Ocean's Story
Triumphs of Thirty Centuries Maritime Adventures, Achievements, Explorations, Discoveries and Inventions
9781465638779
281 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
A history of the ocean from the Flood to the Atlantic Telegraph, with a parallel sketch of ship-building from the Ark to the Iron Clad; a narrative of the rise of commerce, from the days when Solomon's ships traded with Ophir, to the time when the steam whistle is heard on every open sea; a consecutive chronicle of the progress of navigation, from the day when the timid mariner hugged the coast by day and prudently cast anchor by night, to the time when the steamship, apparently endowed with reason, or at least guided by instinct, seems almost to dispense with the aid of man,—such a theme seems to offer topics of interest which it would be difficult to find in any other subject. The reader will readily perceive its scope when we have briefly rehearsed what the sea once was to man, and what it now is,—the purpose of the work being to narrate how from the one it has become the other. In early times, in the scriptural and classic periods, the great oceans were unknown. Mankind—at least that portion whose history has descended to us—dwelt upon the borders of an inland, mediterranean sea. They had never heard of such an expanse of water as the Atlantic, and certainly had never seen it. The land-locked sheet which lay spread out at their feet was at all times full of mystery, and often even of dread and secret misgiving. Those who ventured forth upon its bosom came home and told marvellous tales of the sights they had seen and the perils they had endured. Homer's heroes returned to Ithaca with the music of the sirens in their ears and the cruelties of the giants upon their lips. The Argonauts saw whirling rocks implanted in the sea, to warn and repel the approaching navigator; and, as if the mystery of the waters had tinged with fable even the dry land beyond it, they filled the Caucasus with wild stories of enchantresses, of bulls that breathed fire, and of a race of men that sprang, like a ripened harvest, from the prolific soil. If the ancients were ignorant of the shape of the earth, it was for the very reason that they were ignorant of the ocean. Their geographers and philosophers, whose observations were confined to fragments of Europe, Asia, and Africa, alternately made the world a cylinder, a flat surface begirt by water, a drum, a boat, a disk. The legends that sprang from these confused and contradictory notions made the land a scene of marvels and the water an abode of terrors. At a later period, when, with the progress of time, the love of adventure or the needs of commerce had drawn the navigator from the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic, and when some conception of the immensity of the waters had forced itself upon minds dwarfed by the contracted limits of the inland sea, then the ocean became in good earnest a receptacle of gloomy and appalling horrors, and the marvels narrated by those fortunate enough to return told how deeply the imagination had been stirred by the new scenes opened to their vision. Pytheas, who coasted from Marseilles to the Shetland Isles, and who there obtained a glance at the bleak and wintry desolation of the North Sea, declared, on reaching home, that his further progress was barred by an immense black mollusk, which hung suspended in the air, and in which a ship would be inextricably involved, and where no man could breathe. The menaces of the South were even more appalling than the perils of the North; for he who should venture, it was said, across the equator into the regions of the Sun, would be changed into a negro for his rashness: besides, in the popular belief, the waters there were not navigable. Upon the quaint charts of the Middle Ages, a giant located upon the Canary Islands forbade all farther venture westward, by brandishing his formidable club in the path of all vessels coming from the east.
