shore. This river was the source of all
the rivers and other waters : out of it the sun lifted
itself in the morning, to sink into it again on the
other side of the plain ; the stars, too, rose and
set in its flood; and on its further banks, which
no one had ever been able to reach, were the abodes

146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 13
of the dead. They also deified this outer water
under the name of Oceanus ; and when men had
travelled a little further and learned that west of
Europe and south of Africa there really was a bound
less space of water, it was natural they should call
it by the old poetic name, Oceanus — the ocean.
The ocean which the Phoenician and the Latin
navigators knew almost exclusively — though they
must have been somewhat acquainted with the
Arabian and African edge of the Indian sea — was
that west of Spain and separated from the Mediter
ranean by the Pillars of Hercules. To this water
they gave a special name, the origin of which is
explained by another myth.
One of the very oldest and most venerable of
the Greek gods was Atlas. The poets told all sorts
of stories about him ; but whatever else he did, all
agreed that he supported on his shoulders the pillars
that upheld the sky. These pillars seemed to rest
in the western waters, just beyond the sunset hori
zon. Later on, it was believed among the Greeks
that out there, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, lay
an island of great extent, yet forming only a passage-

14 OLD OCEAN.
way to a vaster continent beyond. Naturally, this
unseen island was spoken of as the home of Atlas,
— Atlantis, or Atlantica.
But let us return to the early offices of the ocean
waters upon this globe of ours. It is certain that
the great waters and great lands have remained
substantially in their present shape ever since they
first became distinct, the first cooling throwing up
certain portions which formed a model for the conti
nents, leaving all the rest of the globe in a series
of great basins holding water — basins which grew
deeper by the steady contraction and sinking of the
crust in these the weakest spots.
The moment it had shores to beat upon, that
moment the ocean began to knock them to pieces
and grind the fragments under its pounding surf.
These fragments sank wherever the currents bore
them or the water was still enough to allow them
to be deposited — sometimes in coarse particles,
sometimes in fine silt — and there hardened gradually
into stone, which was arranged in layers or strata,
and hence is called stratified rock. The primitive
or original rock — New England's granite is as good

146,000,000 SQUARE MILE6 OF WATER. 15
an example of it as you can find — contains in a
mixed state all the components of the future strati
fied rocks. The original rocks held the different forms
of lime, magnesia, etc., to make the limestones ; the
silica to make the gritty sandstones and quartzes ;
the alumina to make the clays, and so on. The sea
not only was the agent to eat this old rich crust
to pieces and respread it into strata, but to sort out
for us the materials to a considerable extent, laying
down beds of limestone by themselves, and sandstone,
shales, marl, etc., by themselves.
All this work upon a chaotic world was not done
in one way, however. While with sledge-hammer
blows old ocean's ponderous waves were crushing
exposed points of the coasts, other of its agencies
were busy elsewhere. For instance, when dry air
comes in contact with water, it soaks up as much as
it can carry in that invisible form — moisture. But
this dampened air, being light, is continually rising,
while the heavier dry air crowds underneath to rise
in turn with its load of moisture until it reaches a
height where the cold is great enough to turn the
moisture into drops ; then it forms clouds, and by

1 6 OLD OCEAN.
and by these become too heavy and fall as rain.
Doubtless you know this process very well already,
but I repeat it to make sure of my next point. The
atmosphere even now contains a small proportion of
a powerful gas known as carbonic acid ; in those early
ages there must have been so much of it that no
living thing could have breathed. Now this gas is
absorbed by water, and every particle of moisture
which the ocean sent up took along a little carbonic
acid with it, and so helped to purify the atmosphere
and make it fit for plants and animals later on.
But don't think now that the carbonic acid was at
that time all nuisance : it had its place in the plan.
This acid is almost the only thing that will dissolve
certain hard minerals, among them silica, the sub
stance of pure sand, and the various sorts of quartz
and gems, and so enable water to take them up
and carry them along. The rain, therefore, well armed
with the carbonic acid of the thick air, by drop, by
rivulet, and by flood, was wearing down the rugged
mountains, filling up the gloomy chasms, levelling off
the surface of the rough continents, and helping the
ocean in sorting out the materials which, later on,

146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 17
should become useful to man as fertile soil, or be
sought after as building-stones, as metals for man
ufacturing purposes, or as minerals precious for their
beauty. Meanwhile, as time went on, the crust of the earth
cooled and stiffened more and more until it became
so stable that only slight and gradual changes of
level took place outside of strictly volcanic reg
ions. Now I have run the risk of being voted tedious
with this bit of geology and chemistry, in order to
show how important a part the ocean has played,
and is still performing, in remodelling the world ;
and also to show that it was done chiefly along the
margins, building continents and large islands out at
the edges just as fast as they were levelled down
over their interiors ; so that, from being enormously
lofty, narrow and precipitous, they became broad and
(for the most part) fiat. When you know that the
whole vast plains of Hindostan are believed to have
been added to primeval Asia, and the broad empires
of Brazil and Patagonia to the central stem of South
America, think what mighty mountains, to which the

1 8 OLD OCEAN.
present Himalayas and Andes are mere hills, have
been cut down to supply materials !
Yet out toward the middle of the sea, hardly even a
short hundred miles from the shore, little drifting
soil could be carried before sinking, and so we feel
sure that no new bottom of consequence has ever been
thus formed. The great basins of the sea — what
vast valleys, thousands of miles wide and from one
to fifty thousand feet deep, they would make if we
could see them emptied ! — have hardly been altered
since creation.
But the ocean, like other architects, did not work
for nothing ; it took its pay for this big job of hewing
a world into good shape in a sort of toll of minerals,
which it holds suspended in its flood. The chief of
these is salt, which has been dissolved out of the
shores and bottom as time went on. Analyze sea-
water, and you find that, besides the large amount of
common salt (known to chemists as chloride of sodi
um), various other compounds of salt, lime, and other
minerals, classified as sulphates, carbonates, iodides,
bromides, and so forth, have been extracted. The
lovely greens, purples, crimsons and scarlets painting

146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 21
the wonderful coralines and sea-weeds dragged to light
from depths of perpetual gloom, are largely dyed by
these compounds.
All these salts together amount to about four
parts (by measure) in every hundred of sea-water,
and make about one-thirtieth of the weight of the
ocean. In many parts of the world, all the salt used
is obtained by boiling down sea-water in vats; the
salt being left in white crystals in the bottom of the
kettle when the water is evaporated away.
It was by this means that our great-grandfathers
in New England provided themselves with salt ; and
at certain places on the coast of Maine and New
Jersey the practice has been kept up until very re
cently by fishermen who use a large quantity of salt
in curing their fish. These old salt-boiling camps on
the desolate beaches were very picturesque affairs,
but have about all disappeared now ; but they would
come back if occasion called. An example of this
happened during the Rebellion. There are no salt-
wells or mines in the Southern States, and the Con
federates were obliged to open factories on the coast,

22 OLD OCEAN.
getting all their salt by boiling down the water, after
the custom of a hundred years before.
Besides this salt, which makes ocean water much
more dense and heavy than fresh water, so an ob
ject may float in the former that would sink in the
latter, and swimming much easier in the ocean than
in a lake, sea-water contains two very valuable
metals — gold and silver; and in such quantities that
it is profitable to scrape the old copper sheathing of
ship bottoms to secure the silver which has formed a
film over its surface. Think of silver-plated frig
ates ! — that is what they all are after a long voyage ;
and somebody has estimated that the whole ocean
holds no less than two millions of tons of the shin
ing metal. Silver is now worth about $1.20 an
ounce : it will be a pretty problem for you to see
how rich old Neptune would be if he had it all in
coins. Then to it you must add his riches in gold,
which can be ascertained when I tell you simply that
from each ton of sea-water one grain of gold may
be extracted, and that the total bulk of salt water on
the globe is said to be 290,000,000 cubic miles.
These are average figures, of course, for the density —

146,000,000 SQUARE MILES OF WATER. 23
that is, the amount of salt, etc., in a given quantity of
water — varies in different parts. Deep water is Salt
er than shallow, because the saline matters sink;
equatorial districts Salter than arctic, because of
more rapid evaporation there ; and the Mediterra
nean saltest of all, because, I suppose, it is not only
in a hot latitude, but so confined that its waters
do not change as freely as they do outside. There
are springs of mineral water, and even of fresh water,
in certain parts of the ocean ; and some of the lat
ter bubble up so forcibly that all the salt water is
pushed aside, and ships are said to fill theii water-
casks at these sweet fountains in the midst of the
open Pacific.
The names of the different parts of the one great
ocean are familar enough, but their boundaries must
necessarily be ill-defined. The Atlantic lies between
the Americas on the west, and Europe and Africa on
the east. The Pacific spreads from the Americas
on the east to Asia on the west; but its great
southward expansion among the islands east of
Australia is called the South Sea, and the expansion
northward between Australia and Sumatra on the

24 OLD OCEAN.
east and Africa on the west, takes the name of the
Indian Ocean — the smallest of all. Besides this,
we speak of all the south-polar waters as the Antarc
tic sea, separating them from the southern exten
sion of the Pacific on one side, and the southern
Atlantic on the other, by the Antarctic Circle. Simi
larly, the imaginary line of the Arctic Circle incloses
the Arctic Ocean. But all these names and distinc
tions are for convenience, and in fact there is but
one ocean, whose waters are alike and inseparable,
and always intermingling, as will be explained in my
chapter on Currents.

Note. — An account of the fabled lost island of Atlantis may be found in
Irving's Columbus, appendix to last volume.

II.— WAVES AND CURRENTS.
IF I start with the remark that the earth rolls from
west to east, it is not because I think you do
not know that, but to lay the foundation for some
thing further. Surrounding the globe is the great
envelope of the atmosphere, forty miles or so thick,
which revolves and travels with it, and is really a part
of the planet But this atmosphere is so light that it
does not revolve quite as fast as the solid earth whirls
within it. It hangs back a little. If (as is near the
truth) a certain point on the equator — say the city of
Quito, in Ecuador — is moving at the rate of a thou
sand miles an hour with the spinning of the globe on
its axis, the atmosphere there only moves at the
rate of 995 miles an hour. Of course, such a lagging
back of the atmosphere must produce a steady wind
in an opposite direction to the revolution of the earth,
25

26 OLD OCEAN.
or from east to west, and at the rate of five miles an
hour ; and such a wind actually does blow all the
year round in the neighborhood of the equator. It is
called the trade-wind ; and it has important influences
beyond the cooling of the hot regions, or the fact that
a ship may set its sails and ride before it for weeks
without the trouble of moving a spar or losing a mo
ment's time.
But before describing these influences upon the
great currents of the ocean, let me call your attention
to another matter — that of waves.
This simple matter of waves has caused a deal of
discussion among philosophic men who were trying to
explain it. It has generally been said that in waves
the water does not move along, but simply rises and
falls. Complicated instruments have been made to
show how this is, but you can illustrate it yourself by
fastening a long strap at both ends, not drawing it
very taut, and then giving one end a sudden jar; you
v/ill see a line of waves run the whole length of the
strap, though certainly the leather does not move for
ward. But water is not confined at the ends, and it
is only a very peculiar jarring disturbance in a con-

WAVES AND CURRENTS. 27
fined space that causes water to toss up and down
without any motion ahead. On the contrary, though,
to a certain extent all waves are tremors which run
across the surface faster than the heavy water can
travel, and so a floating plank will seem to toss up
and down in the same place while the waves go rush
ing under it, letting it rise and fall on their heaving
ridges, yet the water in the waves goes forward all
the time ; and it moves faster than the floating plank,
because it is lighter and is more easily pushed along
by the wind. Watch the sea or lake when a breeze
is ruffling its face or a gale is crowding down upon it
and urging it into violent disturbance. You see the
long curving ridges of water coming swiftly on, one
close behind the other, all marshalled in the same
direction like long ranks of soldiers, and at a thou
sand points breaking into lines of hissing foam. Each
of those ranks of angry green water under this gale
from the north has a long rounded curve on its hinder
slope, in the direction from which the gale comes, but
its southern front is almost straight up and down —
a wall of water, as sailors say of the huge waves of
mid-ocean, which, when you are in front of them,

28 OLD OCEAN.
seem to tower overhead as though the whole mass
would the next minute topple over upon the ship and
you. Sometimes the crest, urged by the gale, does
lose its balance and crash forward in that sparkling,
resounding cataract which we call a " white cap."
Surely this water is moving ahead — racing on like a
frightened herd of white horses whose snowy manes
of cold sharp spray dash fiercely in our faces as we
sit on the open deck or stand at the end of the long
pier. Such a tempest will drive the water upon the
coast it beats against, until it raises the level of all the
river-mouths, fills up all the bays, floods the salt
marshes and throws the surf far beyond its ordinary
mark. On the othef hand, where a strong gale blows
off a coast, it carries the water out until wide areas of
rarely seen bottom are exposed along the shore.
I conclude, then, that waves do not simply lift the
water up and let it down again, but that they also
bear it along with a speed proportionate to the power
behind them.
Now in the tropics, as I have said, the trade-wind
blows steadily from east to west right around the
earth without stopping. This gives it a tremendous

WAVES AND CURRENTS.

29

space of water to pass over, nearly 10,000 miles in a
stretch at one place across from South America to
Australia. If one short breeze or gale can set the
sea flowing strongly upon a certain coast, and even
turn back the currents of large streams, then surely
this strong and ceaseless trade-wind will set the
water of the tropics flowing steadily in its own direc
tion from east to west. And it does do this ; but it is
greatly helped by another agent of nature. ,
The drops which make up a body of water are the
most restless things in the world : they are always
sliding down the least slope, sinking out of the way of
lighter substances, rising to let a heavier object pass
down beneath them, or moving hither and thither in
endless sjearch of that levelness and quiet which we
call equilibrium. Furthermore, when water is heated
it becomes lighter. If, therefore, a portion of the
sea grows more warm than the rest, it will rise to the
surface; and whenever a portion becomes cooled
below the ordinary temperature it sinks.
Now under the blazing sun of the torrid zone the
surface-water of the sea gets very warm indeed and
never has any chance to cool, while in the arctic and

30 OLD OCEAN.
antarctic regions the ocean is always chilled by perma
nent or floating ice until it is nearly cold enough to
freeze ; but these masses of warm and cold water
cannot remain separate in the one great ocean. The
hot tropical flood continually rising must flow away
somewhere to find its level, and it can flow nowhere
except towards the poles, for there the ever-sinking
volume of chilled and therefore heavier water sucks
it in to take its place, while it, in turn, flows under
neath toward the equator, there to fill the gap which
the escaping warm water leaves behind. So we know
there is constantly going on an interchange of water
— a constant flowing away from the equator northward
and southward on the surface, and a flowing in towards
the equator along the bottom ; an endless springing
up in the torrid zone and a steady settling down of
the polar seas. One out of many proofs of this fact
is, that the mid-ocean abysses, five or ten or more
miles deep, are known to be ice-cold. This could not
happen unless they were constantly filled and refilled
with new water from the great coolers at the poles ;
for if the water at those depths should remain
unchanged it would quickly become very warm

WAVES AND CURRENTS. 31
from the heat of the interior of the earth.
But while this invisible vertical circulation is going
on, another more visible and interesting set of move
ments is in progress on the surface, forming what are
known as ocean currents. These are vast rivers in the
ocean flowing across its face in certain directions
and to a certain depth, as rivers make their way along
the land. They begin and are kept going by a union
of the two causes already explained— heat and wind.
The heat of the sun at the equator warming, light
ening and evaporating the water, constantly tends to
draw the colder water from the poles, and particularly
from the great antarctic sea. The cold water, has
tening to the equator, is soon interrupted by the ex
tremities of Australia, Africa and South America, and
so split into three great branches. That which passes
into the South Atlantic goes on northward along the
western coast of Africa, getting so warm under the
hot sun of these low latitudes that it will not sink, as
has the great mass of the water which first left with
it the ice-zone, but comes more and more to the sur
face, until it strikes against the great shoulder of
Guinea and is turned sharply westward. Now it is

32 OLD OCEAN.
squarely under the trade-wind and headed the same
way ; constantly urged forward by this moderate but
endless tugging of the wind upon its waves, the cur
rent can never swerve, and flows along the equator,
and for half a dozen degrees each side of it, straight
across the Atlantic. South America, however stands
in its path, and the wedge-like coast of Brazil, pointed
with Cape St. Roque, splits this great river. Part of
it now turns southward and swings back across
towards Africa, making an eddy a couple of thousand
miles wide in the South Atlantic, and another arm
runs down the Patagonian coast. But by far the
largest part of the divided current is sent northward,
past the Amazon and the Orinoco and all that low
steaming coast of upper Brazil, in through the mazes
of the Antilles, to the pocket of the Carribean Sea,
and thence struggles out between the larger islands
of the West Indies into the North Atlantic. It used
to be thought that out of the Carribean Sea all this
moving flood poured into the Gulf of Mexico, and
thence out ; but now it is known that the trough be
tween Yucatan and Cuba is not deep enough to give
it passage, nor, if it were, is the pass between Florida

WAVES AND CURRENTS. 33
and Cuba large enough to let it out. Nevertheless it
keeps the old name, and, I suspect, will always be
known as the Gulf Stream.
When it has worried through the islands and
has once more gathered its full force together,
the Gulf Stream flows northward close along the coast
of our Southern States until Cape Hatteras gives it
a swerve away, when it strikes out to sea and pushes
straight across to Spain, where a branch leaves it and
runs northward between Iceland and the British
Islands, while the main body turns southward to min
gle again with the equatorial current from Africa and
repeat its journey all over again. It is in the heart of
this great circle of currents in the middle of the At
lantic that navigators find that dreaded region of heat
and calms which they call the Doldrums ; and here,
too, float round and round the wide, buoyant meadows
of the Sargasso Sea.
Meanwhile another most important cold stream is
making its way through the Atlantic, known as the
Arctic current. It comes down out of Baffin's Bay,
joins a similar flood from the outer coast of Greenland,
is thrown up to the surface by the Banks of New-

34 OLD OCEAN.
foundland, and meeting with the warm air, produces
those thick and prolonged fogs so common in that
region, fills Massachusetts Bay with chilly water, and
finally, meeting the Gulf Stream off the Virginia
coast, dips under it amid that commotion of waters
which makes Cape Hatteras a centre of storms.
The Pacific has a very similar arrangement of cur
rents. The trade-wind drives westward the waters
from the western coast of South America, pouring a
branch down between New Guinea and Borneo, while
a larger branch bends northward along the coast of
Siberia, swings across to the coast of Alaska, and then
on down to California, where it is gradually swerved
westward on its old equatorial track. This is a warm
river Jike the Gulf Stream, and is usually called the
great Japan current. But down through Behring's
Strait, which is too shallow to admit a large one,
comes a small cold stream, which answers to the
Arctic current of the other side.
In a lesser way, the Indian Ocean has a strong
stream flowing directly across from Australia to South
Africa. It is of immense help to the ships returning
from China and the East Indies. There are also

WAVES AND CURRENTS.

37

various minor currents, like that one south of Austra
lia, and the one that forms a great eddy in the Ara
bian Sea. You will find all of them marked on a
map in most geographies, and will understand me
better after you have looked them up.
Not all are as well marked as the Gulf Stream. Its
brightly 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 east you find that
the water at first shows only a warmth of fifty or
sixty degrees near the surface ; but as you sail on,
this gets higher, until, opposite Sandy Hook, you may
get as high a reading on the thermometer as 80 de
grees, and opposite Florida above one hundred
degrees. This difference in temperature between the
eastern and western margins of the Gulf Stream is
owing to the presence of the great river of arctic
water flowing in an opposite direction between the
Gulf Stream and the shore. Off Florida the Gulf
Stream is about sixty miles wide ; off New York it is
over one hundred miles in width, but is less sharply

38 OLD OCEAN.
defined. Its depth is hard to determine, but it cer
tainly amounts to several hundred feet. It is worth
remembering that, although some guesses had been
made at it before, Dr. Benjamin Franklin was the
first man really to study the Gulf Stream and tell us
anything of its origin and course.
These ocean currents have a great influence upon
the climate of both the land and the seas, and affect
the inhabitants of both in various ways. The study
of this influence brings out some entertaining facts.
For example, the North Atlantic is the stormiest of
all oceans, because the Gulf Stream heats portions
of the atmosphere and thus sets winds a-blowing.
Scotland lies as far north as Labrador, and the lat
itude of London is above that of Lake Superior. Yet
they have none of the terrible frosts and heavy snows
which prevail in Canada and make Labrador a land
of ice almost uninhabitable. This difference is due
almost entirely to the fact that the Gulf Stream pours
its warm flood against the coast of Great Britain, and
even tempers the Norwegian coast, so that forests
grow and the Laps can live in much comfort on a
line with the endless glaciers and frozen seas of

WAVES AND CURRENTS.

39

Greenland. But instead of having all the sea-breezes
w,armed by flowing over water that brings with it the
heat of its long wanderings under the fierce equa
tor, the unfortunate coasts of Greenland are bathed

OCEAN CURRENTS AND TRADE-WINDS.
in water chilled by months of captivity near the pole,
and loaded with ice which cools down all the winds
that blow ashore till they freeze everything they
touch for half the year, and make it foggy or chilly
the rest of the time. Hence Boston is a city of frost
and snow all winter, when it is really no further
north than sunny, flower-growing Italy, where one
laughs at winter.
Similarly, in the Pacific Ocean, the northward move-

40 OLD OCEAN.
ment of the great Japanese current makes the coast
of China habitable and pleasant clear to the sea of
Okotzk, and gives the Aleutian Archipelago a pretty
decent climate ; but by the time the current has had
a touch of Behring's Strait and swept down the
shores of British America, it has got well rid of its
warmth, and gives to the Pacific coast of the United
States that constant succession of chill winds and
fogs and the heavy rains or snows which mar the
climate of California. The weather in the interior of
continents is pretty much alike on similar latitudes
the world round, varying with height ; but the cli
mate of all sea-coasts is good or bad as a place to
live, in accordance with the temperature of the water
which the currents bring to that part of the ocean.
But the currents of the ocean influence something
besides the weather. Upon them depends to a con
siderable extent whether a certain part of the coast
shall have one or another kind of animals dwelling
in the salt water. This is not so much true of fishes
as it is of the mollusks or ' shell-fish," the worms
that live in the mud of the tide-flats, the anemones,
sea-urchins, starfish and little clinging people of the

WAVES AND CURRENTS. 41
wet rocks, and the jelly-fishes, great and small, that
swim about in the open sea.
Nothing would injure most of these "small fry"
more than a change in the water making it a few de
grees colder or warmer than they were accustomed
to. Since the constant circulation of the currents
keeps the ocean water in all its parts almost precisely
of the same density, and food seems about as likely
to abound in one district as another, naturalists have
concluded that it is temperature which decides the
extent of coast or of sea-area where any one kind of
invertebrate animal will be found ; for beyond, the
too great heat, or else the chill of the water, sets a
wall as impassable as if of rock. It thus happens
that the small life of hot Cuban waters is different
from that of our Carolina coast ; and that, again,
largely separate from what you will see off New
York ; while Cape Cod seems to run out as a parti
tion between the shore-life south of it, and a very
different set of shells, sand-worms, and so forth, to
the northward. This is not strictly defined ; many
species lap over, and a few are to be found the whole
length of our coast ; yet Cape Hatteras ends the

42 OLD OCEAN.
northern range of many half-tropical species, and
Cape Cod will not let pass it dozens of kinds of ani
mals abundant from Massachusetts Bay northward.
But out in the ocean, the warm current of the Gulf
Stream forms a genial pathway along which southern
swimming animals — like the wondrously beautiful
Portuguese man-o'-war — may wander northward for
hundreds of miles beyond where they are found near
shore ; but if by chance they stray outside the limits
of the warm Gulf Stream they will at once be chilled
to death. Similarly the arctic currents let arctic ani
mals, used to half-freezing water, make their way as
far south as Massachusetts Bay.
There is another thing of interest about ocean cur
rents. They not only allow swimming animals to go
beyond their ordinary range by supplying them with
water of the right temperature, but they carry floating
burdens where they are greatly needed. They bring
the icebergs — though perhaps these are not among
the things needed, since they help to form those
terrible fogs of Alaska and Newfoundland ; and they
often bear the great logs which come floating down the
Amazon or our own rivers clear across to the shores

WAVES AND CURRENTS. 43
of Europe. Before the western half of the world
had been discovered to Southern Europe by Colum
bus, these water-soaked, weed-grown, barnacle-flecked
trunks of unknown trees used to puzzle men over there
greatly; and the conviction gradually forced itself
upon their minds that there must be an unseen coun
try far away to the west where these trees grew. Thus
the Atlantic currents bore messages from the mysteri
ous new world which finally were heeded by brave ex
plorers. They gave a hint of the way to America just as
the buffalo-trails first taught the engineers the best
routes of our Pacific railways across the Rocky
Mountains. The currents do another service to the world.
Where they strike islands not far from some conti
nent or some other islands, they often carry along
old logs with plants growing upon them and quanti
ties of seeds which are not injured by their short
voyages. When, therefore, the coral polyps build up
one of their reef-islands until it appears above the
waves, thither the currents bring roots and seeds
from neighboring islands, and quickly plant them
upon the new barren shores, so that in a few seasons

44 OLD OCEAN.
the little islet becomes green and wooded and ready
to hold its own against the winds and waves.
Moreover, the same drifting stuff will carry many
sorts of land animals, — insects, snails of many kinds,
reptiles, and even four-footed beasts, and so not only
give the island a vegetation, but populate it with
many of its smaller animals. This seems to you,
perhaps, a very accidental and haphazard way of fit
ting out an island so that presently it may support
human beings, nor is it the only means by which
barren islands become productive ; but it is important
as far as it goes ; and when we study into the distri
bution of plants and animals in an archipelago, we
are pretty sure to find those of the same sort upon
islands that lie in the same current.

III.— EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH
POLE.
T SUPPOSE that by the discovery of how to get
¦*• a fire, the first savage men were able to make
the longest of all the steps toward civilization. Next
to this, the tilling of the soil has been of most
advantage ; but surely the third means of growth out
of barbarism has been the knowledge of navigation.
As we have no history of a time when men did not
possess a fire, so we cannot go back to where they
did not have boats. Yet it is easy to return to an
age when all use of boats was confined to inland
waters, or to ocean coasts where headlands were
always in sight as landmarks. As wars and trade
called for larger enterprises, and knowledge grew, the
boatmen became more venturesome, until, finally, a
wonderful invention enabled sailors to leave the land
45

46 OLD OCEAN.
behind, and become real mariners, pursuing a steadily
straight course for weeks together across the untracked
sea. How well the early Chinese knew the oriental
seas, and that the Polynesians could steer from
island to island for thousands of miles, we can
only guess; for the first seafaring people of whom
we have any accurate history are the Phoenicians,
who were at the head of the world about 500 years
B. C. Their capital city was Tyre, on the Syrian
coast ; and when we first hear of them, their ships
traded east and west from England to India. As
long ago as 600 years B. C, Necho, a wise king of
Egypt, employed Phoenician sailors to explore the
eastern coast of Africa, and they started down the
Red sea. Two years later they came sailing into
the Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar,
showing that they had rounded the Cape of Good
Hope. A century or so later the princes of the
second great Phoenician city, Carthage (now Tunis),
sent Hamio, with sixty ships, to explore the Atlantic
coast of Africa; but he seems to have got only
about as far as Sierra Leone. Then in 320 B. C, an

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 47
expedition from Massilia (where Marseilles in France
now stands) set out northward under another Cartha
ginian captain, Pytheas. It sailed along the coasts
of Spain and France, clear around Great Britain, and
back home, and is famous for its discovery of Ultima
Thule (now generally thought to be Shetland, or else
a part of Norway), then considered the northern
extremity of the earth. The next year Pytheas
penetrated the Baltic.
Meanwhile, exploration in the east had been
pushed by the conquests of Alexander the Great,
but chiefly on land, so that all the coasts beyond,
nearer India, remained unknown for hundreds of
years later; though the fact that the earth was a
globe was understood two centuries before Christ ;
and the first geographer, Eratosthenes, suggested
that by sailing westward new continents and islands
might be discovered beyond the "utmost purple rim"
of the Atlantic. This is about all that the famous
Ptolemy knew in the second century after Christ.
The conquests of Rome, Constantinople, and the
Mohammedans, extended a knowledge of Asia ; but
in Europe more than six hundred years went by after

48 OLD OCEAN.
Ptolemy, before any progress was made. This was
that dark time called the Middle Ages, which fol
lowed the weakening and breaking up of the Roman
empire. The first signs of its brightening came
from Gothland, on the cold shores of the North sea,
where the Norman Vikings ruled, not only the most
enterprising and refined race in western Europe, but
all-powerful on the sea. Dreaded as these rough
old Norman sea-kings were, they were not wholly
pirates and marauders ; and from them the proudest
Englishmen and Americans trace their descent.
Well, these Normans, with their friends the Norse
men, braving the icy terrors of the wild seas in their
small ships, by the middle of the ninth century had
sailed past North Cape, and all along the coast of
Lapland, knew all about Scotland and the Scottish
Isles, had discovered the Faroe Islands (A. D. 861)
and settled them, and in 874 planted colonies in
Iceland. Thence old Red Eric — who has atoned
for his crimes by his valor — bore away westward,
until the bleak cliffs of Greenland loomed before
him, and landed upon the continent of America
five hundred years before Columbus started from

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 49
Cartegena. The colonies thus established in Green
land not only kept up communication with Iceland
and Europe, but made new explorations for them
selves. They sailed around into Baffin's bay, going
well towards its northern extremity; and before the
year 1000, Byorni, a son of one of old Red Eric's
comrades, led an expedition southward past Labrador,
around Nova Scotia, and away south of Cape Cod to
a pleasant district called Vinland, where a Norse
village existed for many years. Just where this was
situated we don't know, but it is thought that the old
tower at Newport, Rhode Island, is a relic of those
early days. Very soon after, fishermen began coming
from Norway, Jutland (Denmark), and the Briton
coast of France, to the banks of Newfoundland;
and it is a curious fact, that the Indian name in
Newfoundland for the cod is not an Indian word at
all, but a corrupted French word.
For five hundred years these Norman colonies
flourished, and the Newfoundland banks were annu
ally fished upon by Europeans, who found their way
back and forth by the help of the stars, I suppose.
But toward the end of the fourteenth century catas-

50 OLD OCEAN.
trophe came. Fleeing from destruction, a Tartan
chief with a few followers marched to Kamtchatka,
crossed Behring's straits after much fighting, col
lected an army of Arctic Indians, and made his way
clear across from Alaska to Labrador, where he ar
rived in 1399. There he heard of the Norman towns
in southern Greenland, rich in things he needed.
Not minding the wrong of it, he built boats enough
to carry a crowd of his savages across, attacked the
villages then feeble with the devastation of a plague,
killed all the people and left the towns in ruins. This
was the end of all colonies in Greenland ; for just
then their people at home were too busy in conquer
ing England and fighting the Gauls to think of Amer
ica, and the far western shore was forgotten by all
but a few students.
But about this time the world was waking from its
long stupidity. Commerce was reviving, learning
began to flourish, and kings were willing to let their
subjects plan and carry out naval enterprises. Just
in this ripe time came the help which enabled naviga
tion to take the greatest step forward it ever did or
ever will take, Jt appears that while the western

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 5 1
world was under the cloud of the Dark Ages, the
Chinese discovered — no one knows just how or
where — that a bit of iron properly magnetized will
invariably turn so as to point toward the north, no
matter in what part of the world the test is made.
Europe learned of this astonishing invention first at
Naples about 1307, and the value of it was seen at
once, for it gave the sailor a sure indication of where
north lay when he was out of sight of land and all
the stars were hidden in storm-clouds. Knowing
where north was, he could easily find east or west ;
but to aid him, these, and three hundred and sixty in
termediate points called " degrees," were marked in
a circle on a small sheet of paper, over which the
magnetized needle was so fixed as to swing freely ;
and this arrangement, so simple yet accomplishing so
much, made the mariner's compass.
At this time nearly all the commerce of Europe
was with India and China. The overland route was
long, expensive and dangerous. The water route was
equally so, for vessels had to stick close to land, and
thus were often on a perilous lea shore. The first
need of the world was the discovery of some straighter

52 OLD OCEAN.
and quicker road to the east. But upon this errand,
Venice took the lead, and sent Zeni to the westward
as early as 1380, but he could not get past North
America, and so returned. Then Portugal came for
ward under the brilliant leadership of Prince Henry
the Navigator, who, by the way, was half an English
man, since his mother was Philippa of Lancaster. It
was Prince Henry's ambition to find the sea-path to
the east, and he enlisted the help of the best naviga
tors of every country. Thus urged, Portugal's ships
sailed further and further southward, seeking to get
by Africa, until in i486 Dias fought his way through
the storms that guarded the Cape of Good Hope,
and opened the route for Vasco de Gama to push
straight across the Indian ocean to Calcutta in 1497.
The sea-path to India was found at last, and the
extension of commerce to China and the great eastern
islands quickly followed ; but poor Prince Henry was
dead long before.
Portugal was so much occupied with these and other
ocean surveys, and in governing her new eastern pos
sessions, that she would not listen to the plans of an
ambitious young sailor from Genoa named Christo-

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 53
pher Columbus. He had been reading all the trav
els he could get hold of, and diligently studying all
that was known of geography and navigation. He had
heard of the voyages of the Vikings to Greenland and
Vinland, of the fishing trips to Newfoundland and of
the researches of Zeni. He had faith in them, and
thought if he went further south he might either get
past Vinland and sail straight on to China and eastern
India or else he would come upon an unknown conti
nent. Either of these results would be glorious. But
it was long before he could get any government to
support the attempt. How, finally, he persuaded
Spain to fit out his small ships ; how bravely he kept
on his way across the rough Atlantic with instruments
which now we should think utterly worthless, since
the quadrant and sextant were then unknown ; how,
in 1492, the Bahamas were reached ; and how in sub
sequent voyages more and more of the West Indies
were surveyed, until in 1498 he set foot upon the
mainland of South America — are already familiar to
you. Europe was quick to profit by the discovery of the
western continent, and sent scores of expeditions to

54 OLD OCEAN.
take possession of anything not yet claimed by Spain ;
but the Spaniards kept in the lead, and rapidly ex
plored not only the Brazilian coast, but crossed over
and set their standards in the surf of the Pacific.
Thence they extended their expeditions from Panama
northward as far as Vancouver's Island, and south
ward to Chili.
AH this time the Dutch and Portuguese were busy
exploring the Tegion about Spitzbergen and in the
White sea, and possessing themselves of the East
Indies, while the English and French sent voyagers
to the rediscovered shores of what is now Canada and
New England, until within a very few years from Col
umbus' voyage the whole Atlantic and much of the
Pacific coast of both Americas was fairly well known.
Of all these expeditions, however, the most bril
liant was that of Magellan, a native of Portugal, who
commanded an expedition of three ships for the king
of Spain. Steering straight for Brazil, he worked his
way southward to see where the end of the continent
was, and finally entered a gulf, the southern shore of
which he called Terra del Fuego, because he saw so
many fires there. Sailing into this gulf, he was de-

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 55
lighted presently to emerge into a new ocean on the
other side. Shaping his course northwest, at the end
of three long months Magellan reached the East
Indies, and knew that he had been around the world
for the first time in history.
Following him with an expedition in 1577, Sir
Francis Drake of England was driven by a storm west
of Terra del Fuego to its southern point, and so dis
covered that the Atlantic and Pacific were joined
there. Then he sailed northward, entered the har
bor where San Francisco now stands, and then
crossed the Pacific, homeward bound. Thirty-eight
years later Cape Horn was rounded for the first time
by the Dutch Captain Van Schonter, who named it
after his native town in Holland. Meanwhile the
same nation had caught sight of Australia, and in
1642 Captain Abel Jansen Tasman left Batavia on a
voyage southward, which was destined to prove very
important indeed, for it added to the map Southern
Australia, Van Diemen's land, New Zealand, and
much information concerning New Guinea and many
small islands. Beyond this, the voyages of the fa
mous English Captain Cook taught us most about

5*

OLD OCEAN.

the south seas where Cook finally lost his life.
During this time accident more than design had
contributed some knowledge of the ocean about the
south pole, although steady explorations were being
conducted in the Arctic seas, to which I shall devote
the whole of my next chapter.
More than two hundred and eighty years ago the
existence of islands far to the southward of any con
tinents became known to navigators, who were driven
thither by bad weather, and little by little was added
to the map of this desolate region ; but it was not
until 1774 that any one went into that terrible Ant
arctic sea for the express purpose of a survey. This
man was the intrepid Captain Cook, and though he
went a third of the way around the globe in his efforts
to find an entrance through the icy barrier, he could
never penetrate beyond 71" south latitude, only about
equal to North Cape, or the town of Upernavik, in
the Arctic region. Later captains did little better,
until 1841, when Ross, in his ships " Erebus " and
"Terror," skirted the edge of the thick ice that every
where clothed the land, though it was midsummer,
and finally reached the base of the southernmost

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 59
land yet known on the globe — a magnificent moun
tain chain stretching away to the south from latitude
77" 5'. Some years before this, Captain Parry, an
Arctic explorer, gave the name of "Ross" to the
most northerly land then known ; this southward
end of the world Ross now called "Parry Land,"
and so returned a compliment in a way it is not often
possible for men to do.
The most conspicuous point of all this range of
polar mountains was a lofty volcano — Mt. Erebus —
12,400 feet high, and covered with everlasting glaciers
and snow from its lonely crest to the tempestuous
water's edge. It was in active eruption, and Ross
tries to tell of the splendor of its action when the wide,
glistening waste of snow and the deep blue of the
ocean were lighted by the column of fire and smoke
hurled thousands of feet skyward from its crater ;
but who can picture the grandeur of such a scene !
Meagre as this information is, it is about all we
know of the globe within the Antarctic circle, and
we are likely never to learn much more. In a lati
tude much further from the pole than where, in the
north, vegetation is abundant, and men and animals

60 OLD OCEAN.
live all the year round, the severity of the Antarctic
climate cuts off all life, and constantly seals the
water under a cap of ice. The only land appears to
be volcanic ; and the soil, or, rather, the structure of
the islands, is often found to consist of nothing but
alternate layers of ashes and ice, that have suc
ceeded one another season after season. Most of
the coast is unapproachable on account of an
unbroken belt of cliffs of perpetual ice; and it is
only in the outermost islands that even coarse grass,
a few lichens, or simple seaweeds can be found ; for
the volcanic heights within are utterly destitute of
any vegetation whatever, and the highest noonday
heat of summer is only a little above the freezing-
point. Why this intense cold and dreadful desolation
exists so much further from the pole in the southern
than in the northern hemisphere, I need hardly
explain to you ; for you will recall that in the north
the continents are so broad as to form almost an
unbroken wall about the narrow polar sea, confining
its cold waters, warming the air by wide radiation,
and guiding the heated flood of the Gulf Stream

EARLY VOYAGES, AND THE SOUTH POLE. 6 1
straight into the chilling northern sea. In the
Antarctic region, on the other hand, an immense
breadth of water is broken by no land of any
account; there is and can be no great warm current
to temper the sea-water, and along hundreds of miles
of glacial cliffs icebergs are daily breaking off and
drifting far northward to chill both water and air
beyond the limit of animal endurance. Terra del
Fuego stands as a type of all that is cold and
desolate, yet it is no nearer to its pole than the
Highlands of Scotland are to the northern " hub,"
and considerably more distant than the great city
of St. Petersburg, the capital of "all the Russias."
Of course, then, you would not expect land-
animals to be found in this vast iceland capping
the southern axis of the globe ; yet of sea mammals
there is a large variety, including several whales,
dolphins and their kin, and various sorts of seals,
small and large — notably the huge sea- elephant, now
becoming very rare. All these feed on fishes, which
are abundant there, as also are the humbler orders
of animal life. Then, too, the Antarctic islands are
the resort of enormous flocks of sea-birds : ducks,

62 OLD OCEAN.
albatrosses, penguins, petrels, etc., all different from
the arctic species. Some of these birds are giants
of their kind, as, for instance, the great "break-
bones" petrel, whose powerful beak is four and one-
half inches long. It ordinarily lives on fishes or on
floating: carrion, but now and then it attacks living:
birds, even those as large as a loon, killing them by
repeated blows on the head. Feeble mates of its
own species, even, are thus struck down and torn
to pieces. As for the albatross, it is only rivalled by
the condor in size and strength ; while the big,
stupid penguins seem far more fishy than bird-like,
scarcely ever visiting the land except to lay their
a-ggs and hatch their young.

IV.— THE POLAR REGIONS.
EVER since the sea-route from Europe to Indie
and China was settled and the coast of South
America explored, the regions within the Arctic circle
have been the favorite field of discovery. It occurred
to every navigator that as a way was found past the
southern end of the American continent, so one
around its northern border might be disclosed; and
perhaps, also, a ship-route along the northern coast oi
Siberia and down through Behring's straits. Both oi
these would be far shorter than going around Cape
Horn or the Cape of Good Hope. Thus captain
after captain headed expeditions of research, from
Barentzoon in 1596, to Mackenzie in 1789, until, al
the beginning of the present century, the mainland
coasts of both continents surrounding the north pole
were well known. If you look at a map of the polai
63

64 OLD OCEAN.
world you see that these coasts form a fairly good
circle of land, broken only by the Atlantic ; and also
that all points on this coast-line are nearly at equal
distance from the pole, except at the northeastern
corner of America, where a dense group of islands
extends northward. Within this great circle is an
unknown region about one thousand miles wide in its
narrowest part, and covered with almost endless ice
and snow. Whether it be all a frozen sea, or
partially open water, or an archipelago of glacier-
capped islands, or a mass of land, no one knows.
What hardships the men of artic expeditions have
undergone, and the splendid courage they have shown,
cannot be told here. You can read it in their own
words, and gaze at their own hurried sketches. I
know no more thrilling tales than these narratives of
Beechy, Sconsby, Ross, Parry, Kane, Hayes, Hall,
Markham, Young, and the " Polaris " party. And
there are many keenly enjoyable arctic books in
French, German and Swedish, for none of these
nations have been behind us.
Well, it having been found that the dream of a
" northwest passage " to China must be abandoned,

THE POLAR REGIONS. 65
and that, although Professor Nordonskjold carried
his steamer through the Siberian sea from Copen
hagen to Yokohama, yet this route was not really
useful to merchants — what has been accomplished
by three hundred years of steady and intelligent
cruising in the frigid zone ?
Looking first at the mainlands, we notice that they
are much alike all the way round. Back from the
coast lie low, level plains, forming the "barren
grounds" of America and the "tundras" of the old
world. These plains remain treeless, because swept
during the greater part of the year by fearfully cold
and fierce winds; but they are overspread with
mosses and lichens so dense as to form peat-beds in
damp spots. This dreary monotony is relieved in
sheltered places by scanty grasses and a few flowers.
Portions of this area, particularly along the lower parts
of the great Russian rivers, are morasses with islands
of half-firm ground to break their wide watery soli
tude. In America these plains extend as far south as
Labrador. West of Hudson's bay, however, the
forests grow much further to the north, and continue

66 OLD OCEAN.
to encroach upon the barrens until, towards the mouth
of the Mackenzie, they reach as high as latitude 710,
after which they fall away again to the Alaskan
coast. The same irregular boundary between the
forests and the tundras exists in Russia, the woods
growing nearest to the coast along the Lena river,
and furthest from it west of the Yenesei and in
Kamtchatka. These forests are all evergreen trees
(chiefly firs), and of diminutive size, even when of
great age, because the short summers permit only a
trifling growth.
To these desolate marshes in summer come from
the south hosts of water-birds to make their nests,
followed by hawks and owls intent upon rearing their
own young, and preying upon their weaker fellows.
Various small animals — hares, mice, lemmings, etc.
— live there ; the musk-ox and reindeer leave the
insect-plagued woods to graze upon the reindeer
moss, and the fox, lynx and bear range along the
forest edges. But in winter nearly all signs of life
have disappeared, and limitless fields of snow closely
blanket lakes, rivers and grassy plains alike.
In the summer months, too, barbarous people

THE POLAR REGIONS. 67
wander over these barrens — in Russia the Laps, the
Samoyeds, the Tchooctchi, and others — and in
America the Innuit and other Indians and the Eski
mos; but in winter they all retreat into the forests,
or else set up their warm huts on the sea-shore.
It has been said that the continuance of our world
as a suitable place for us to live, depends on these
vast tundas remaining low and fiat as they are now.
If there were mountains or even hills instead of
plains, lofty cliffs in place of marshy shores, the
elevation would make them so cold that the snows of
winter would never melt, but harden into ice every
summer, as happens on a small scale in the Swiss
mountains. This would go on increasing over so
wide an extent, that finally the weight of accumulated
ice would disturb the balance of the world, and the
result would be the destruction of animal life. As it
is, we need not fear any such catastrophe..,
In the Arctic seas the perils of navigation are
doubled. In addition to the storms and mishaps of
ordinary voyages, the seaman must here thread his
way through narrow channels whose depth is imper
fectly known, will often find himself wrapped in

68 OLD OCEAN.
dense fogs or blinding snow-storms, must watch lest
he be crushed in ice that is drifting, or dashed to
pieces against ice that is firm.
Sailing northward in summer, navigators first begin
to meet with great floating masses, called bergs, on
a line between Ireland and Newfoundland; though
occasionally bergs drift almost down to Nova Scotia.
Next they come to drift-ice — fragments large and
small moving in fields, loose enough to let a ship
make its way through. Beyond this is seen the
pack-ice; that is, broken ice so firmly packed to
gether that it cannot be penetrated ; and if this is of
great extent, or is a solid portion broken off the main
field that has covered the whole sea or bay, it is
spoken of as a floe.
The position where hard pack-ice is pretty sure to
be met with is now well known to the whaling and
sealing vessels, and the exploring ships that annu
ally go into northern waters. It stands as a barrier
hundreds of miles wide along eastern Greenland, ex
tends from the southern point of Spitzbergen east
ward almost to Nova Zembla (which has an ice-field
of its own on the eastern shore), then stretches

THE POLAR REGIONS. 69
across to Taimyr gulf. Thence only a narrow space
of open water is ever to be found — and that not
surely — between the solid ice and the mainland away
eastward along Siberia, across Behring'sstraits, and on
beyond Alaska to the mouth of the Mackenzie river.
There the great number of islands make the region
so warm, by soaking sunshine into the land, as it
were, and storing it up to be let out gradually through
the winter, that a good deal of open water is seen dur
ing the warm half of the year, extending far to the
northwest of Greenland. In the Atlantic, the fading
warmth of the last end of the Gulf Stream is sufficient
to keep the western shores of Spitzbergen pretty free
from summer ice, and enables plants to grow and
some animals to live on those far Arctic islands.
It is for this reason that the most nearly successful
of the attempts to reach the north pole have been
those by the way of Greenland or else past Spitzbergen.
These attempts have been many ; and though while I
am writing, news comes of the wrecking of the
feantiette north of Siberia, word is also brought
that a new ship of Arctic research is to be prepared
in New York. It seems as though men would never

70 OLD OCEAN.
stop till they had sailed over the very end of the
earth, and been able to write in their log-books, " no
longitude, no latitude."
Do you ask, "What is the use of that, when it is
so difficult and dangerous and expensive ? " Well,
we have learned that there is no commercial gain to
be got, no people to be benefited ; and we should
probably discover litlle more than we now know of
the geology and the scanty plants and animals of the
unexplored regions. Astronomers say they should be
glad to have certain scientific experiments made right
at the pole to match with those made elsewhere in
the world; but I fear the search has come to be
chiefly a matter of pride. Every man who tries,
knows that if he succeeds his name will be spoken
with glory all over the world, and each nation is
anxious that its citizens should be able to claim this
grand praise. So brave sailors and scientific men
will still risk their lives to go, and governments will
gladly furnish them with ships.
To go on a polar exploration, a ship has to be made
doubly strong by every kind of extra planking and
bracir.g. None but steam vessels are sent nowa-

THE POLAR REGIONS. 7
days, and they are usually accompanied by a seconc
vessel which goes with them to Disco, or some othe:
Danish settlement in Greenland, and carries an extn
supply of coal and other things, so that they mai
start with full bins on the very edge of their field o
work. After that they use their sails as much as pos
sible, instead of steam, and so economize their coal,
At the settlements of the Greenlanders they take or
board fur-clothing, sledges and Eskimo dogs, and
perhaps an Eskimo family as interpreters, with dried
seal and walrus meat to feed the dogs. Years ago,
canned meats and other provisions were not known, and
a two years' trip of this kind was a long period of half
starvation and sickness ; but now very good food is
taken in compact form, and there is always a skilful
surgeon in the party. Indeed, it was only a few
years ago that Lord Dufferin went to Arctic regions
in his steam yacht as a pleasure trip !
It is summer when they start, and generally they
can pick their way through loose ice beyond the
upper end of Baffin's bay. After this begin great
perils as they push northward. The channels be
tween the many islands are narrow and tortuous, and

72 OLD OCEAN.
through them come drifting enormous bergs, towering
hundreds of feet over the mast-head, and often pitch
ing over. It is often almost impossible to avoid
them, or the shore ice, because these island channels
cause the tides to form swift and changeable currents
which give the pilots great difficulty in steering.
Sometimes it happens that two currents will oppose
one another side by side, so as to bring two huge
bergs together, and the ship must work hard to keep
from being between when the collision comes. Then
there are the packs to be studied, which is the busi
ness of a single experienced officer called an ice-
pilot. The currents play havoc with these packs too.
One freak is to set them spinning. Let two great
whirling packs, each five hundred or a thousand
acres in extent, strike one another, and you can im
agine what a crashing and grinding there will be.
The strongest ship would amount to nothing more
there than a peanut-shell under a trip-hammer.
Often ice will bar a whole channel, and from the
mast-head can be seen nothing else ahead. Then the
ship must be moored to its edge and drift with the
floe, watching it carefully to see that something dan-

THE POLAR REGIONS. 73
gerous does not occur, until a crack opens and one
can sail in. Perhaps after a few hundred yards of
cautious progress this crack will close up, and then
there is great danger lest the ship shall be cut in two
by the pinching edges of the re-united floe, or held a
prisoner and drift helplessly southward until the
whole season is wasted.
These and a score of other perils avoided — and in
some seasons no one can make any headway, while
in other years progress is comparatively easy — the
explorer finds himself at the end of the summer as
far north as he is able to get, and either hastens
back or goes into winter-quarters. Generally the
latter plan is adopted, and a good harbor chosen ; but
sometimes the ship is obliged to winter wherever it
happens to be.
The spot having been chosen, several anchors are
set very firmly, all the "running rigging" is taken
down, a wooden house, which has been brought in
pieces, is fitted together over the whole deck, and a
great wall of snow is built on the ice around the ship
as high as her bulwarks, to keep off the wind, while.
some snow-huts are built near by as store-houses.

74 OLD OCEAN.
And now the days grow so short that only at mid
day does the sun shine, and long before Christmas it
is almost as dark at noon as at midnight. You know
how this is, don't you ?
How the sun being so far north of the equator in
summer, can be seen at the pole to roll round and
round the horizon, instead of in a sideway-curve over
head ; and how, oppositely, when it has gone to the
south of the equator in winter, though equally visible
to the seals and penguins of the antartic sea, the
dwellers about the north pole get no sight of it at all
for nearly six months. To the terrors of the bitter
cold of the winter — cold which has been known to
go as low as 60 degrees below zero and freeze ether
— are added total darkness, except for star-light.
But these winter months are not days of idle gloom
to the explorer. Harnessing his teams of dogs to
his sledges, he pushes his way over the roughly frozen
sea, and seeks to gain a point far north of where his
ship has been able to go. It is by means of sledges
and not of ships that the highest latitude known
to man — about 84° — has been reached; but many
solitary graves mark their tracks.

THE POLAR REGIONS. 77
Too often the winter's gales and the slow crowding
of the ice-floe have broken the ship to pieces, or lifted
her up on to the ice and placed her so that she cannot
be relaunched. Then the crew must take sledges
and small boats and work their way homeward as
best they can. The whole history of voyaging can
tell no stories to equal the adventures of these ship
wrecked Arctic crews, and there is hardly a single
record of an expedition which does not contain
some narrative of the kind.
Such boat-journeys would in almost every case
have failed had not the castaways been able to get
birds and animals to feed upon, since they would be
unable to carry away from the ship enough preserved
food. No point has been reached, however, so far
north that animals did not live there. Even the wild
musk-ox in America and the reindeer in Europe and
Asia have been seen as far north as men have seen
anything; and cases are known of reindeer bearing
the brand-marks of European herds, having been
killed in Greenland, so that they must have come
across. The polar bear roves throughout the polar
regions near the coast, foxes are pretty abundant,

78 OLD OCEAN.
hares occur on the uttermost islands (and the hare is
a plant-feeder, remember), and in Siberia the rat-like
lemming is abundant. As for the water-life, the
Arctic oceans harbor whales of several species — and
they are sometimes caught in Baffin's bay with
Siberian lances sticking in their backs — walruses,
half a dozen species of seals, which keep open holes
in the ice, and make burrows beneath the snow which
covers it, and so pass the winter, and a variety of
fishes and shell-fish. These afford food to hosts of
water-birds which retreat in winter only so far south
as will give them light enough to see to fish, and in
summer fly northward to nesting-places often far with
in the charmed circle which yet defies our exploration.
Where there is so much animal life, humanity can
dwell; and we find the whole of the Arctic coast-lands
haunted by scattered bands of degraded Eskimos,
whose habits and history are of the greatest interest,
not only because they live in such eternal desolation,
but because they are believed to be the remnants of
the most ancient of all the natives of our continent.

V.— SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING.
ALONG with progress in sea explorations has
gone a like progress in ship-building, and at
about an equal pace. That wood would float, that
a log hollowed out served better as a support in
water than one whole, and that an imitation of a
hollowed log, made by putting several pieces together,
was best of all, were among the first facts learned by
savage men. Thus came the canoes and first rude
boats. For rivers and bays these proved enough,
and ages passed before any advance was made.
The idea of rigging is equally simple of explana
tion, though some romantic stories are told by
the old mythologists as to its origin. That a
strong breeze moves a canoe out of its way,
and that, if a man in a canoe holds a skin out
stretched or a thick bush upright, the force would
79

8o

OLD OCEAN.

send him along as fast as he cared to go, without the
labor of paddling, were facts quickly and gratefully
seized upon by the earliest boatmen. To have a skin
ready for the purpose, and to set up a pole to hold it

SHIP WITH ALL SAILS SET.

Sails: i, Outer jib. 2, Jib. 3, Foretop-mast stay-sail. 4, Fore royal.
5, Foreto'gallant sail. 6, Upper foretop-sail. 7, Lower foretop-sail.
8, Fore-sail. 9, Main to'gallant stay-sail. io, Main top-mast stay-sail.
11, Main sky-sail. 12, Main royal. 13, Main to'gallant sail. 14, Upper
main top-sail. 15, Lower main top-sail. 16, Main-sail. 17, Main spencer.
18, Mizzen royal. 19, Mizzen to'gallant sail. 20, Upper mizzen top-sail.
21, Lower mizzen top-sail. 22, Cross jack. 23, Spanker. 24, FJying jib.
25, Foretop-mast studdin'-sail. 26, Foreto' gallant studdin'-sail.

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 8l
in position, were easy matters; yet in this simple
arrangement you have the first sail.
But skins were heavy and too valuable for such a
purpose. People who spent much time on the
water, therefore, like the ancient Egyptians, and the
islanders of the Chinese and South seas, soon devised
a way of weaving rushes or splints of bamboo
into broad mats, and thus were able, on account of
their lightness, to carry much larger and more
effective sails, which were kept outstretched by one
or more cross-poles or spars, and could be taken
down quickly. Many such sails are in use to this
day among the boatmen of Eastern nations. With the
discovery of how to make cloth out of hempen,
cotton, woollen and silken fibres, came a still better
material for sails and ropes.
In the same way it was only gradually that men
learned the best shape for the hulls of their boats.
From the very first, I imagine, canoes were pointed,
— at least in front; but this made the original dug
out more than ever liable to upset, and a smooth,
round bottom causes a boat to drift sideways. At
first the latter difficulty was avoided by putting a

82 OLD OCEAN.
board or stiffened mat over the side, so as to
counteract the leeway caused by the wind ; but it was
not long before the keel was added to the bottom,
which cured both disadvantages.
It is said that the oldest forms of paddles of which
we have any record among the Egyptian or Assyrian
hieroglyphs show them to have been shaped some
what like the hand and arm, and that similar paddles
were to be seen only a few years ago on the canals
in Holland. This is natural, because undoubtedly
the very first paddle ever used was the naked hand.
Short paddles were soon found less powerful than
long ones ; but in order to work these latter it was
necessary to brace them against something in
the middle. Notches were therefore cut in the edge
of the boat, your paddle has become an oar, and by
and by the notch is to be replaced by a carefully
formed row-lock, and boatmen will learn that it is
best to feather their oars when they row.
Now build a great canoe-shaped hull, able to hold
a hundred men, out of hewn ribs and planking ; set
up one or more short masts with a square sail hung
on each of them, arrange as many oars as can be

3-MAST SCHOONER. TOW BOAT. BRIG.
HE KM APHRODITE HKIG.

CAT-BOAT. PILOT BOAT. OCEAN STEAMER.
BAFKENTIISL. FISHERMAN.

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 85
accommodated, with a single long oar in the middle
behind, or two oars, one on each side of the stern, to
steer by, and you have the plan of the vessels that
die Phoenicians and Carthaginians carried their
freight and fought their battles in; that Cleopatra, in
all the splendor of her court, sailed down to Alexan
dria with; that brought tin from Britain, that later
figured in the adventures of the Northmen and
formed the navies of western Europe.
So, though the trading-vessels of the ancients
depended on the wind for the most part, yet they all
carried and used oars ; while for the ships of war or
pleasure, which were made longer and narrower than
the traders, sails were held to be of small service, and
oars alone were employed. In the time of the
Roman Empire these row-boats-of-war were so made
as to allow two, three or even more tiers of oars, one
over the other, to be worked by rowers who did none
of the fighting and were protected by high bulwarks.
Some of these boats, then and several centuries
Eafter, were built of a size almost equal to large
vessels nowadays, and their oarsmen were trained
into that precision of moving in perfect unison which

86 OLD OCEAN.
alone could propel such heavy craft. Their construc
tion was careful, too. They were often, if not always,
sheathed with lead, and were put together with copper
nails, since iron spikes rusted out. It was the
fashion to dye the sails in brilliant colors or to

SLOOP.
Sails: ., Jib. z, Gaff top-sail. 3, Main-sail.
embroider them, and the cabins were often magnifi
cently furnished. Do you not remember Ezekiel's
description of the vessels of Tyre?
Their ship boards are of fir trees of Senir, their masts

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 87
of cedars, their oars of oaks of Bashan, their benches of
ivory, their sails of fine embroidered linen.
These row-boats held their place as war vessels
through 2000 years of history, beginning with the
battle of Salamis in 480 B. C. which saved Greece
from the grasp of Xerxes. There were 380 open boats
on the side of the Greeks there, each carrying about 18
soldiers besides the rowers, who sat amidships (or in
the centre), while the soldiers stood upon two platforms,
one at the prow and one over the stern. The ends
of all those ancient boats were built up into a high
projection forward, which ended in a serpent's head
or a swan's neck, the face of an owl or some odd
image ; and we keep the tradition of it until now by
putting a carved figure-head under our bowsprits.
The battle of Salamis taught the Greeks the value
of a navy — which, by the way, they were at first afraid
to send around the southern peninsula, and so used
to haul across the isthmus of Corinth — and helped
them greatly to attain the power they afterwards had.
They improved, too, on the boats of their fathers,
extended the end platforms to meet over the heads
of the rowers so as to make a deck and give room for

88 OLD OCEAN.
more soldiers, and devised " engines " to aid
them. Their enemies were equally skilful, and the
hand-to-hand naval conflicts of those days were
horrible. From the bows protruded sharp prows
designed to strike and sink an enemy's vessel, and
over these prows projected platforms where men
stood ready to drop heavy stones or pointed masses
of iron upon the enemy's boat when it had come
within reach, to crush it; or great grappling irons
which should draw it close up so that the soldiers
could leap upon the deck of their foe and fight there.
From the masts, also, were suspended battering-rams
and other contrivances to break in the bulwarks of
an enemy; and every vessel carried catapults, or
immense cross-bows, worked by tackle and windlasses,
and which at short range shot large stones with the
force of cannon-balls. Lastly there was the dread
ful Greek fire, the knowledge of how to make which
has been lost. It consisted of several liquids — the
principal one being naphtha, it is thought — which,
when mixed and exposed to the air, instantly took fire.
A vessel armed with this carried several tubes of iron
or bronze projecting from her walls, and when an

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 89
engagement came on her crew pumped through these
nozzles streams of flaming liquid accompanied by dense
fumes and a suffocating odor. The spouting liquid
fire falling upon a man would burn him to death
instantly, while the woodwork it reached was set into
a blaze, so that those who escaped burning were
likely to be drowned. Arrows wrapped with tow
soaked in this mixture, flew through the air like
meteors to set on fire any boat they lighted upon,
and nothing but sand or smothering would extinguish
the flames ; for to throw on water was only to spread
it the further. I think it a good fortune that Greek
fire is lost to our knowledge, for the world could well
spare so fearful an agent of harm.
After the Roman power sank there is little to tell
of naval history, and nothing of commerce, until the
western part of Europe began to wake up. People
had sea-boats all this time, though, and were trading
and fighting, and the Vikings, in their short, thick,
blunt-bowed, unwieldy little vessels, had done won
ders in voyaging. The natives of the British isles
kept almost incessant wars with the Danes and
Normans and Scandinavians back and forth across

9° OLD OCEAN.
the Channel, until the grand expedition of William
the Conqueror in 1066 settled matters somewhat.
The Normans were at that time the most powerful
people in northern Europe, and they were ambitious
to extend their rule southward. The finest of seamen,
their fleets rounded the headlands of Spain, passed
into the Mediterranean, forced their way to Italy
and overran its ports, sailed around to its eastern
coast, and began to believe themselves masters of the
whole region. But over there stood the refined and
beautiful city of Venice — the leader in power and
wealth of all southern Europe. The Venetians heard
with dismay of the approach of these rough northern
strangers with their ruddy complexions, their tangled
yellow beards and their uncouth tongue. A fleet
was quickly manned and sent to oppose them. The
two forces met near Durazzo, in one of the hardest
sea-fights those many-battled waters ever witnessed,
and the Normans — all that were left of them —
hastened homeward and kept themselves in their own
ocean. After that came the activity by sea and land of
the Crusades, and Venice became supreme in the

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 9 1
Mediterranean. It was chiefly through the force
sent by her against the Saracens, in the twelfth cen
tury, that the Infidel fleet in the bay of Jaffa was
beaten, and that, a little later, the stronghold of Tyre
was captured. Afterwards Genoa wrested the control
of the seas from Venice, and had her century or two of
supremacy. But these old conflicts seem to have
produced little change or improvement in ship-build
ing. As before, all the long piratical wars in the
Mediterranean and along the Atlantic coast were
carried on in big row-boats, which could be managed
in a battle more easily than the clumsy, round-bodied
sail-vessels. The fighting was all at close quarters,
and the war-vessels were often shielded on the out
side with iron belts and armor, which protected them
from blows and injury from sharp rams. To pierce
or break the vessel ; to deprive it of its rudder, its
sails, its oars ; to open in its side or at the prow a
large aperture so as to endanger its sinking, seems
to have been the tactics of every commander. The
knights of the Middle Ages, when combatting on
shore, always fought man to man, despising anyone
who would have sought to kill the horse of the war-

92 OLD OCEAN.
rior whom he could not eject from the saddle with the
spear. At sea this was never the case. In all ages the
vessels were struck in order to overthrow the men ; and
for this reason the vessel was strengthened, cuirassed,
protected by as many towers as possible, until it
became a sort of floating fortress, bastioned, bul
warked, defended by archers, slingers and soldiers
armed with spears, swords, axes and maces : in short,
with all the arms used in the camps or in beseiged
towns. Such were the " fleets " and tactics with
which our ancestors defended the "snug little islands,"
almost or quite up to the time of Henry VIII ; and
though merchant vessels retained the use of sails,
they were of the simplest patterns, and adapted to
little rougher work than the comparatively peaceful
waters of the Mediterranean.
In the fourteenth century we begin to hear
of a revival in the art of ship-building and the
use of sails, as, indeed, was needful if the long voy
ages were to be undertaken which the discovery of
the compass now rendered possible. In this revival
the Venetians and Genoese took the lead, but the
English, whose monarchs gloried in the title of

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 93
" Sovereigns of the Sea," were not far behind.
There was a large variety of vessels in that day, rude
though they were, and called by names we should
hardly recognize now. What would you make of
these lines of old Hardyorg :
" They fought full sore upon the waters of Sayrn,
With carrickes many, well stuffed and arrayed ;
And many other shippes great of Hispayne,
Barges, babyngers, and galleys unaffrayed,
Which proudly came upon our shippes vmprayed."
Though the hulls of these vessels were large and
tight, their shape was poorly adapted for speed or
for safety in bad weather. Their decks were built
up into immensely high structures at the stern and
bows, after the old galley model, and to form forts
for the soldiers. Our word " forecastle " reminds us
of this old usage. Their masts were single sticks —
not divided into top-masts — and hence were obliged
to be thick and heavy; and they bore upon their
summits large "top-castles" where a number of
marines stood in a battle to shoot down upon the
enemy's decks. This weight above, and height of

94 OLD OCEAN.
surface exposed to the wind, and their rude rigging,
made it impossible for them to sail safely, except
with a fair and gentle wind (they never attempted it
otherwise), and they were required to carry an enor
mous quantity of ballast. There was so little room
for anything but sleeping-berths, armament and a
cooking room in the war-ships, that every fleet had
to take with it small vessels carrying provisions ; and
the case was little better in merchant vessels.
The ships in which Vasco di Gama, Columbus, the
Cabots and other explorers did their marvellous work
were no better than this : strangely inefficient it seems
to us, and we wonder that some of the simplest con
trivances in rigging were not adopted centuries
before they came into use, until we remember that it
was not for long, speedy voyages that vessels were
intended up to the sixteenth century or so, but
simply as a means of carrying a great number of men
or huge cargoes.
However, as the known world widened and trade
grew, the inventions of private ship-owners continually
improved the rigging, and Columbus' " carravel "
had four short masts, the forward one having a square

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 95
sail and the three after-masts that Mediterranean
style of swinging three-cornered sail called lateen.
At this time, too, pirates sprang up and exerted them
selves to make their crafts as swift as possible, to
escape their pursuers, while the regular navies, which
governments now began to support, afforded oppor
tunities to test inventions and adopt new models.
To this same end also the introduction of gunpowder
and cannons into warfare contributed ; for now it was
no longer needful to fight hand to hand, since ships
could be defeated at a distance. That gunpowder was
known to the Chinese thousands of years ago, is certain ;
that it was used by the Egyptians and Greeks is sur
mised, but it was not until about 1340 that records
show equipments of cannons of brass and iron in
estimates for ships, and of hand-guns for soldiers.
Some of these old ship-cannon had from two to five
chambers or barrels, and were covered with orna
ments. Bows and arrows, cross-bows and hurling-
engines remained, nevertheless, many years in com
pany with the guns, even down to the time of
Henry VIII.
From the fourteenth century, progress was rapid

96

OLD OCEAN.

towards the rigging of ships as we now see them, of
rather as they were forty years ago when sailing ves
sels were -at the height of their prosperity, before
steamers came to do away with sails, as sails had
outstripped the old galleys.

CAT-BOAT. FISHING SCHOONER.
i, Main-sail. Sails: i, Flying jib. *, Jib. 3. Fore-sail.
4, Stay-sail. 5, Gaff top-sail. 6, Main-sail.
The rigging of sailing vessels now is divided into
" standing " and " running " rigging ; the former in
cludes the stays to the masts, now generally made of
wire, the shrouds, and such other rope-work as is not
adjustable. A vessel looks like a skeleton when
" stripped " of all the mass of ropes, lines, halliards,

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 97
sheets and tackle which seem such a tangled maze
to a landsman's eye, but are so clear and handy to the
" able seaman." The sails, too, can be divided into
two classes : first, those attached to a boom and gaff,
or to a stay ; and, second, those spread between
yards which are swung across the mast, and are
known as " square " sails. All the variations in
shape — except the lugger sail of New Orleans — in
this country can be counted in one or the other of
these classes.
The styles of rigs to be seen in American waters
are not many, and are easily described — at least so
that you can recognize them and call them by their
right names. Let us begin with the simplest :
A sloop has one mast and a main-sail,* and one or
more jibs ; there may also be a gaff top-sail.
A cat-boat is a kind of single-masted boat which
has no bowsprit, but has its mast stepped in the
extreme prow, and only a main-sail. There is a kind
of sloop-sail called a leg-o'-mutton, which is pointed
at the top, has no gaff, and is seen most often in the

* I must refer you to the dictionary for definitions of these sails, if you
don't know them now.

98 OLD OCEAN.
Connecticut sharpies, where there are often two masts
rigged this way.
Of two-masted rigs, the oldest is the brig, which
has square sails on both masts, just like the main and
mizzen masts of a full-rigged ship, to be described in
the next paragraph. Then there is the brigantine, a
slight modification of the brig, and the hermaphrodite
brig, which has schooner-rig on the main-mast and
square-rig on the fore-mast. This will explain itself
when you learn what a schooner is. The schooner is
a purely American invention, and one of the greatest
of all Yankee notions. It is two-masted, and the
sails are alike on both, — a big squarish canvas
stretched between a boom below and a gaff above,
and between the gaff and the top-mast is a triangular
canvas called a gaff top-sail ; the bowsprit supports
one, two or three jibs. Sometimes on the foretop-
mast is placed a square sail, which makes the vessel
a top-sail schooner. Now they are building many
three-masted schooners, but three-masted vessels are
generally rigged as barks (or barques) or as ships ;
or with square sails forward, and called barkentines ;
for, though we have come to speak of any large

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 99
vessel as a " ship," yet in nautical and proper lan
guage a ship is a vessel rigged in a particular way,
and it is nothing else.
Masts have their proper names : the highest is in
the middle of the vessel, and is called the main-mast ;
the next tallest is nearer the prow, and is the fore
mast ; the third is in the stern, and named mizzen-mast.
The sails and rigging take their names from the masts
to which they belong, as, for example, main shrouds,
mizzen shrouds, fore shrouds, mizzen-royal main-top
sail-yard, foretop-gallant-staysail, and so on. The
three masts, bowsprit, yards and stays of a full-rigged
ship are capable of spreading an enormous breadth
of canvas — thousands of square yards; yet in the
trade-winds vessels sometimes go week after week
without touching a single thread night or day. All
of the sails upon the masts are square, and take their
names from the sections of the mast opposite which
they hang. Counting from the deck to the truck, or
tiptop of the mast, these sails are as follows : On the
main-mast, main-sail, top-sail (generally in two parts),
top-gallant-royal and sky-sail. On the mizzen-mast
are mizzen-sail, mizzen-topsail, mizzen-top-gallant,

100 OLD OCEAN.
mizzen-royal ; on the fore-mast, fore-sail, foretop-sail,
foretop-gallant, fore-royal. The bowsprit sails are the
foretop-mast, stay-sail, jib, flying jib and outer jib. Be
hind the mizzen-mast is a schooner-like sail called a
spanker ; and each of the stays running diagonally
from mast to mast bears a triangular sail known by
the name of the particular stay on which it hangs, as
main-topsail stay-sail, and so on — six in all. In ad
dition to all this, a little sail is sometimes set above
the sky-sail and royals, and another under the bow
sprit, while out beyond the ends of the yards are
extended light additional yards carrying studding-
sails. There may then be twenty-eight sails set at
once on a full-rigged ship, besides the studd in '-sails.
Rig the fore-mast of a three-masted vessel with square
sails, and the main and mizzen masts with schooner
sails, and you have a bark. A frigate is a ship made
for war, and intended to be handled with quickness.
But the tendency is more and more toward giving
up this elaborate arrangement of lofty square sails,
and substituting three-masted schooners. This is
due to the fact that the schooner-style will sail closer
to the wind, gives as much force in proportion as the

SHIPS AND THEIR RIGGING. 101
ship-style, while it is far less expensive to build, and
more quickly and easily managed, not requiring
nearly as many men, and therefore being cheaper to
run as well as to set up. The schooner has worked
its way, by proving its merit, well to the front in the
estimation of seamen of all nations ; which is why I
have called it one of the greatest of Yankee notions.

VI.— WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES.
* I "'HE ancient mode of fighting has been tolJ
-*- in the last chapter ; but I did not make it plain
that all those old armaments were furnished as required
by the various ports of a kingdom to which the ships
afterwards returned, and were given back to their
owners. This system was found so inconvenient that
kings gradually came to build ships of their own,
and to keep them at public expense ready at all
times for war. In England, Henry VIII. was the
first monarch to adopt this plan, and his first ship,
laying the foundation of the Royal navy, was the
Great Harry, built in 1488. For a whole century
after that, England was almost continually at war on
the seas with the French and Spaniards. Towards
the last of this time, however, Queen Elizabeth
strengthened and organized her navy very greatly,
102

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 103
so that she was ready for the first important
event in English naval history — the repulse of the
Spanish armada.
This armada was a fleet of 132 large ships and
many small vessels, mounting altogether over 3000
pieces of cannon. It carried 8776 seamen, over
2000 slaves to row in the galleys, and nearly 22,000
soldiers. In comparison to this, England could
oppose only a miserably small fleet ; and the news of
the Spanish advance spread fright throughout Great
Britain, and also the greatest excitement, so that,
finally ninety vessels were gathered under command
of Charles Howard, and cruised in the mouth of the
Channel. His sub-commanders were all men whose
names are famous as explorers — Sir Francis Drake,
Sir John Hawkins and Sir Martin Frobisher. At
the beginning of June the huge armada left Spain
with pompous rejoicing ; but almost at once a storm
scattered it, and drove it into various ports very much
crestfallen. This gave the English a chance to com
plete their outfit, for it was seven weeks before the
armada again put to sea, and after much bad
weather, appeared off Plymouth " like so many float-

104 OLD OCEAN.
ing castles." Admiral Howard let them go by, and
then sailed upon their rear. The winds were variable,
storms and calms succeeded one another, and gene
rally only portions of the fleets were engaged at any
one time. Though so much smaller and weaker
than the Spanish ships, the English vessels sailed
better — poorly enough at best ! — were more
nimble, and could shoot squarely into the foreign
hulls, while the Spanish gun-decks were so high that
most of their cannon-balls went harmlessly over the
low-lying Englishmen. Thus for a week the two
fleets were backing and filling in almost constant
fight, which gave opportunities for wonderful feats of
single-handed courage. Then the shattered armada,
shorn of its pride, mourning a loss of forty large ships
and 10,000 men, crept back to Spain. This surpris
ing victory was followed by many expeditions against
the Spanish coast and seizures of rich Spanish vessels.
At this time England demanded that every vessel
sailing the seas should strike its flag in the presence
of a British man-of-war, in token of submission.
This was the cause of many small fights, and began,
in 1604, the great war with the Dutch, which lasted

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 1 05
for fifty years, and was followed by a long series of
battles with almost all the Mediterranean ports, and
afterwards with Spain and her American islands.
This, again, was hardly over when war came on with
the French, which lasted clear through Queen Anne's
reign, and gives a flavor to so many novels written
about that interesting time. These long constant wars,
and the incessant danger from privateers, which were
private war-vessels permitted to be equipped to range
for prizes, but not owned by the government, taught all
the European nations many lessons in sailing and
sea-fighting, so that they were a very well-built lot of
ships and fully trained crews on both sides that went
into the famous battle of Gibraltar in July, 1704.
The Dutch and English were allies then against
the French, who held the fortress not so impregnable
as now. A heavy bombardment and assault in boats
captured the rock ; but the matter was only half done,
for there immediately appeared in the offing a large
French fleet, which was defeated only after terrible
loss of life. Ever since then England has maintained
and continually strengthened this great rock, which
commands the entrance to the Mediterranean.

toS OLD OCEAN.
Though peace with France had been declared in
174S, war on the seas soon began again, and Spain
also became an object of attack, until in 1762
Havana was captured by a British squadron, and a
peace forced upon France and Spain by which Eng
land gained possession in America of all Canada, all
of the Southern part of the United States east of
the Mississippi, Florida, and several of the West In
dian islands, with many possessions and privileges in
other quarters of the globe. No naval victories ever
bore more fruit than did these, or were followed by
a firmer time of peace.
A little later, however, came the American war of
the Revolution ; but the naval battles were few, and
well-known to most American boys. Who has not
heard of the exploits of Paul Jones, and of the help
which Rochambeau and other French admirals gave
us? The American navy was chiefly of that half-
piratical kind called privateers, however, and very
often came to grief.
In the midst of so many gallant exploits, and
battles of the greatest consequence, it is hard to pick
any in particular; but perhaps the most celebrated

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 107
naval encounter of the next few years was the battle
of the Nile, in which the great Nelson, who afterward
fell so gloriously at Trafalgar, commanded. A long
series of brilliant exploits had given Nelson's fame,
and the vigorous account of them he himself used to
write home helped his great popularity. In 1798 he was
a rear admiral, and was sent to the Mediterranean in
pursuit of a French fleet, which he finally cornered in
the bay of Alexandria at the mouth of the Nile. Nel
son had fifteen ships, thirteen of them "seventy- fours "
(that is, carrying seventy-four guns each), and one thou
sand and twenty-eight guns in all; to which were op
posed one thousand and ten guns carried by seventeen
ships, the largest of which, L 'Orient, carried one
hundred and twenty guns. This French fleet was
anchored in a bended line and pretty close together,
only a little way from shore, the huge L' Orient being
in the centre. Nelson advanced with his ships, and
caused each of them to take a position as close as
possible to its particular foe, and there to anchor.
This was late in the afternoon, and the sun set upon
the sight of those thirty-two monstrous ships fastened
by their anchors in close battle array and hidden in

108 OLD OCEAN.
the smoke and flame of their incessant broadsides.
One by one the masts went down, and the hulls were
shot to pieces, until before nine o'clock at night half
a dozen ships had surrendered to the English flag,
when the whole battle was suspended at a sight which
drew all the gunners from their grimy work and
crowded the riggings of friend and foe with eager
spectators. The great flagship of the French squad
ron, L' Orient, perhaps the largest man-of-war then
afloat, was on fire. Almost in a moment the flames
mounted her tarred rigging and- enveloped her mas
sive hull. Blazing with a fierceness no land structure
would show, the remnant of her almost destroyed
crew had hardly time to throw themselves into the
water or escape in boats, when her magazines explod
ed, and the magnificent vessel burst asunder into a
volcano of fire, to- be swallowed the next instant by
the black waves.
This over, the battle was resumed, and continued
all night. In the morning a few disabled vessels of
the French were able to sail away; but though
Nelson's fleet was too badly hurt to follow them, he
had actually lost no ship except the Bellerophon,

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. IO9
which was still able to float, while several French
vessels were sunken or burned and several others
captured. The English loss of life, too, was far less
than in the French fleet, where there was not a single
vessel whose captain was not either killed or wound
ed. Without one exception, say historians, this
victory of the Nile is the grandest on record. The
clearness and wisdom of the admiral's plans, the fine
seamanship of the captains, the great skill of the
gunners and the splendid courage of all the men,
remain unrivalled. Now our sea battles are fought in
a different way, and these old heroic but dreadfully
bloody conflicts are things of the past.
Perhaps, though, you will think more glorious the
great battle of Trafalgar on the 21st of October, 1805.
Lord Nelson had there his flagship Victory carry
ing one hundred guns, and thirty-one other ships,
mounting altogether no less than two thousand
three hundred cannon. The enemy in this case was
the combined fleet of France and Spain, and consisted
of thirty-three vessels having two thousand six hun
dred and twenty guns, so that in size and number of
vessels, and in amount of ordnance, the allies had

110 OLD OCEAN.
the advantage. At daylight on the 20th the French
fleet put to sea from the port of Cadiz ; but it was
not until the next morning that they approached the
British squadrons off Cape Trafalgar. Then the
wind was so light that it was high noon before
Nelson hoisted on his ship the signals which sent
that never-to-be-forgotten message, not only to the
sailors on the other ships, but to British mariners
everywhere for generations to come — " England expects
every man will do his duty I" Then the Royal Sov
ereign led the way straight into and through the
enemy's line, firing her broadsides right and left
as she passed between the Santa Aha and the
Fougueux. Thus the terrible struggle began. Dif
ficult to manage in the almost total calm which
always follows a naval battle, and is supposed to be
due to the shock of the air in the firing, the great
ships drifted near to one and another adversary in
turn, or became locked by some entanglement of
rigging in struggles so close at hand that the flame
of the guns burnt the woodwork of the opposite hull.
Ponderous balls went crashing through the oaken
walls, and showers of pain-dealing splinters flew to do

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. Ill
harm where the balls themselves had killed no one.
Masts were shot away and fell headlong in a maze
of rigging, or yards and heavy tackle crashed down
from aloft, while all the time the thundering of the
guns and the booming of broadsides rent the air and
deafened the scorched and blood-spattered gunners.
Nelson himself was shot by a musket-ball from the
rigging of a French vessel alongside, and was carried
below mortally wounded ; but he covered his face and
his star with a handkerchief, in order that his men
should not know that their commander had fallen.
Receiving reports of the battle from time to time
from Captain Hardy, he continued to give orders and
mourn his inactivity ; but at four o'clock he became
speechless, and in a few moments more was dead.
Of all the noble names of naval story none are
grander than Nelson's; and his last words ought to
be as famous as the resolve with which he began this
marvellous sea-fight : "I have done my duty — I
thank God for it ! "
Trafalgar was about the last of the great naval
battles in the old-fashioned full-rigged wooden ships
of war. Of course there was no end of hard fighting

112 OLD OCEAN.
in wooden line-of-battle ships and frigates after that
in all parts of the world ; but before many years
steam was introduced into the construction and man
agement of ships, and iron-plating began to be used.
This produced as great a change in the methods of
naval warfare as did the superseding of the old
galleys by well-rigged sailing craft.
The guns of the old ships of war, though so
numerous, were all of small size, the heaviest of them
being only twenty-fours and thirty-twos ; that is,
shooting round balls twenty-four or thirty-two pounds
in weight. The United States has lately cast some
smooth-bored cannon for land-defences, hurling a
solid round shot weighing nearly two thousand
pounds. These are the famous twenty-inch colum-
biads. Soon after Nelson's day, the wars in the Medi
terranean and in American waters, where forts had
to be bombarded and improved ships were met with,
guns of much larger calibre (that is, breadth of bore)
were made, and hurled their shot with so much
greater force that the oaken walls were no longer a
sufficient protection, and builders began to plate the

¦'•¦•/

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. 115
hulls of their vessels with sheets of iron, whence
came the name " ironclads." Next artillerymen
cut spiral grooves in the bore of their cannon, like
those in the barrel of a rifle, and fitted to them an
elongated conical projectile — the word ball won't
do for anything but a round shot, while projectile may
mean anything thrown. The advantage gained by
this rifling was, that a projectile (which goes straight
point foremost to its mark) is called upon to punch
a smaller hole than a ball of the same weight and
velocity, and therefore its force can be exerted more
powerfully. You can easily understand what I mean
if you take a round chunk of iron and try to drive it
into a board by a single blow of a hammer. You
will succeed very poorly ; but if you forge this piece
into a nail, one strong blow will send it well into the
plank. Pointed projectiles and rifled guns, then,
have taken the place almost entirely in ironclad ships
of war, of the old smooth-bores and round shot.
But with better knowledge of how to manufacture
and how to manage large ordnance, went a constant
growth in the size of guns, until now an ironclad's
armament is chiefly guns having bores ten or twelve

Il6 OLD OCEAN.
inches in diameter and carrying a projectile weight
three-quarters of a ton. Such cannon would knock
one of the old Victorys or Bellerophons into kind
ling wood in a few minutes ; while there are few
forts in the world — certainly not one in America —
that would not crumble under their fire between
breakfast and luncheon.
But as fast as the guns got bigger, the armor of
vessels became thicker and the number of guns, they
carried was reduced. Instead of the old three and
four deckers, standing as high out of the water as a
church, bristling with cannons' mouths, and covered
above by an enormous structure of spars and ropes
and canvas, we now see long shapeless vessels with
scarcely more beauty or shape about them than a
canal-boat, and with only a few sails. Instead of the
hundred guns there are only half a dozen, and in
place of the oaken bulwarks are walls of solid iron,
while the monster is driven to its position by deeply
hidden engines and submerged propellers instead of
working grandly into its place in the line by skilful
handling of top-sails. The old romantic, picturesque
glory of a sea-fight is gone ; a battle between two

WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES. I17
modern ironclads would be much like two volcanoes
firing jets of lava at each other, for all one could see.
But we can afford to lose the. romance, for the dread
ful carnage of the bloody decks is also a thing of the
past ; and unless some grand catastrophe occurs
which sends the whole huge ship to the bottom
before her crew can escape, the present loss of life
is small.
The most of the iron ships of war building by
England, Germany and Italy — which are the leading
nations in naval matters now — are turret ships. The
idea of a round tower of iron on deck from which
cannon should be fired, came out in our war of
the Rebellion, and produced the Monitor. Her
turret, however, went round on wheels, and the great
gun in it was carried along, so that instead of moving
and aiming the cannon, they wheeled and aimed the
turret. This plan has been abandoned, and the gun-
carriage is now moved within the turret, and fired
out of it as it would be out of the casement of a fort.
Of course the moving of these enormous gun-
carriages, and the handling of the heavy ammunition
in loading, is all done by steam machinery.

Il8 OLD OCEAN.
On the turret — sometimes a ship has two or three
— and the region amidships, where (as low in down the
hull as possible) the massive engines are placed, the
armor is the heaviest. It consists of great plates
of iron or steel moulded to the precise form of the
vessels, and bolted on to the frame. These plates
are as thick as possible ; but when more than twelve
inches in thickness is required, as is often the case,
a second layer must be placed over the first.
Lastly, the prow of the ironclad below the water-
line is extended out into a sharp knife or point of
steel called a ram. Driven by the enormous weight
of the ironclad in motion, nothing could stand a
blow from this ram, and the vessel struck by it is
sure to sink. Nothing, then, would be further from
the thoughts of a modern captain than to allow
his enemy to run into him, as used so often to be
done in the old frigate fighting.
A first-class ironclad costs from $2,000,000 to
$3,000,000.

VII.— ROBBERS OF THE SEAS.
A S the sea has furnished opportunities for so much
¦*- *• good — manly exertion, knowledge of the world,
acquaintance with people outside of one's own coun
try, and constant wealth — so it has given a chance
for bad men to pursue their villainy, and the guard
ing of shore-towns and merchant vessels has always
been a part of the usefulness and duty of a nation's
naval force.
As on land there are robbers and highwaymen, so
on the ocean robber-ships have always been lying in
wait for vessels loaded with treasure, and have landed
crews of marauders to make havoc with rich seaboard
provinces. Such robbers on the high seas were
termed pirates — so named from a Greek word mean
ing " one who attacks at sea " — and their crime was
visited by the old laws with the most torturing meth-
119

120 OLD OCEAN.
ods of death. They have existed from the earliest
records of commerce, and are by no means got rid
of yet ; but they were never more daring than when
the laws against them were severest.
The first pirates who figure in history with any
great fame were those who had taken possession of
some islands in the y£gean sea, and who made forage
upon the commercial vessels plying between the
western and middle parts of the Mediterranean, and
the rich cities of the Syrian coast and the Bosphorus.
You will remember that, when Julius Caesar was a
young man, and was making a voyage to the East
with a large number of soldiers and other persons,
he was set upon by pirates, captured and carried
away to an island where they had their homes and
warehouses. Life was held cheap in those days by kings and
subjects both ; it need not surprise us, then, to learn
that these Greek or Byzantine pirates were accus
tomed to kill all their prisoners as soon as they found
nothing more was to be gained from them. Their
usual plan was to tie them, two together, back to
back, and hurl them alive into the sea. Some they

ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 121
tortured in order to make them reveal further riches,
others they retained as material for a little amuse
ment called " walking the plank." Prisoners selected
for this pleasantry were treated with the most extraor
dinary politeness and given the best of fare for
several days, until they came to have the greatest
confidence in their captors, and think them very good
fellows after all. Then some fine afternoon a plank
would be pushed out across the bulwark, and, amid a
profusion of bows and compliments, the amazed
prisoners would be invited (and compelled) " to walk
home." The wretches thought it good fun to witness
the terror of the men, cheated with hopes, as they
fell from the end of the bobbing plank into the
raging waters.
Though the pirates who took Caesar did not know
who he was, they surmised from his purple robes
and large retinue that he was a person of distinction.
Caesar himself, the story says, did not seem to regard
the matter as anything more than a jolly adventure,
and joked the ruffians with threats of what he would
do to them when he got home — he would hang 'em
all, he told them. Meanwhile they treated him well,

122 OLD OCEAN.
hoping to get a large ransom, and he rather enjoyed
it, joining their games and amusing diem by his royal
airs and graces. Instead of a ransom, however, one
day a large squadron of Roman galleys appeared,
Caesar was rescued, and die pirates were hanged, sure
enough. The intricate channels, many harbors and rich
islands of that archipelago remained a hiding-place
of sea-robbers, however, and is so yet, though every
few years, from Caesar's time till now, the kings of
the surrounding countries have sent expeditions to
break them up. In the sixteenth century piracy in
that region was especially strong. The crews were
chiefly Turkish, but the great leaders were two
Roumanians, the brothers Hayraddin and Aruch Bar-
barossa (" Redbeard ").
Now, to understand what is coming, you must take
note that in the centre of the northern coast of Africa
lay the district of Algeria or Algiers, at first a sul
tanate of the Mohammedan Empire. When Spain
expelled the Moors, and pursued her victories across
the straits, however, Algeria fell under her rule, and
remained so until the death of King Ferdinand in

ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 125
1516. Then the Algerians sent an embassy to Aruch
Barbarossa, requesting him to aid them in driving out
the Spaniards, and promising a share in the spoils.
He eagerly accepted this proposition, seeing more in
it than his hosts had any idea of ; for the moment
the Spaniards had been beaten and expelled, Red-
beard murdered the prince he had come there to
help, seized upon the city and port for himself, and
made it headquarters for that system of desperate
piracy which became the dread of all Europe.
These robbers of the sea called themselves corsairs,
from an Italian word signifying a race ; and they
generally won, because they had the best and swiftest
vessels of that time. Their flag was jet black, and
their reputations became equally dark, so that even
yet to call a man as bad as a Barbary pirate is to
mean that he could not be much worse if he tried.
I have striven to get at the history or origin of the
black flag, but have been able to discover nothing
about it, except that from time out of memory a black
flag has been a sign of piracy. Flags or banners, or
something to serve their purpose, have always been
carried by armies. In the early days of Egypt and

126 OLD OCEAN.
Israel, Babylon and Tyre, and even down to the wars
of Rome, they were made of metal, and were called
standards. Each band, or tribe, or company of sol
diers from a single region followed its own device —
usually some image or animal — cut out of thin metal
and mounted on a staff. As tribes and armies grew
larger certain standards became prominent and lesser
ones disappeared. Thus the eagle was the device
of the Roman Emperors ; and the various eagles
which figure on the coats of arms and flags of Euro
pean states perpetuate the memory of the "victorious
standards " of the Caesars.
By and by metal pennons and banners all on one
side of the staff were used in place of the standards.
After this came cloth flags, and often these were
made of silk and were very gorgeous, particularly
those used on the old ships. The great flag under
which William the Conqueror sailed to the conquest
of England was exceedingly costly, having been
embroidered in intricate designs by titled ladies of
his realm and presented to him. After nations and
commerce began to take firm shape, governments
adopted national flags, and forbade private banners

ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 127
except on merchant vessels within certain limits.
Definite rules were made about the hoisting of flags
on ships, too, and they were arranged for signalling.
Nowadays a white flag, all over the world, means
truce or peace or surrender ; a red flag gives an
alarm, and used to be hoisted in shore-towns and on
beacons to inform the people inland that an enemy
was about to land and that they must hasten to the
coast to repel them. A black flag means "no quar
ter ; " that is, that all prisoners taken on both sides
will be killed. As this was the general rule among
pirates, and in fighting them, it came to stand for
piracy. Its only ornament was sometimes a skull
and crossbones.
Now let us go back to Barbarossa and his career.
Redbeard's first care was to fortify the city of
Algiers ; and he expended a great deal of money and
labor on the perfection of the harbor, compelling all
his prisoners and thousands of the citizens to work
as slaves on these defences.
Meanwhile his vessels were ranging the length
and breadth of the Mediterranean and cruising out
upon the Atlantic, intercepting merchant ships and

128 OLD OCEAN.
fighting with vessels of war. The Spanish colonies
in America, a few years later, began sending home
immense treasures dug in the silver and gold mines
of Peru and Mexico, and extorted from the natives,
or stolen from the temples of those unhappy coun
tries. These fleets of treasure-ships, though con
voyed by war-ships, were often attacked and cap
tured by the corsairs ; and whenever it happened
that the pirates were defeated, they would land upon
the nearest unprotected coast of Spain, France or
Italy, and burn and pillage some town in revenge.
How galling this was to all merchants and travellers
we can hardly understand in these days; but so
strong were the corsairs that the fleets and armies
of various governments, and even of the Pope, which
were sent against them could not gain their strong
hold or suppress their cruises, at least for more than
a short time. Not Algiers alone, but Tunis, Tripoli
and Morocco also harbored piratical vessels in
every port, and the rulers shared their spoils. This
lasted even down to the present century, and until
England got possession of Gibraltar, whereupon she
sent a large fleet to Algiers, shelled the city into

ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 129
pieces, burned all the pirate ships, forced them to
yield up all Christian slaves, and keep their cruisers
at home. That was the end of the corsairs ; but
there is many a small, sneaking imitation of a pirate
yet lurking round the grape and olive growing islands
of that sunny sea.
Turkish and Barbary pirates were not the only
ones. Though they did not go under that name,
the old Norwegian vikings and the rough Norman
barons were scarcely anything else in fact, as their
neighboring coasts could testify ; but this was away
back before modern affairs began. Then, when
America was discovered and the Spaniards and
French began to colonize the West Indies, and to
dig mines in the continents of South and Central
America, a new set of pirates sprang up, than which
the world has never seen worse. These were the
Freebooters and the Buccaneers.
As the archipelago east of Greece had sheltered
the hordes of the Turkish corsairs, so the many
islands, crooked channels, reefs hidden from all but
the local pilots, small harbors and abundant food of
the Antilles, made the West Indies the safest place

130 OLD OCEAN.
in the world for pirates to pursue their work. To
these new and wild regions, in the sixteenth century,
had flocked bad men and adventurers from all over
the world. When the wars and their chances of plun
der died out after the campaigns led by Cortez,
Pizarro, Balbao and the rest of the Spanish conquista-
dores, many ruffians seized upon vessels by force,
or stole them, and turned into robbers of the sea.
As a rule, they had farms and families on some
island, and only went freebooting a portion of the
year, at first. The large island of Hayti, or St.
Domingo, was then settled by colonists who were of
three distinct classes — farmers, hunters and cattle
men. The last class of men spent their time in the
wild interior of the island, capturing, herding or
killing wild cattle. They came to the settlements
only now and then to get supplies, and then re
turned to the wilderness for several months of
absence again. Finally, a war having arisen be
tween this and other islands, the trade of the cattle
men was destroyed, and large numbers of them
joined the Freebooters, who then became extremely
numerous and formidable ; and so largely was this

ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 131
due to their new friends that they lost their old
name, and were known by the name of the cattle-
hunters — Buccaneer.
St. Domingo became the headquarters of the
Buccaneers, but several small islands were also owned
and controlled by them. They were made up of
men of all nations, but were chiefly Spaniards, Dutch
and negroes. They were thousands in number, pos
sessed large fleets of ships and boats, well-armed,
and had their regular chief and under-officers. The
most noted, perhaps, of these chiefs was Morgan,
who was an Englishman.
They had two methods of work. One was to
patrol the sea in the track of vessels bound to and
from Europe and Brazil or Spanish America, and
seize them. Very often the crews were willing, or
were compelled, to join the pirates ; but sometimes
all were killed or carried into slavery. Merchant-
ships, therefore, all went heavily armed in those
waters, and many were the bloody battles fought.
This work, however, employed only a portion of
the Buccaneers, and was too uncertain a means of
wealth to suit them. They would, therefore, equip a

132 OLD OCEAN.
great fleet, enlist men under certain strict rules as
to sharing the spoils, and sail away to pillage some
coast. There was hardly an island in the West
Indies from which, in this way, they did not extort
immense sums of money under threat of destruction
of the people. The mainland also suffered from
the marauders. Great cities, like Cartagena in
Venezuela, Panama on the Isthmus, Merida in Yuca
tan, and Havana, Cuba, were attacked by armies
of Buccaneers numbering tens of thousands of men.
Sometimes their fortifications held good and the
enemy was beaten back ; but sooner or later all
these cities, and others, smaller, were captured,
burned or partially burned, and robbed of everything
valuable that they contained.
"Why did the citizens not hide their wealth?"
They did; but the Buccaneers put to the most
dreadful tortures men, women, children, slaves — ev
erybody — until they would tell where their money and
jewels were buried. It is sickening to read of the
crimes and suffering committed by these wickedest
of men. For years and years they were the terror of
the whole Caribbean region. Nor did their enormous

ROBBERS OF THE SEAS. 133
riches do them a particle of real good, for they wasted
it all, the moment they got home, in wild rioting, so
that the spoils earned by months of hardship, and
exposure, and wounds, and danger of death, would
be spent in a week of carousing. Before the end of
the century, however, the combined naval forces of
all the nations interested in the commerce of the new
world broke the power of the Buccaneers, and their
depredations ceased. Their story is one of the wild
est, most romantic, but most terrible pictures in the
history of the world.
For the same reason as in the case of the corsairs
and the Buccaneers, the East Indies have always been
infested with pirates, whose light, swift vessels could
run in and out of intricate channels among the dan
gerous coral reefs, where government cruisers dare
not follow, while the people on shore sympathized
more with the pirates than with the police.
The East Indian sea-robbers, however, are, as a
rule, natives of that region — Malays, Bornevans,
Dyaks and Chinese, with many half-savages of the
South Sea islands. This is more like a continuance
of savage resistance to civilization than real piracy,

134 OLD OCEAN.
since the pirates of the Atlantic are civilized sailors
in mutiny against their own people and national com
merce. The result is just as bad, though, for these
East Indians are as bloodthirsty and cruel as can be,
and if they do not kill their victims, or save them for
some cannibal feast (as would probably happen in
the New Hebrides and some other islands), they con
demn them to a life of frightful misery. In these
days of improved vessels and sea-craft, however,
piracy, even in Malaya, is weak. Our consuls and
government agents watch suspicious vessels ; our tel
egraph warns the naval authorities in a moment;
our steam-cruisers outspeed the swiftest craft of the
black flag; our rifled guns silence their cheap artil
lery, and our coast surveys furnish maps so accurate
that the pirate no longer holds the secret of channels
and harbors where he can safely retreat. If old
Redbeard should come back to life and try to be
king of the seas as he rejoiced to be a couple of
centuries ago, his pride would be humbled in less
than a fortnight, and he would gladly return to his
grave and his ancient glory.

VIII.— THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA.
A MERCHANT is a man who buys and sells
goods. When these goods are produced or
manufactured within the country where they are sold,
we call the buying and selling " domestic trade."
When they grow or are made by one country and
sold to another, we call it ''commerce." Commerce,
then, is trade or buying and selling between nations.
Some countries produce certain things in so great
abundance that they are of little or no account there,
though very valuable in some other part of the
world which lacks them. This " other part," how
ever, will be sure to possess in plenty something the
first region wants. An exchange of these commodi
ties constitutes commerce, which may be done over
land, as has been the method by camel-trains in Asia
'35

136 OLD OCEAN.
for unnumbered centuries, but in our age is chiefly
carried on by water.
The original practise in these international trades
was simple barter, that is, an exchange of a quantity
of my cargo for a quantity of yours — a chest of tea
for an equal-sized bale of furs, as used to be done
between Russians and Chinese at the Thibetan
border. Now we have money in which we estimate
the value of this thing and that, independent of its
bulk, and so sell what we have for cash, and buy
what we want with the money. The merchants of
the sea, however, have kept nearer the old method
than those on land ; and on wild coasts even now
often make up their cargoes by exchange with the
natives instead of by purchasing with money, as they
would in civilized ports. This occurs most fre
quently among the South Sea Islands and in South
Africa. The history of shipping which you have already
read in a previous chapter, will also answer as a
history of early commerce. It began with the
Egyptians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and was
confined to the Mediterranean until quite modern

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 137
times. Later, in the days of the Roman Empire, the
trading-ships were as important to them as their
soldiers ; for nearly every free man was in the army,
and the slaves made poor farmers. A large part of
the grain, then, to supply the wants of the people
had to be brought by water from Egypt, which was
pretty sure to have "corn," as the Bible calls it,
when the rest of the world was suffering from short
crops. Large fleets of grain-ships, convoyed by
armed vessels, were continually passing between the
Nile and the Tiber, and so many were the risks they
ran of wreck or capture, that the arrival of a flotilla
with its precious freight of food was always a cause
of rejoicing, at any rate among the poor people of
the great city.
With that grand awakening of interest in education
and industry and discovery in the fourteenth century,
the city of Venice took the lead in power, and her
merchants were the most enterprising and wealthy.
It was the needs of commerce which urged the
explorations that marked the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries, for by this time Venice had her banks —
the first in the world — and her exchange on the

I38 OLD OCEAN.
famous Rialto bridge; Genoa was in close rivalry;
Spain was mining immense quantities of gold and
silver in South America ; and England was coming
to the front as a maritime power. The trade with
Cathay — as all India, China, and the Oriental
Islands were called collectively — was chiefly by
caravans across the Persian deserts, and Spain,
England and Holland had small shares in it, since
the only water-route known was through the Medi
terranean and Red Seas, where, between the extor
tionate charges and stealings of the Arabs, who
carried the cargoes from vessel to vessel across the
Isthmus of Suez, and the captures by Algerine
pirates, there was little chance for profit left to the
shippers. To western Europe, then, Vasco de Gama's dis
covery of the route around the Cape of Good Hope was
a long advantage, and England and Holland at least
were quick to seize it. The great " East India com
panies '' of the Dutch and English were formed by a
group of powerful merchants in London and in
Amsterdam, who were given vast privileges by
the government in respect to trading in the East.

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 139
They equipped fleets of merchant and war vessels,
established forts, carried on small wars along the
Oriental coasts, and were really little kingdoms
within kingdoms, because of their wide monopoly
and enormous wealth. The history of the operations
of these companies is full of curious interest. Their
captains and supercargoes — as the men in charge of
the cargo and business matters of a merchant-vessel
are called — went into utterly unknown waters, and
penetrated regions of land where Europeans had
never been before. They brought home new facts,
and specimens of human industry or natural products
entirely novel. They thus enlarged the knowledge
of Europe about the people and animals and plants
and scenery of the East, and by taking possession of
sea-ports and islands for the purposes of trade,
added broad realms to their home kingdoms. Many
volumes have been written in relation to the dis
coveries, adventures and great transactions of the
agents of the East India companies, which were the
forerunners of all our present trade with India,
China and the South Pacific.
But those were slow and costly times — though full

140 OLD OCEAN.
of a romance impossible now — compared with the
present. Then a voyage around the world occupied
three years, and to go from London to Calcutta and
back took from New Year's to Christmas under the
most favorable circumstances. Now our steamers
make it in less than as many days as an East India-
man would have required weeks. Another important
change, too, has gradually come about. Formerly,
the vessels were owned almost entirely by the mer
chants themselves, or by a company of them. They
paid all her expenses, and put into her a cargo of
their own wares. They would send to China, for
instance, cotton goods, household furniture, hatchets,
tools, cutlery and other hardware, farming imple
ments and fancy goods of all sorts. In return the
vessel would bring silks, tea and porcelain, which
would go into the owners' warehouses and be sold
in their own shops. The shipper and importer and
merchant were all one.
Now this is changed. The importers and mer
chants of London, Paris and New York are not often
those who own vessels and bring their own goods.
Instead of this they have agents who live permanently

TAKING PILOT IN ROUGH WEATHER; AND BOSTON HARBOR.

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 143
in each of the foreign ports where they buy the goods
they want, and they hire vessels to bring them home.
By the old way, the nation which had anything to sell
carried it to the nation that would buy it, and brought
back the best pay it could get ; now the merchants
go to various parts of the world, buy their cargoes
and order them sent home in substantially the same
way as you go a-shopping in town.
This has brought out a new department of sea-
labor, unknown, as a class, a century ago — the busi
ness of carrying goods which the owners of the ves
sel have no property in. In Boston, New York, San
Francisco, and all other sea-board cities of this and
other countries, the great majority of the vessels are
owned, not by the merchants of the city, but by
" transportation companies," who agree to carry car
goes at a certain rate.
In most cases these vessels run back and forth only
between certain ports, and so constitute "lines," such
as those between Baltimore and Rio de Janeiro.
Nearly all the steamships are thus settled in their
voyages, and depart and arrive with regularity once or
twice a week, a fortnight, or a month. The merchant

144 OLD OCEAN.
or broker, then, who wishes to ship his goods to any
particular port, knows what vessel goes there regu
larly and when she will sail ; or if there is more than
one line, he chooses between them carefully as to
safety, speed and cheapness. There is thus sharp
competition between these ocean-carriers as to which
shall show the greatest advantages and transport the
most cheaply, and this is to the benefit of the public.
In addition to these there are many vessels that be
long to no regular lines. Many of them carry large
numbers of passengers also, in the most comfortable
way — another modern idea. For people travel far
more now than they were wont to do in the times of
"good Queen Bess," oreven of our own grandfathers.
All this rivalry and effort in commerce (with gen
erous aid from scientific men and governments) have
taught navigators much about the ocean, its winds,
currents, depths and shallows, coasts and harbors. The
very shortest and safest courses are plotted upon
charts to every part of the world, and all the ships
passing to and fro between the greatest ports sail on
nearly the same courses, so that we have come to
know these well-followed though invisible tracks as

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 1 45
" ocean highways." A short sketch of some of these
tracks will show you how they run.
The steamship lines between New York and Great
Britain do not steer straight across the Atlantic, but
on their way to this country keep well to the north
ward so as to get to the west of the Gulf Stream, and
into the favorable current flowing south from Baffin's
Bay ; then they skirt Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and
Cape Cod. Going over, however, the steamers (and
sailing-vessels too) keep much further south, and
work along with the Gulf Stream as far as they can.
From Europe to South America, or through the
Straits of Magellan on their way to the South Sea
islands or Australia (though this route is not often
taken), or to the Pacific coast of the Americas, vessels
keep close down the African coast, and then steer
straight ahead from Guinea to Brazil and on down
the coast. (Put a map before you and you will under
stand these courses better.) Sailing-vessels to Eu
rope or the United States from Cape Horn, however,
would swing far out into the South Atlantic to avoid
heading against the southward coast-current and to
get the benefit of the southeast trade-wind and the

146 OLD OCEAN.
equatorial currents. From New York to the Cape of
Good Hope or back, the track is nearly straight.
In the Pacific, the steamer route in summer from
San Francisco might be five thousand miles as straight
as a parallel of latitude, only that here, as also
between New York and Liverpool, navigators adopt
what is called " great-circle sailing." This consists
in not heading straight for the port desired, but
going to it in a curve, by which distance is saved, be
cause the rotundity of the globe is avoided. This
may be hard for you to understand, because I cannot
stop to explain it here fully, but must refer you to
the library.
Sailing-vessels, however, curve so far north in com
ing from Japan or China to America, and so far to
the south going out from San Francisco, in order to
get into prevailing winds and currents favorable to
them, that in mid-ocean it is about one thousand
miles north and south between ships outward bound
and those coming home. Between California and
Honolulu a steamer takes a bee-line, but sailing-ves
sels find it best to make detours. In summer this
amounts to steering straight northward until under

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 1 47
latitude forty degrees, before turning eastward, mak
ing more than a right angle to go around.
I have said that the finding of a sea-route to the
East around the Cape of Good Hope was a great boon
to Western Europe and advanced commerce. It re
mained so until within the last fifty years. Lately,
the Corsairs being out of the way, and safety guaran
teed in Egypt, merchants and sailors both began to
wish they had a shorter route between England and
India. Then, with immense labor and sacrifice, the
canal was cut across the Isthmus of Suez, and com
merce returned to its ancient channel through the
Red Sea, saving thousands of miles of weary distance
and much time in each voyage.
From the end of the Red Sea at Aden, the tracks
of steamers both ways are straight cuts to Bombay
and Ceylon, and thence straight up to Calcutta,
across to Singapore or down to Australia. Except
East African coast lines, no steamers go around the
Cape of Good Hope from England, excepting one
line to South Australia, which steers straight east
ward all the way from Cape Town to Adelaide.
But the Indian Ocean is so situated under the

148 OLD OCEAN.
equator, is so filled with " prevailing " winds and
currents and counter-currents, that sailing-vessels
must take very roundabout courses, and can by no
means steer the same track at all seasons of the year.
I fear you have voted these details dull ; but if you
will follow them out on an atlas map which marks the
directions of the trade-winds and the ocean currents,
you will gather a great deal of interest from the sug
gestions and information you will get.
You can by no means, however, rank all sea-faring
men as either in the naval or the merchant service.
There are other classes of industries carried on in
vessels, the fishing, for instance, which employs
thousand of men in the United States, and an
equally large proportion of the citizens of other mari
time nations. Then there are the pilots, the yachts
men, the whalers and sealers, the coast-guard, the
life-saving and lighthouse service, the wreckers,
oystermen, and others who get their living along the
coast ; besides the ship-builders, riggers, yard-labor
ers and iron-workers on shore, the lightermen, 'long
shoremen and warehouse hands, the brokers and
agents, supercargoes and clerks, whose daily bread

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 1 49
all comes directly from being busy with salt-water
affairs. Add these all together, and you will find a
surprisingly large number of men and families thus
supported. For the first-mentioned of these classes, pilots,
space is left me for a few words in this chapter. A
pilot is a man who has made himself thoroughly
acquainted with certain waters where navigation is
dangerous, and who directs vessels in safety through
those bad places. A ship-captain may understand
perfectly the proper course from one continent to
another and how to handle his vessel in the open
sea, but he is not expected to know every rock and
sand-bar crouching under the treacherous waves, and
all the twistings and obstructions of the narrow en
trance into a foreign harbor. Indeed, the naval regu
lations will not permit captains to act, though they
may think they know the channel, since if an accident
happens when there was no pilot on board, the insur
ance money will not be paid.
Pilots, then, are important men, and they know it
so well that they charge very high prices for their ser
vices (generally rated according to the draft of the

ISO OLD OCEAN.
vessel), and admit few young men to their ranks to
be trained.
Their method of work is very exciting. A dozen or
so together will form the crew of a trim, staunch
schooner, provisioned for a fortnight or more, which
can outsail anything but a racing yacht, and is built
to ride safely through the highest seas. You will
now and then see one of these beautiful little vessels
sailing up the quiet harbor, threading her way through
the black steamers and sputtering tug-boats and
great ships, as a shy and graceful girl walks among
the guests at a lawn party, and you know from its air
as well as the big number on its white mainsail that it
is a pilot boat.
But these fine schooners and the brave men they
carry are rarely in port. Their time is spent far in
the offing of the harbor, cruising back and forth
in wait for incoming ships, and the New York pilots
often go two and three hundred miles out to
sea. There are other pilot-boats waiting also,
and the lookout at the reeling mast-head must
keep the very keenest watch upon the horizon.
Suddenly he catches sight of a white speck

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 15 1
which his practised eye tells him are a ship's top
gallants, or a blur upon the sky that advertises a
steamer's approach. The schooner's head is instantly
turned toward it, and all the canvas is crowded on
that she will bear, for away off at the right a second
pilot boat, well down, is also seen to be aiming at
the same prize, and trying hard to win. The man
whose turn it is to go on duty, hurries below and
packs the little valise which holds the few things he
wants to take home, and the crew's letters ; if it is a
steamer which is lying there with slowly turning
wheels and signals flying, he shaves himself and puts
on a clean white shirt ; but a common sailing-vessel
is not so honored.
The storm may be howling in the full force of
winter's fury, and the waves "running mountains
high," as we say, but the pilot must get aboard by
some means. It takes rough weather to make it
impossible for his mates to launch their yawl and
row him to where he can clamber up the stranger's
side with the aid of a friendly rope's-end. But often
this is out of the question. Then a "whip" is rigged
beyond the end of a lee-yard arm, carrying a rope

152 OLD OCEAN.
drove through a snatch-block, and having a bowline
at its end. The steamer slows her engines, or the
ship heaves to, and the pilot-schooner, under perfect
control, runs up under the lee of the big ship, as
near as she dares in the gale. Then, just at the
right instant, a man on the ship's yard hurls the
rope, it is caught by the schooner, the pilot slips
one leg through the bowline-noose, and a second
afterward the schooner has swept on and he is being
hoisted up to the yard-arm, but generally not in
time to save himself a good ducking in the combing
of some big roller.
Going on shipboard in this fashion is not favorable
to an imposing effect ; nevertheless, the pilot is wel
comed by officers and seamen and passengers, who
all admire his courage and trust his skill.
Now the pilot is master — stands ahead of the
captain even — and his orders are absolute law. He
inspects the vessel to form his opinion of how she
will behave, and then goes to the wheel or stands
where best he can give his orders to the steersman
and to the men in the fore-chains who are heaving
the lead. He must never abandon his post, he must

THE MERCHANTS OF THE SEA. 153
never lose his control of the ship, or make a mistake
as to its position in respect to the lee-shore, or fail
to be equal to every emergency. If it is too dark
and foggy and stormy to see, he must feel ; and if he
cannot do this he must have the faculty of going
right by intuition. To fail is to lose his reputation
if not his life. This is what is expected of a pilot,
and this is what they actually do in a hundred cases,
the full details of any one of which would make a
long and thrilling tale of adventurous fighting for
life.

IX.— THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP.
OEAMEN, however skilful, and pilots, though
v""'^ never so knowing, cannot escape the incessant
danger which attends a seafaring life. Experience
in reading the signs of the ocean and of the skies,
surveyors' charts of coasts and harbors, added to the
appliances of powerful modern machinery, have less
ened the perils, it is true, since the old times ; yet
even now ships sail proudly out of sunny havens,
their topsails are watched by loving eyes till they disap
pear at sunset, and are never seen again. On a calm
day in 1782 the great hundred-gun line-of-battle-ship
Royal George sank unwarned into the harbor of Spit-
head, carrying down almost a thousand souls ; two
years ago the Atalanta, one of the finest of England's
modern steam iron-clads, foundered at sea, and not a
man survived, Each of these vessels was perhaps

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. I 55
the best of its kind in the world. Every few years
an extraordinary gale will prove the ruin of whole
fleets in a single day, and each week, wrecks happen
upon the shores of every continent, and sailors lose
their lives in the most terrible manner. Old Neptune
is still a match for us, when he asserts himself.
Nevertheless we must go upon the restless waters, and
must risk battle with their power; therefore every
effort has been made by men on land to be of aid to
their brethren at sea — whose perils grow greater as
they approach the coast — by erecting lights to guide
them to the entrance of every harbor, by marking
the channels so that hidden rocks and shallows may
be avoided, and by contrivances to save life and
property when the fury of the gale renders seaman
ship useless, and the noble ship is cast away in the
thundering surf of some wild shore.
Ever since men began to go to sea, lights have
been placed on shore to guide them to a landing-
place ; but in early times these were nothing more
than fires on headlands. Three hundred years before
Christ, however, there was built, on an island at Alex
andria, a pyramid over four hundred feet in height, on

156 OLD OCEAN.
top of which a great fire was kept burning, which, we
are told, was visible to the corn-ships going to Egypt
when forty-one miles away on the Mediterranean.
This pyramid was called the Pharos, and to-day the
French name for a lighthouse is phare, and the Span
ish/aw. The rocky coasts on both sides of the Brit
ish Channel centuries ago showed beacon-fires on
very dark nights. These were generally tar-barrels,
which would burn brightly in a high wind when a fire
of sticks would be blown away. And they were gen
erally lighted for the benefit of the fishermen, by their
wives, without any authority from government. It
was an easy matter to imitate such beacons, and bad
men would often erect false lights, steering by
which a ship would come crashing to sure destruction
at the foot of the crags which thrust their cruel edges
through the surf. When the ship went to pieces, her
goods coming ashore would be seized and sold by
the wreckers, as these wicked people were called.
Many a fearful tradition has come down of the doings
of wreckers, not only in England and Spain, but in
America and in the East. One of the tricks of the
West Indian pirates, when they saw a ship approach-

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 157
ing their island in the evening, was to hang a lantern
upon a horse's neck, and let him graze, well hobbled,
along the beach. This would appear like the rocking
of a lantern on a vessel at rest ; and, deceived by the
hope of a safe anchorage, the stranger would only
discover how he had been cheated when his keel
struck the sand-bars and the pirates had begun their
villanous attack.
Though scaffoldings and towers of wood, iron and
stone were built here and there at especially danger
ous points by governments long before the beginning
of the last century, they were lighted by fires of wood
or coal up to 1760, when Smeaton introduced wax
candles at Eddystone. The Eddystone shoals were
a group of reefs exceedingly dangerous, because they
were almost invisible, and lay precisely in the track
of ships bound up or down the English Channel.
Two hundred years ago a lighthouse of wood and
iron trestle-work was built there by Sir Henry Win-
stanley, and stood so well that he boasted, like King
Canute, that the sea had not strength enough to throw
it down. Soon after, he went out with a company of
men to make repairs, when one of the worst gales in

158 OLD OCEAN.
history arose, and the morning afterward not a trace
of the structure remained. Another wooden frame
took its place for several years, but was burned.
Then the engineer Smeaton proposed to build a
tower of stone, which should take the shape of a
massive tree-trunk, with swelling base, like roots,
founded upon a level floor cut in the rock of the
reef. This stands to-day, rivalling its magnificent
neighbor on the Biscay shore opposite, the light
house of Carduan, which was built to support a bon
fire of oak, but has remained to be lighted succes
sively by oil-lamps, by gas-burners, and finally by
electricity. Thus, everywhere, and in all latitudes,
the beacons and wooden towers and huge pyramids
of long ago have given place to slender spires of solid
masonry, holding powerful signals perhaps hundreds
of feet above the waves, and visible as far as the
curve of the earth's surface will permit. Yet in place
of the sturdy bonfire of oak, or the huge iron cage
full of coals, there is only a single lamp, whose rays
are gathered by deep reflectors into a compact bundle
of unwasted rays, and doubled and redoubled by
rows of magnifying lenses until they can dart to the

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 159
furthest horizon in a strong beam of steady light.
No longer does the mariner trust to his wife to kindle
the tar-barrel to guide him home. He knows that
nowhere is his government more watchful of its sub
jects than in its lighthouse service, and that he may
trust to having that bright signal to welcome him in
the darkness, as well as he can trust his own eyes to
see it. The United States alone expends $2,000,000
annually in looking after her lighthouses, lightships
and buoys.
Indeed, these beacons have become so thickly
planted that it has been found necessary to distin
guish between them in order to avoid mistaking
one for another. Thus some of them are simply
fixed white lights ; some are white and revolve — the
whole lantern on the summit of the tower being
turned on wheels by machinery, and the flame disap
pears for a longer or shorter time ; while others are
white " flash " lights, glancing only for an instant, and
then lost for a few seconds, or giving a long wink and
then a short one with a space of darkness between.
Some lighthouses show a steady red light, others
alternate red and white. By these colors and vary-

160 OLD OCEAN.
ing periods of appearance and disappearance (pub
lished by the government in a book called the Coast
Pilot ) navigators know which light they are looking
at when several are in sight, as is often the case. The
beautiful machinery by which the light is produced,
the lenses are arranged and the revolution of the lan
tern effected, I cannot describe here. If you can get
an opportunity to climb into the top of a lighthouse
and see it all, you will greatly enjoy it ; and if you can
be there when a storm is raging, you will never forget
the scene.
On some especially dangerous — because hidden —
reefs or bars, like the shoals off Nantucket, or the
extreme point of Sandy Hook, it is out of the ques
tion or bad policy to erect a lighthouse. Here its
place is taken by anchoring a stout vessel, built to
withstand the roughest weather, and arranged to carry
one or two very large lanterns at its mast-heads.
These are called " lightships," and they are manned
by a large crew of keepers who have a very monoto
nous time of it, confined in their rolling and pitching
home with almost nothing to do. It is never a difficult
thing to find crews for the lightships, though ; there

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. l6l
is a class of men, much too large I think, who like
nothing better than to earn their living by doing
nothing, having no fear of what the French call
ennui. When a big storm tugs at the anchors and drives
charging squadrons of water to attack the anchored
vessel, the crew are kept as busy as anybody could
wish, however, to save their lives and keep their bea
cons burning, and it often happens that they go
adrift and are wrecked. Because this is liable to
happen when the lightships are most needed, the
government gets rid of them as fast as it can, and puts
lighthouses in their place.
It is fifty years since the last Scottish coal-beacon
was regularly fired for the mariners, yet the old ways
occasionally crop out yet, and show that they served
their purpose not so badly as we are inclined to think.
Have you not heard of that noble little girl in North
Carolina, whose father was a lighthouse keeper, but
went ashore one night, leaving his assistant in charge ?
The assistant became very ill and insensible, and the
little girl was unable to light the great lamps. But
she saw that it was to be a tempestuous night, and

162 OLD OCEAN.
that not only her father could never sail back to her
without the light, but that vessels might strike the
rocks. So she wearily cariied up the long staircases
load after load of the dry pitch-pine sticks that
had been stored for kindling-wood, and, lighting
these like torches, one by one, she held them up
inside the lantern, where their blazing was caught,
magnified and sent out to the relief of the bewildered
ships, and, best of all for the brave, tired girl, brought
her father safely to her help.
Even the electric beam from a first-class lantern
fails to penetrate a fog to any great distance ; yet
when the coast is shrouded in thick mist is the
most dangerous of all times to an approaching ship.
The only way, in such an emergency, in which a warn
ing can be given, is by sound. In many places bells
are rung; but often the point to be avoided is so
placed 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

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 163
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 po
sition. One kind of these horns is very complicated
in its structure, and screeches in a rough, broken
blare, a note far-reaching beyond any smooth, whistling
sound that could be made. This shriek is so hideous,
so ear-splitting, when heard near at hand, that no
name bad enough to express it could be found ; so its
inventors went to the other extreme, and called it a
siren, after those most enchanting of sweet singers
who tried to entice Ulysses out of his course. This
name is opposite in a double sense, indeed, for the
sirens of old lured sailors to wreck, while our siren
hoarsely bids them keep off. Finally, buoys, which at
first were simply tight casks, but now are usually
made of boiler-iron, are anchored on small reefs, to
which are hung bells, rung constantly by the tossing
of their support ; and on other reefs, buoys are fixed
having a hollow cap so arranged that when a big wave
rushes over, it shuts in a body of air, under great
and sudden pressure, which can only escape through a
whistle in the top of the cap, uttering a long warning

164 OLD OCEAN.
wail to tell its position. Buoys in harbors are also
made to carry lights, some by ordinary oil-lanterns,
others by having their hollow interiors filled with
greatly compressed gas, which burns in a strong globe
of glass, and cannot be blown or drenched out.
But the ordinary duty of the buoy is to mark the
line of inner channels, and by their color they tell on
which side of them the pilot must steer.
To keep the buoys all anchored, replace them if
lost, or put new ones where needed ; to visit the light
ships, and carry provisions and letters to their crews ;
to see that all the lighthouses are in shape, and the
various parts of the machinery in good working order,
is the duty of an inspector, who has a certain dis
trict of coast under his care, and continually travels
up and down it in a steamer called a " tender."
Generally all the men who have anything to do with
the lighthouse service must live very lonely lives in
their towers or on their endlessly rocking hulks.
There is a small library which the government helps
circulate among them, and this library ought to be
increased, for there is no class of men in the world to
whom reading matter will prove more precious. If

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 1 65
any of my readers want to give any books or files of
magazines where they will be appreciated, let them
send them to the office of the Lighthouse Board at
Washington, for this library.
Lighthouses and sirens and buoys and coast sur
veys are all intended to prevent shipwreck ; but, as I
have said, the ocean is still supreme. So we add to
our precautions arrangements to help those cast away.
Societies to save wrecked persons have existed in
China, it is said, for centuries, but in Europe are
scarcely over a hundred years old ; and the first life
boat was not made until 1784. Those European
humane societies, especially in Great Britain, placed
life-boats and gears in certain shore towns, and
organized crews who promise to go out to the aid
of any lost ship, and to take good care of the persons
rescued. In America, however, our coasts are so ex
tensive, and so much of the dangerous part of them
is far away from any villages, or even farm-houses,
that the government was obliged to do anything that
was to be done. Thus came about the Life Saving
Service, as it is called, which now has its stations
close together along our whole sea-coast, and upon

1 66 OLD OCEAN.
the great lakes, covering more than ten thousand
miles in all.
Each of these stations is a snug house on the
beach, tenanted by a keeper and six men, all of
whom are chosen for their skill in swimming, and in
handling a boat in the surf — something every man
who " follows the sea " cannot do.
During all the season, from October till May, two
men from each station are incessantly patrolling the
beach at night, each walking until he meets the patrol
man from the next station. No matter how foul the
weather, these watchmen are out until daylight look
ing for disasters. The moment they discover a
vessel ashore, or likely to become disabled, they
summon their companions, and hasten to launch their
boat. These boats are of two kinds. On the lakes
and on the steep Pacific coast is used the very heavy
English life-boat, fitted with masts and sails if
necessary, and which a steam tug is required to tow
to the scene of the wreck, if it is not close in shore.
But upon our flat, sandy Atlantic beaches a lighter
kind of surf-boat, made of cedar, can only be
handled. This is built with air-cases at each end

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 167
and under the thwarts, so that it cannot sink. The
station-men drag it on its low wagon to the scene
of its use, unless horses are to be had, and when it is
launched, they sit at the six oars, each with his cork
belt buckled around him, and his eye fixed on the
steersman, who stands in the stern, ready to obey his
slightest motion of command, for rowing through the
angry waves that dash themselves on a storm-
beaten beach is a matter requiring extraordinary
skill and strength. Then, when the vessel is reached,
comes another struggle to avoid being struck and
crushed by the plunging ship, or the broken spars
and rigging pounding about the hull. But skill and
caution generally enable the crew to rescue the
unfortunate castaways one by one, though frequently
several trips must be made, in each one of which
every surfman risks his life, and in many a sad case
has lost it.
It is a common occurrence, however, that the sea
will run so high that no boat could possibly be
launched. Then the only possibility of rescue for
the crew is by means of a line which shall bridge the
space between the ship and the land before the hull

l68 OLD OCEAN.
falls to pieces. We read in old tales of wrecks of
how some brave seaman would tie a light line around
his waist, and dare the dreadful waves, and the more
dreadful undertow, to save his comrades. If he got
safely upon the beach, he drew a hawser on shore
and made it fast. Now we do not ask this ; but with
a small cannon made for the purpose, a strong cord
attached to the cannon-ball is fired over the ship,
even though it be several hundred yards distant.
Seizing this line as it falls across their vessel, the
imperilled sailors haul to them a larger line, called a
" whip," which they fasten in a tackle-block in such
a way that a still heavier line can be stretched
between the wreck and the land, and made fast.
Then by means of a small side-line and pulleys a
double canvas bag, shaped like a pair of knee-breeches,
is sent back and forth between the ship and the
shore, bringing a man each time, until all are saved.
Should there be many persons on board, though, and
great haste necessary, a small covered metallic boat,
called the life-car, is sent out, into which several
persons can get at once.
Such are the principal means of saving life prac-

THE DANGERS OF THE DEEP. 169
tised by the Life Saving Service; and you will believe
that they are good in device, and managed with
great skill and grand courage, when I tell you that in
1880, out of nearly two thousand persons whose
lives were endangered by shipwreck upon the Amer
ican coasts, all but nine were saved. I wish, as I
have so often wished before, that I had time to
tell you a few of the thrilling incidents of which the
surfmen are the heroes.

X. — LIFE UNDER THE WAVES.
THE ocean was the home of the first living thing
that appeared on our planet, either of plant or
animal ; sea-weeds 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 are
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 any rate near
its margin — is more populous than the most haunted
bit of woods you ever saw.
This was more true, perhaps, of the ancient than it
is of the present ocean. " The mollusks lived at that
time," says one of my books, " in such serried and
compact masses, that their remains have produced by
170

LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 171
their accumulation deep strata and lofty eminences."
Is that hard to understand ? Let me explain it a
trifle, and also show that not mollusks alone were in
" serried and compact masses " during the Devonian,
Silurian and cretaceous ages.
There exists in our ponds and ditches a race of
plants so minute that it requires a powerful micro
scope to examine them. Under this instrument it is
seen that they have delicate, flinty shells or armor,
which is of a great variety of forms — coiled, globular,
boat-shaped, spindle-like, and so on — and always
beautifully sculptured. These minute and beautiful
diatoms, as they are called, move about freely, and
were long supposed to be animals : now they are
known to be the simplest of sea-weeds, consisting of
only one cell. Since life first began, these diatoms,
and other microscopic plants much like them, have
swarmed in the fresh waters not only, 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

172 OLD OCEAN.
delicate, glass-like shell was indestructible, and when
the bit of life was lost, it sank slowly down to the
bottom. What effect towards perceptible sediment
could come from a thing so small it would scarcely
be felt in your eye ? One, or two, or a million, truly
would go for nothing ; but century after century,
through ages too long for us to comprehend, a steady
rain of these exquisitely engraved particles of flint
showered down upon the still sea-floor, almost as thickly
as you have seen motes in a sunbeam, until there was
deposited a layer, many feet in thickness, of nothing
but diatom-skeletons. Though this went on to a
greater or less extent everywhere in the sea, such
deposits are not now to be discovered everywhere,
because disturbing causes swept the shells away, or
broke up the floor after it had been laid down ; but
in various parts of the world to-day, you may find
wide beds of rock made up wholly of such skeletons,
soldered together into hard stone ; while in some
regions the mud of our sea-bottom appears to
consist of almost nothing else. The mighty chalk
cliffs of Great Britain and the French coast were
built up in an ancient sea, whence they have

LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 73
since been lifted, in precisely the same manner.
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 algae that break the gloom of black head
lands 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.
Sea-weeds 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 micro
scopic forms are known. These latter float about, of
course, and many of them have been thought to be
animals because they seem able to move at their own
will. They come to the surface as well as haunt the
depths ; and the Red Sea takes its name from the fact
that a minute carmine-tinted alga occasionally comes
to the surface in throngs so dense and wide as to
tinge the water for miles in extent. The same thing
occurs in the Pacific, where the sailors call it " sea-
sawdust." The proper home of the sea-weed, however, is a

174 OLD OCEAN.
rocky shore between tide-marks or just below them,
and it is because the eastern coast of the United
States is rather poor in rocks — at least south of Cape
Cod — that we are poor in algae, compared with other
regions. The sea-weed has no roots, and only clings
to the rock for support ; shifting sand therefore woul4
not hold it, and there are great sandy deserts undei
the ocean, bare of algae, just as some land regions are.
sandy deserts naked of terrestrial plants.
It often happens, however, that masses of weed
will be torn away from their moorings and set
adrift. This does not necessarily kill them, and they
go on flourishing while afloat. This is supposed to
be the origin of those great areas of " gulf-weed " veg
etation in mid-ocean called "sargasso seas." You
will remember that a branch of the Gulf Stream,
striking over towards the Moorish coast of Africa, is
turned southward there, and sweeps down to the
equator, then westward again. This surrounds a
broad region in the middle Atlantic whose only cur
rents go round and round like a slow whirlpool ; and
it is here that the gulf-weed concentrates in masses
which are sometimes dense enough to impede a ship

LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 77
— Columbus reported among the wonders of his first
voyage the trouble he had sailing through it — and cov
ers an area, between the Azores and the Bahamas, as
large as the Mississippi valley. This is the Sargasso
sea ordinarily referred to in books, but it is not the
only one. A thousand miles west of San Francisco
there is a similar collection of floating plants ; and
others exist elsewhere in the southern oceans.
These floating meadows, as it were, are chosen as
the abode of a long list of animals that rarely quit
the safety and plenty of their precincts. Among
these are innumerable pretty jelly-fishes, sea-worms,
and mollusks without shells, which cling to the buoy
ant plants, and perhaps feed solely upon them. Here
is to be had in abundance the fairy-like, rare ptero-
pods, the richly purple janthinas with their curious
rafts of eggs, and no end of small crabs. Here a
small fish, something like a perch, spends his whole
time building a nest like a bird's in the tangled weed-
masses, and carefully guarding his treasures against
the large marauding fishes which haunt the vicinity
to the dread of its peaceful inhabitants; and here
those far-flying birds, the wandering albatross and

178 OLD OCEAN.
the petrels, hover about in search of something to
capture and eat. The Sargasso sea is an extremely
interesting part of the ocean, except to the luckless
sailor becalmed and balked in its midst.
In favorable places a surprising variety of sea-weeds
can be picked out, and books exist by which you may
learn the method of classification and names of the
different species. The chief of these books for Amer
ica is Harvey's work, published by the Smithsonian
Institution. Not only in the shape and colors of the
fronds (as the leaf-like expansions or branching tufts
of the stem are called), but in size, sea-weeds differ
greatly among themselves, from the many diminutive
sorts to the cable-like growths of California, which
would measure a quarter of a mile in length if stretched
out. Algas, as I have said, constitute, with very few
exceptions, the whole vegetation of the salt water,
together with a large part of the vegetation in fresh
water ; and they serve the same useful purpose there
that land-plants do for the dry parts of the globe,
continually making and throwing off the oxygen which
is necessary to keep the water as well as the air

LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 179
pure. To this end they do a very important work.
This is not the whole of their service in ocean
matters, however. I think it can be said that if it
were not for sea-weeds, animals could not live in the
ocean, as truthfully as that if it were not for herbage, no
animals would be able to exist on land. Sea-weeds
are fed upon directly by all sorts of salt-water life, from
mollusks as big as your thumb to turtles the size of
a dining-table, and they make a shelter for thousands
of little fellows who never leave their shadow.
But this is a small part of the story. The diatoms,
and other minute plants like them, form the main por
tion, if not all, the food of a large number of sponges,
polyps, mollusks and other stationary sluggish creat
ures, that otherwise, so far as I see, would not be
able to live at all. These, in turn, are fed upon by
larger predaceous animals. Thus, though the fishes
and cetaceans* may never bite a sea-weed themselves,
they look for food to creatures that do. We may
say then that the algae form the basis of all ocean life.
Men have been able to make marine plants of ser-
* I dislike a long word like this, but there is no easier English word to cover
the whales, porpoises, seals, and others of the group of marine mammals
called Cctacea.

180 OLD OCEAN.
vice to them also. This was more true in former
years than now. During the last century, for exam
ple, the kelp trade was the one great industry of the
islands at the northern end of Scotland, employing
thousands of persons, and paying vast revenues to the
lordly owners of the shores. Kelp was the ashes of
sea-weed which was burned in kilns of stone and
brick, clouding the air with huge volumes of strongly
odorous smoke. The slow burning of the sea-weed
left the ashes fused into a solid mass, which was
broken up like stone before being sold. In France
this was called varec ; and in Spain, where the algae
were mixed with beach-plants, cultivated for the pur
pose, and burned in holes in the ground, it went to
market as barilla.
In those days, kelp was the only source of the val
uable alkali soda needed in manufacturing glass and
soap. Then a French chemist discovered how to
make such soda out of common salt, and the kelp
ovens were abandoned, except a few in Scotland,
supplying the demand for iodine. Iodine forms a
part of all sea-water and sea-weeds, and is used in
photography and in medicine. It is a curious fact that

LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. l8l
barbarous people have long chewed sea- weeds as a
remedy in the very diseases for which physicians now
prescribe the iodine extracted from those plants.
Iodine is a violet dye, too, and the bluish and purple
tints of many algae, shells and sea animals appears to
be due to the presence of this element.
Sea-weed and eel-grass are collected in great quan
tities by farmers who live alongshore in all corners
of the world, as a fertilizer, especially for fruit trees.
It forms an extremely good manure, because in it
there is so much of the soda and lime which all plants
consume ; indeed, there is a kind of sea-weed growing
at great depths, looking much like a coral, and called
the nullipore, which takes up so much lime from the
water that its substance becomes almost like stone, so
that theplant retains its shape and full size when dried.
Some of these nullipores are beautifully fan-shaped,
scarlet or pink, and are often seen in museums,
marked Corallines.
Cattle and horses that have been accustomed to
rough pastures, like the Scotch and Irish moors, eat
sea-weed and thrive on it, especially as winter fodder,
and from several species are derived dishes for

182 OLD OCEAN.
our own tables. The Irish moss, or carrageen —
which is not a moss at all, but a sea-weed — is the
most important of these, and grows on both sides of
the northern Atlantic. In England the market sup
ply comes chiefly from the western coast of Ireland,
while Massachusetts Bay gives America all that is
wanted. The little port of Scituate, Mass., is the
chief point of supply, where, last year, over 400,000
pounds were gathered. In early June, two or three
hundred men and women go to the rocks at low tide
and pick off the small brown plants, each man get
ting about a barrel in one day's work. When the
tide rises, the people get into small boats and pull up
the moss with rakes.
The moss gathered each day is taken to the beach,
where a gravelly space has been prepared, and is
spread out to lie bleaching during all of the next day,
when it is taken up, washed in tubs and again spread
out. This washing and drying in the sun is con
tinued for seven days, by which time it has bleached
to a yellowish white. Should a shower come, the
moss is heaped up and covered with canvas to protect
it from injury.

LIFE UNDER THE WAVES. 1 83
Besides being of value for food, carrageen
serves to make sizing used by paper-makers, cloth-
printers, hatters, and so on, to clarify beer in the
brewery-vats, as a medicine, and to make bandoline
for stiffening the hair. In cookery, jellies, blani
mange and various methods of boiling in milk and
mixing in soups make it palatable.
Other species beside the Irish moss serve as food
in Europe, generally in a raw state, often proving the
only salty relish which the Irish peasant has to eat
with his potatoes. One of these is the dulse of the
Scotch, and the dillisk of Ireland, which also abounds
in the Mediterranean, and is there made into a soup.
The natives of the South Sea Islands eat algae which
is extraordinarily abundant and varied in Oriental
latitudes ; and the poor among the Japanese and the
interior of China, where the weed is sent dried, prize
it especially, because it has a sea flavor and saves
salt, which with them is a costly luxury. These people
mix it with vegetables and other materials, and form
thick, delicious soups and dressings. A peculiarly
bad-smelling sauce, prepared from sea-weed, is among
the edibles China sends to Europe as a condiment.

184 OLD OCEAN.
Along the shores from Japan to Malaga grows an
alga which the natives of those coasts dry and keep
as long as they please. When the substance is wanted
they steep some of the dried pieces in hot water,
where the weed dissolves, and then, having been taken
off the fire, stiffens into glue, said to be the strongest
cement in the world.
A kind of false isinglass, also, is a product of the
Eastern sea-weeds, and not only helps the Chinese
baker to make his pastry and confectionery, but it
serves to varnish and glue thin paper and to stiffen
light and transparent gauzes of fine silk used in mak
ing screens, fans, hangings, etc., so that painters can
decorate them. With a poorer quality the bamboo
stretchers of paper umbrellas, lanterns and various
toys are smeared to give them hard and polished sur
faces. In China and Japan the sea-weed is not raked
up but caught by simple machines as the tide drifts it in.
Lastly, ornaments and small articles of use, like
knife-handles, are made by several nations out of
large dried sea-weeds ; and albums of preserved
fronds are one of the prettiest things to be found in a
naturalist's cabinet.

XL— SEA ANIMALS — THE' LESSER HALF.
T HAVE very little space left in which to cover
-*• the great subject of ocean animals. The old
idea of the ocean was that it was a vast desert ; but
now we know that it teems with animal life as densely
as do the land, fresh waters and the air. In it be
gan the life of this globe, for the records of the rocks
show that the first animals lived in the sea, and that
ages passed before any began to people the newly
formed lands, and breathe the atmosphere instead of
the oxygen of the water. Abundant as ocean life is
now, the palaeozoic seas held immensely greater hordes,
and many forms which were giants compared with
those of our day, just as the monstrous reptiles of the
cretaceous era vastly exceeded in size the present
lizards and turtles and frogs. Some of the old
straight-shells, relatives of our pearly nautilus, were
185

186 OLD OCEAN.
twelve feet long ; and I have seen fossil ammonites,
another relative, which when alive must have been too
heavy for a man to lift. The fishes, too, could tell
great stories of the glory of their ancestors in size and
strength and crowded hordes. Some of them wore
solid coats of mail upon their great heads, and could
do battle even with the huge swimming reptiles which
were the dreaded tyrants of the deep.
Life in the ocean in those old geologic days
was along guerrilla warfare — every animal guarding
against attack, and at the same time watching sharply
for an opportunity to seize and pray upon some
weaker companion. As for the foraminifera and
other microscopic fellows, I have already explained
how countless they were, and how their skeletons,
singly invisible, have by accumulation built up great
masses of rock, like the chalk-beds of England and
France. Though lessened in numbers and reduced in size,
because the land has gradually won over to its
side many sorts of animals which in former ages
were exclusively confined to the water, and for
other reasons, the sea still holds its share of

SEA ANIMALS  THE LESSER HALF. 187
every "branch" and "class" — except birds, and
many almost claim some of them, like the albatross,
penguin and petrel — and a majority of the "orders "
cf animal life. Glance at the catalogue : Foramin-
ifers, sponges and polyps are chiefly confined to salt
water, starfishes, sea-urchins and the like, wholly so ;
mollusks (coming next higher) are principally oceanic,
and the great majority of the crabs inhabit salt water.
Among the arachnida (the spider order) one species,
the common " horse-shoe " of our shores, has nothing
to do with the land, except between tide-marks, and
remains as the solitary representative of an immense
and varied group which so crowded the palaeozoic sea-
bottom that some rocks, for instance the limestones
of Iowa, are packed almost as full of their fossils as
a box is of raisins — I mean the trilobites. None of
the insects that I know of are truly marine ; yet some
of them are sea-faring, truly, for they spend their lives
on drifting sea-wrack, or just out of reach of the tides ;
but most of the true worms are dwellers in the mud
of the sea-bottom. I have never heard of any
land fishes yet, but I need not tell you that they
throng the fresh waters as well as the salt, and that

l88 OLD OCEAN.
many species inhabit both at different seasons.
In respect to the reptiles, of which the ancient
oceans contained so many gigantic and horrid types,
I do not know any now that are truly oceanic, if you
leave out the "sea-serpent," of which we hear so
many wonderful and not quite satisfactory tales, ex
cept the turtles. Of these there are many species in
various parts of the globe. You will hear of " sea-
snakes " in the East Indies, but they are only certain
kinds of serpents which swim well, and pass the most
of their time in the salt water, as several species of
our own country do in the rivers and ponds. It is in
this manner, too, that we may count certain birds,
such as the petrels, auks, penguins, albatrosses,
frigate-birds and their kin, as belonging to the ocean.
They spend all their whole days over the waves, seek
ing their food there, and some of them never go
ashore, except to lay their eggs and hatch their young
on remote rocks, resting and sleeping on the billows,
or in the air over them, when not busy at their
hunting. In the highest rank of all, however, the
mammals, to which belong the quadrupeds and our
most noble selves, several families are natives of the

SEA ANIMALS  THE LESSER HALF. 189
"great deep'' — '.he whales, dolphins and porpoises,
the seals and walruses, and the manatees and
dugongs. But all these must come to the surface to
breathe, not having gills like fishes, but true lungs.
Everybody has been surprised to learn dur
ing the last few years that animals are not con
fined to the neighborhood of the shores of the
ocean alone, but exist far away from it. It is
only recently that machinery has been invented
for proper deep-sea dredging. Now naturalists can
scrape up the soil of the bottom at the depth of even
three thousand fathoms, or nearly four miles, by
means of a dredge dragged by a wire rope and worked
by steam machinery on shipboard. The " Challenger
Expedition," which a few years ago was sent out by
the British government on a cruise around the world
for scientific exploration of the ocean, sank its
dredges to that depth, and the information gained was
very interesting.
It appears that as you go further and further away
from shore, and into deeper and deeper water, the
less animals are obtained, and there are very few spe
cies indeed which live on shore and also at a greater

1 90 OLD OCEAN.
depth than about one hundred fathoms. I have
already explained to you how the majority of species
of marine animals are spread in limited areas of sea,
beyond which other species take their place, and that
k is not always easy to see why a certain sort of cowry,
for example, should be found only along a particular
strip of coast, when there is nothing that we can see
to prevent its extending its range much further. It is
believed that the temperature or the water is the chief
fact which sets these invisible boundaries to the wan
derings of animals living near the surface, only a few
of which are very widespread in their distribution.
Now in deep-sea life the case is different. Here tem
perature cannot be of so much account, since only a
short distance down, the water becomes almost as cold
as ice, and preserves this uniform chill all around the
globe. The life found at a great depth, too, is very
widespread, instead of restricted in its range, often
occurring in two or more ocean basins; but here the
restriction is an up-and-down one, rather than side-
wise, and the secret is found in the word pressure.
There are very few animals able to live in the shallows
and also under the enormous weight of sea water

•onihsijT aaxsAo-Tuvsj

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'ONIHSM-HJIX^'JOT

SEA ANIMALS — THE LESSER HALF. 193
three or four miles deep. To most of them a great
variation in the pressure of the water to which they
are accustomed proves fatal, just as men and other
animals breathing air cannot survive when they rise
into the thin atmosphere beyond a certain height, or
are placed where air is greatly condensed. Thus we
find layers of animal life in the ocean from the
shallows to the abysses.
The most striking example of this, I think, is the
case of coral-reefs. The foundations are laid by the
millions of minute individuals of one solid, heavy
sort of coral which can grow only in pretty deep
water. When these have reached their highest
growth, a second kind colonizes itself upon the sum
mit of this foundation, and carries the work a little
way further. Then a third kind takes it up and brings
the structure to the top, where many surface corals,
corallines, and various other animals help to erect a
dry reef, upon which vegetation can find root-hold,
and, after a while, men may live.
There is so much to say about sea-animals, and so
little time to say it, that I must only glance at the
subject in a single way — utility to man.

194 OLD OCEAN.
Men make use of something in nearly every branch
of ocean-life, from humblest to highest. The lowest
of all, as I have already said, are the foraminifers ; it
is their skeletons which make up our common chalk.
A close ally of theirs is the sponge, of which there
are a dozen or so varieties sold in the shops. Sponges
come chiefly from the Mediterranean, the Persian
and Ceylonese waters of the Indian Ocean, and from
the gulf coast of Florida. In the Old World they
are obtained chiefly by diving. Men who are trained
from boyhood to this work, go out to the sponge-
ground in boats, on fine days. Fastening a netting-
bag about their waists, and taking a heavy stone in
their hands, they dive head-foremost to the bottom —
often twelve or fifteen fathoms below — tear the
sponges from the rocks and rise with a bag-full, to be
dragged almost utterly exhausted into their boat,
often fainting immediately after. This requires them
to hold their breath under the water for two minutes
or more ; but none but the most expert can do that,
and a diver does not live long. In Florida, however,
the sponge-gatherers do not dive, but go in ships to
where the sponges grow, and then cruise about in

SEA ANIMALS — THE LESSER HALF. 195
small boats, each of which contains two men. One
of these steers, while the other man leans over the side
searching the bottom. In order to see it plainly, he
has what he calls a " water-glass." This is a common
wooden pail the bottom of which is glass. Pressing
this down into the water a few inches he thrusts in
his face, and can then perceive everything on the
bottom with great distinctness. When he sees a
sponge he thrusts down a long stout pole, on the end
of which is a double hook, like a small pitchfork set
at right angles to the handle, and drags up the cap
tive. Having got the sponges, they must go through long
operations of rotting, beating, rinsing, drying and
bleaching before their skeletons — which is all we
want — are fit for use. Only a few out of the large
number of species of sponges are serviceable, how
ever. The living skeletons of the coral polyps form what
we term " corals." The round white ones and the
variously branching ones may come from any one of
several parts of the equatorial half of the globe, and
are of value chiefly as mantel ornaments. The red

196 OLD OCEAN.
coral of which necklaces and other bits of jewelry are
made is procured by divers in the Mediterranean,
and its gathering keeps hundreds of men busy.
Rising to starfishes and sea-urchins, I can only
say that the starfishes interest oystermen because
they prey upon their oysters ; but in old days it was
thought that medicines made out of the " stars " and
" sea-eggs " were very potent in certain diseases.
The trepang, which is dried and eaten by the Chinese
and East Indians, belongs here too.
Coming to crabs — do we not eat them from the
delicate " shedder '' to the huge lobster ? On the
coast of Maine there are whole villages which live
almost entirely by catching lobsters and canning
them to send abroad. In Virginia and in North Car
olina at certain seasons, hundreds of men are busy
catching and shipping crabs for market, and in
Louisiana large factories are devoted to canning
shrimps. This brings us to the class of mollusks, in our
glance at the useful animals of the ocean ; and, to
prove their importance, it is enough to remind you
that here belong the " shellfish " — the oyster, clam,

SEA ANIMALS — THE LESSER HALF.

197

mussel, scallop, cockle and all the rest (not a few)
which are edible. I find by my study of the subject,
that of oysters alone there are taken from the waters
of the coast of the United States each year almost
twenty-three millions of bushels, for which the oyster-
men get about $13,500,000. That business forms
the sole support of perhaps a hundred thousand per
sons in this country alone. And there are oysters
and clams and other shellfish all round the globe,
forming one of the most important of all the natural
supplies of food. The savages knew this, as the great
shell-heaps, ancient and modern, to be found piled
upon all coasts, plainly show.
But mollusks are not useful as food alone. Their
shells are applied to many purposes. We burn them
into excellent lime ; we cut them up by the million
into buttons and studs and small objects like parasol-
handles, and we polish them into ornamental shape
for our centre-tables. In the city of Newark, I am
told, there are three factories devoted to the manu
facture of shell buttons and mother-of-pearl goods
alone. And many ship-loads of shells from the West
Indies and California come into New York annually

198 OLD OCEAN.
to supply this trade, which employs so many hands
in profitable labor.
Mother-of-pearl is the bright inside surface, or
nacre, of the large oyster which gives us pearls. This
— in one or another form — exists in various parts
of the world ; but in America the only fishery for
the pearl oyster is in the Gulf of California, and that
is by no means as productive as it used to be. The
season for pearl-fishing on the Pacific coast of Mex
ico is from June to December, but the diving can be
done only in good weather, and for about three hours
at the time of low water, since the tide there rises
twenty feet, which would make a large dive of itself;
and, besides, the currents are troublesome during
high water.
At the right hour the Mexicans go out in their
canoes, one man of the four or five in each canoe pad
dling, 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

SEA ANIMALS — THE LESSER HALF. 199
is not too deep for these adventurous divers, who
will stay a whole minute upon the bottom, picking up
oysters and putting them into a basket sunken before
hand, where a quantity of shells has been discovered.
No food is eaten by these men on the day they
dive, until their labor is done.
The divers could tell us some entertaining things
about their experiences in the mysterious world
under the waves, if they had the faculty of descrip
tion. Drowning is only one of many dangers that
threaten them. The warm waters in which they
work are the home of the largest and most deadly
sharks, and of various other submarine creatures
one would far rather read about than meet in his
own element. Of them all sharks are the most to
be dreaded ; as a rule, however, they are easily fright
ened away, or can be avoided by the clever swimmer,
who quickly stirs up the mud of the bottom, and
rises in the fog before the dull shark discovers
that he is gone. The natives of the East Indies
are said to fight the sharks quite fearlessly, stabbing
them with knives as they roll over. I have read a story
to the effect that formerly the Mexican Indian divers

2 00 OLD OCEAN.
on our Western coast used to take down with them
a stick of hard wood about two feet long and sharp
ened at both ends. When a shark was encountered
from which they could not readily escape, they would
snatch this weapon from their belts, grasp it in the
middle, and thrust it dextrously crosswise into the
widely distended mouth of the monster opened
to seize them. To shut down his jaws upon such a
skewer would undoubtedly discomfit a shark or any
thing else ; but when one thinks of the time, nerve,
and sure aim it would require to accomplish this
feat, he begins to doubt whether really it ever was
tried. I advise you, therefore, to prove the story
better than I have been able to do, before you pin
all your faith to it.
All the oysters when brought ashore are opened
in vats of water, and carefully examined for the
pearls they may contain half embedded in their
mantles; but very few reward the diver with pearls
worth selling separately or except by weight. Many
divers, therefore, do not themselves take the trouble
of opening what they catch, but sell them unopened
at a few cents a dozen, preferring the small pay

SEA ANIMALS  THE LESSER HALF. 20T
and no risk to a chance for more money with so
much additional work.
The round, flat, beautiful shells are all saved,
and their sale ( for mother-of-pearl work ) brings
nearly as much money into the pearl-fishing com
munities in the course of a season as the pearls
themselves are worth.
We are not only gathering and utilizing the lower
invertebrate creatures of the ocean in all these
ways, but we are beginning to cultivate an artificial
supply of the most important of them, such as the
food-mollusks. The Romans, away back in the days
of Horace, raised oysters in ponds along the Italian
coast, and Eastern nations preserved the custom
during the mediaeval centuries when Europe was do
ing little except quarrelling, and making pretty pictures
on parchment. Recently the French of the Channel
coast took it up, and the English followed, finding
that their natural oyster and mussel beds were be
coming exhausted. The same fate has overtaken
our own oyster-beds everywhere north of the Ches
apeake, until now nearly all the oysters brought to
market have been raised upon private planted beds.

202 OLD OCEAN.
An oyster-farm is conducted in two ways. One is
to place upon a certain space of bottom, leased in
some shallow bay, as many young oysters as it will
conveniently hold. These young oysters (generally
hardly bigger than your thumb-nail) are dredged in
summer from certain reefs in deep water, where the
oysters are never allowed to grow to full size ; and to
a large extent they are brought by the ship-load from
Maryland and Virginia, which have more " seed," as
it is called, than they need for their own planting.
These young oysters, watched against harm, and hav
ing plenty of space to grow in, come to a proper size
for market in from one to three years, and are then
gathered by their owners and sold.
Another method is to spread old shells, pebbles,
etc., on the bottom, to which the floating eggs of
adult oysters in the neighborhood adhere. This
thick "catch'' of seed is then taken up and respread
in a thinner way upon new ground, and is allowed to
grow to maturity. The oysters raised by either of
these methods are of better appearance and taste, as
a rule, than those that grow naturally.
Mussels, clams of many varieties, and even sponges

SEA ANIMALS — THE LESSER HALF. 203
and peak-shells, are also cultivated to some extent,
each according to the plan its natural habits make
advisable. In this way certain great areas of favora
ble ocean-bottom have become as valuable as the
neighboring shore-land, or even far more so, if j-ou
compare, acre for acre, the yields of the crops below
with that above the water-line.

XII. — SEA ANIMALS.— THE GREATER
HALF.
TT is almost impossible for one whose home is iu-
•*¦ land, to realize to what an extent the sea enters
into the industries of the people who live on its bord
ers, and to what an extent a whole country is indebted
to its adjacent ocean. This indebtedness arises in a
great variety of ways, the most important of which
are supplying food, and the education of a class of
men whose peculiar services are often of the greatest
value to their fellow-citizens.
The vegetables and lower animals of the sea which
serve as food, we have already studied ; those ani
mals higher in the scale remain for this article, and
they are many, — fishes, turtles, seals, walruses and
whales. Each of these classes possesses a large va
riety and great numbers of individuals, while some of
204

SEA ANIMALS.  THE GREATER HALF.

2°5

them yield other products of value beside their eata
ble flesh.
The right to catch fish has always been held one of
the most valuable privileges a colony or nation could
enjoy, and more than one war has been engaged in
over this privilege ; indeed, the old French wars that
tormented the New England colonies and the mari
time provinces of Canada, previous to the Revolution
ary war, were fought largely, if not wholly, upon this
question. By our Puritan forefathers, and by the
early settlers of New York and New Jersey, the fish
ing along the coast was esteemed one of the highest
inducements for coming to the new land, and it was
talked about in a way that seems queer to us who
have so many other interests ; but the forefathers
were careful to have a strong clause in the Massa
chusetts charter as to their right over and ownership
of every sort of fish and fishing, and more than once
success in their boats was all that saved *hole towns
from starvation. The same is true still in other
parts of the world, and some savage tribes, particu
larly in northern regions, depend almost wholly on
fish for their support. Take away his salmon from

206 OLD OCEAN.
the Vancouver Island Indian, and he would starve to
death, I fear.
Sea-fishing is carried on extensively along the
coasts of China and Japan, on both sides of Behring's
straits, on the Californian coast, in the Mediterranean
and elsewhere ; but the chief fishing grounds of the
world, I think, are in the North Atlantic, and partic
ularly off the coast of Newfoundland. It is on the
waters of this ocean that fishermen congregate under
the greatest nnmber of different flags, andhailing from
the greatest distances. To the skill and eagerness of
the Norse fishermen — rovers indeed — do we owe the
first voyages extending their course, by degrees, until
the Orkneys, the Faroes, Iceland and Greenland suc
cessively were discovered.
The Banks of Newfoundland are a series of shoals —
submerged islands, in fact — which lie off the north
eastern coast of America from Cape Cod to the farther
end of Newfoundland. The shallowness of the water
over them makes them advantageous places for fish
ing, because many of the species caught, remain near
the bottom, and in deep water are therefore beyond
convenient reach. It is possible, also, to anchor

SEA ANIMALS. — THE GREATER HALF. 207
on the Banks — a necessity for most fishing.
Cod, halibut, hake, haddock, mackerel and herring
are the fishes chiefly taken in the North Atlantic,
winter being the most favorable time, except for
mackerel. Along our coast more southerly, men
haden, shad and mullet fishing employ great num
bers of men, while on the southern coasts of Europe
the catching and preserving of sardines, whitebait and
anchvies is of great importance to the shore-people,
beyond the ordinary fishing.
Of all these, cod-fishing takes the lead, at least in
America, hundreds of vessels gathering year after year
upon the Banks and loading deep with their captures.
To go cod-fishing the staunchest vessels are required,
for terrible storms are often encountered. These
vessels are of the swiftest model, also, for they must
make quick voyages to and fro, in order to save time
and beat their rivals. Their rig is adapted to this
purpose, and spreads almost as much canvas as a
racing-yacht. The best of them all, perhaps, belong
at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and are never used for
any other purpose.
Formerly, all the fishing for cod, halibut and the

208 OLD OCEAN.
rest was by the hand-line, but now this is nearly given
up, except in the case of mackerel, and the trawl has
taken its place. The trawl consists of a strong rope,
between three and four hundred feet long, having at
each end an anchor and a flag-buoy. It is so ar
ranged that when it is stretched out and anchored the
line will be several fathoms beneath the surface. To
this line, at intervals of six feet or so, are hung short
lines, each carrying a stout hook. When the fishing-
ground has been reached, the captain anchors his
vessel, or, if the weather permits, he sails gently to
and fro. Previously, six trawls have been baited with
clams brought from home, and one put in each of the
six small boats which the vessel carries. Two men
now put off in each of these boats and anchor the
trawls at convenient distances from each other, in
such a way that the trawl-line, with its fringe of hooks,
shall be stretched taut and at the proper depth. How
long they stay down depends on the weather — five
or six hours, or from evening until morning, is the
usual length. Then the men go out, and taking up
the anchors at one end, haul each trawl into the boat,
coiling it in the bottom and taking off the hooks

SEA ANIMALS.  THE GREATER HALF. 2 11
each captive fish as fast as they come to it.
Simple as this sounds, it is terribly hard work.
The trawls are heavy and stiff, and armed with dan
gerously sharp hooks. The busiest season is mid
winter, and no dread of cold or danger must stop the
fisherman who boldly ventures in his little dory into
the teeth of a howling snow-storm, and fast-increas
ing gale, piling the water " mountain-high " about him
and encasing his body in a sheet of icy spray ; this
must he do in spite of discomfort and the imminent
risk of death, if he would save from destruction his
valuable trawls and the booty they may have hooked
for him. A fine day on the Banks of Newfoundland
is a rare thing ; fog and snow and icy gales are the
rule, and only the greatest courage, endurance and
skill would enable a man to resist the ocean and
wrest from it his self-support :
" Brave are the hearts that man
The fishing-smacks of Gloucester,
The sea-boats of Cape Ann."
The thrilling tales these men can tell of escapes
from death, and of exciting moments of contest with

212 OLD OCEAN.
the tempest, would go far ahead of any imagined
peril ever thought of ; but they cannot be written out —
especially in so brief a space as these papers are
allowed — without losing so much of their salt sea-
flavor that they would sound very flat, I fear.
But the cod, halibut and mackerel fisheries are not
the only ones that claim the steady efforts of the fifty
thousand or more men whom the last census reports
as getting their living by means of these industries.
All along the coast from Maine to New Jersey are
caught the menhaden, or pogies, or bunkers, or bony
fish, as this useful little member of the " finny tribe ''
is called in various regions. The menhaden is shaped
much like a shad, but of smaller size, rarely exceeding
a foot in length. It travels about in companies or
"schools," which may contain from ten thousand to
five hundred thousand, and which move hither and
thither in a solid mass in search of food. The food
sought consists of the minute transparent animals
that crowd near the surface of the summer sea, and
are never suspected by any one, except, perhaps, the
naturalist who, with his towing-net and microscope,
captures them for his aquarium, and draws their elfin

SEA ANIMALS.  THE GREATER HALF.

213

portraits. The open-mouthed pursuit of this small
and lively prey leads the menhaden so close to the sur
face that the fisherman-lookout sees from his mast
head the flit of their tails, and catches through the
blue wash of overlying water the gleam of their red
backs flashing beneath as they crowd one another in
rushing and wrangling haste.
The menhaden fishery is carried on in trim little
steamers, behind which are towed two yawls carrying
a great net, part of which is in each boat, a few feet
of the middle of the net stretching between them.
The moment the " color " of a school is reported by
the lookout, is a moment of immense excitement on
board the steamer. The crews rush to the boats and
pull them away toward their prize with the greatest
speed, while the steamer, left in charge of the cook
and engineer, slows her speed and gracefully swings
around to aid the boats at the proper time.
In each boat stands a man whose business it is to
pay out the net coiled in the prow ; and when the
boats have approached near enough to the men
haden — which must not be alarmed or they may
dart away by diving — the captain orders the net

214 OLD OCEAN.
thrown. Then the two men work like heroes casting
the heavy netting overboard, while the two yawls
pull away from each other, and in a circular direc
tion, gradually surrounding the school of fish, their
track being marked by the line of cork-floats left be
hind and supporting the net cast overboard. It is
not until the ring of corks and netting has nearly
closed into a complete circle around them, that the
fish become really terrified and seek to escape. Then
it is too late for any but a few of them, since the boats
have drawn nearly together, and they are surrounded
by an invisible wall of netting hanging many fathoms
deep. Rushing from side to side, they push out this
yielding wall, but cannot go through its firm meshes.
By and by they would dive down and learn to go
underneath it, but the fisherman has guarded against
this by reaving through loops along the lower edge of
the net a rope, to the end of which is fastened a
heavy weight. The moment the circle of the net is
completed about the imprisoned fish, this weight is
pitched overboard. Sinking rapidly to the bottom it
pulls along with it the rope at the bottom of the net,
which, sliding through the loops, acts as a puckering-

SEA ANIMALS. — THE GREATER HALF. 215
string to draw the bottom of the net together in the
centre and transform it into a huge bag or purse.
This done, the fishermen pull into their boats as
much of the net as they can drag over the gunwale.
This is terribly hard work. The water is often rough
(I have seen them working when the crest of each
wave was high enough to hide the steamer's masts
only a couple of hundred yards away ), and though all
haul together, the struggles of the host of the fishes
and the weight of the wet net allows the men to
take only a portion back into the yawls. Then the
steamer comes up, the net is fastened like a bag be
tween the steamer's side and the two boats, and the
menhaden are ladled out and tumbled, like a flashing
shower of silver and mother-of-pearl, into the dark
hold, perhaps a hundred or two hundred thousand at
a single catch.
The menhaden are not eaten, but taken to factories
on the beaches where they are boiled by steam in
deep vats and then put through a mill that presses the
rich oil out of them. The refuse of bones and scales
is mixed with bone-dust, etcetera, and made into a land-
fertilizer. Many millions of these fishes are thus

2l6 OLD OCEAN.
taken and used each year, but there seems no dimi
nution of their numbers ; while the cod-fish, which in
" the good old Colony times," were abundant in New
York bay, in Long Island Sound, off Cape Cod —
whence its name — and Cape Ann, have now been
driven to the far away " Banks," in an effort to escape
the incessant pursuit thaffollows them wherever they
may retreat. It is so likely that a few more years —
or at least a few more decades — will see their extinc
tion, that the United States Fish Commission has
been breeding codfish artificially and seems to be suc
ceeding in restocking a portion of Massachusetts bay.
These are only glimpses of the ways of sea-fishing
and fisher-folk — ways of hardship and peril, absence
from home, pleasant things and means of education
in books. But harder even than the lives of the
Bank and menhaden fishermen, are the duties of the
sealers and whalers.
Seals are of great variety, and of the greatest utility
to the natives of the Arctic and Antarctic regions
where they chiefly live. The Eskimos and the Alas
kans depend upon the seals almost wholly for food
(outside of their fish-diet), clothing, fire, and lamp-

SEA ANIMALS.  THE GREATER HALF. 217
light, tools and weapons. It is surprising how great
a variety of purposes the body of the seal is made to
serve; and, equally, the skill with which die active
animal is killed and his carcass secured with savage
weapons. To the civilized world seals are valuable for their
skins and- oil, and walruses for skins, oil and ivory
tusks. The skins are employed as material for
leather, and on account of their fur. The fur-bearing
seals, from which cloaks and muffs and collars are
made, all live on certain islands in Alaska, where they
appear every summer, departing in winter to the open
sea, — nobody knows exactly where. So easily killed
were these great unwieldy beasts at these summer
haunts, that the government has found it wise to
make laws that no more than one hundred thousand
shall be killed in one year. This saves them from
extermination, and keeps up the price of the fur so
that the native population is able to support itself in
steady prosperity. Though the "fur seal," properly
speaking, belongs wholly to Alaska, there is an Atlan
tic fur seal which formerly was much, used by furriers,
but is now of small consequence.

210 OLD OCEAN.
In the early spring, there come floating down with
the drifting ice from the Arctic regions great numbers
of seals, of three or four species, with their young.
Then there are fitted out in Canada, Newfoundland,
Scotland and Sweden, very strong iron steamships,
manned by men who go to meet this ice-raft in the
stormy seas northeast of Newfoundland, and rob it
of its freight. Fastening their vessels to the pack, or
working their way among the broken floes, as do
Arctic navigators, the sealers brave the double perils
of ocean and ice in search of the gentle little animals
whose misfortune it is that they can be made useful
to men. Having sighted a band huddled together
with their baby seals, the crews land on the ice and
attack them with clubs, one hard blow being enough
to kill the innocents in most cases. Having slaugh
tered all the men have strength or time for, the bodies
are hastily skinned in such a way that the heavy layer
of fat, or " blubber," comes off with the hide, which is
then taken on board the ship.
Sometimes the ice breaks up when the crews are
busy in killing; or a sudden squall causes the ship to
break loose and drift awav ; or the boats returning to

SEA ANIMALS.  THE GREATER HALF. 219
the ship are lost in fogs and snow-storms, so that the
dangers which face the sealer are far more than those
of the ordinary seaman. Arrived at home from his
cold, perilous, exhausting and inhuman work, he sells
his sealskins to be made into leather, and the blubber
to be converted into oil. Large fleets of staunch
steamers and hundreds of sturdy men engage in these
expeditions every year, which yield millions of dollars
to the pockets of sailors and owners; but it is all
confined to the northernmost towns on both sides of
the Atlantic.
Whaling used to be one of the very first industries
of the sea, but has now fallen into decay, — an event
brought about partly by the decrease of the whales
through incessant chasing, and partly by the dis
covery of petroleum, which took the place of whale-
oil for many purposes.
Old records say that whales of all kinds were com
monly seen all along our eastern coast, and in all the
harbors. In those days every shore town had its
boat and crew, who were accustomed to go off from
shore on a moment's notice and attack the " levia
than." As the increase of population and shipping

220 OLD OCEAN.
used up or drove away all the whales near shore,
ships were fitted out to go after them at a distance,
and the American colonies soon held their own with
the whalers of Europe. Boston, the Cape Cod towns,
Nantucket, New Bedford, New London and Sag
Harbor (Long Island), were the chief headquarters of
whaling, and are so yet; indeed Nantucket, New
Bedford, New London and Sag Harbor were formed
almost wholly by the whaling and have made very
little progress since it declined.
Whaling was at its height (at least in America)
about thirty years ago, and a hundred years ago was
worth nearly as much as it is now. In 1853 the total
value of whales (oil and bone) taken was about fif
teen millions of dollars ; last year it was only a third
as much.
The whaling vessels were large staunch ships, and
carried crews of strong, skilful men. They would sail
on voyages lasting two or three years, and some
times would circumnavigate The globe and return
without having touched at a port. As a rule, how
ever, they would gain part of a cargo, and then go to
some port, ship it to London or New York, and refit

SEA ANIMALS.  THE GREATER HALF. 221
for a new voyage. The profits of a trip were thus
very great sometimes, but other trips were attended
by only expense and misfortune.
To the whalers we owe the discovery of many new
lands and many facts in geography and navigation.
At their mastheads flew the first American flags ever
seen in the Pacific, and they annually added to our
map of the polar regions by their adventurous strug
gles northward in search of new hunting-grounds.
England owes to them first her colonies in the South
Pacific. The intrepid and skilful voyages, daring every fa
tigue and danger in the open sea, of our whalers and
fishermen have been schools for the best seamen of
the world. Every nation is glad to draw these sail
ors into their navies, and it is they who make the
bravest yet most cautious captains of our merchant
marine, showing to their comrades and to landsmen
splendid examples of heroism and fortitude. This
schooling I mean when I say that in its industries,
we get not only food, but formation of character from
Old Ocean.

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