The Sea (La Mer). Jules Michelet

      BOOK FIRST.

      A GLANCE UPON THE SEAS.

      CHAPTER I.

      THE SEA AS SEEN FROM THE SHORE.

      A gallant Dutch seaman, a cool and stern observer, who has passed his whole life at sea, frankly tells us that his feeling on first seeing the ocean was fear. For all terrestrial animals, water is the non-respirable element, the ever heaving but inevitably asphyxiating enemy; the fatal and eternal barrier between the two worlds. We need not, all things being considered, be at all surprised, if that immense mass of waters which we call the sea, dark and inscrutable in its immense depths, ever and always impresses the human mind with a vague and resistless awe.

      The imaginative Orientals see it only and call it only, as, the Night of the Depths. In all the antique tongues, from India to Ireland, the synonymous or analogous name of the sea is either Night or the Desert.

      Ah! With what a great and a hallowed and a hallowing, with what an at once soothing and subduing melancholy it is that, evening after evening, we see the Sun, that great world's joy, that brilliant, life-quickening, and light-giving Sun of all that lives, fade, sink, die—though so surely to rise and live again! Ah! as that glorious light departs, how tenderly do we think of the human loves that have died from us—of the hour when we, also, shall thus depart from human ken, lost, for the time, to this world—to shine more gloriously in that other world, now dark, distant, unknown, but certain.

      Descend to even a slight depth in the sea, and the beauty and brilliancy of the upper light are lost; you enter into a persistent twilight, and misty and half-lurid haze; a little lower, and even that sinister and eldritch twilight is lost, and all around you is Night, showing nothing, but suggesting everything that darkness—handmaiden of terrible Fancy—can suggest. Above, below, beneath, all around, darkness, utter darkness, save when, from time to time, the swift and gracefully terrible motion of some passing monster of the deep makes "darkness visible" for a brief moment—and, then, that passing gleam leaves you in darkness more dense, more utter, more terrible, than ever. Immense in its extent, enormous in its depth, that mass of waters which covers the greater part of our globe seems, in truth, a great world of shadows and of gloom. And it is that which, above all, at once fascinates and intimidates us. Darkness and Fear! Twin sisters, they! In the early day, the at once timid and unreasoning Childhood of our race, men imagined that where no Light was, neither could there be Life; that in the unfathomed depths, there was a black, lifeless, soundless, Chaos; above, nought but water and gloom—beneath, sand, and shells, the bones of the wrecked mariner, the rich wares of the far off, ruined, and vainly bewailing merchant;—those sad treasures of "that ever-receiving and never-restoring treasury—the Sea."

      The waters of the sea afford us no encouragement by their transparency. Look not there for the seductive, brightly sparkling, and ever-smiling nymph of the fountain. Opaque, heavy, mighty, merciless, your sea is a liquid Polyphemus, a blind giant that cares not, reasons not, feels not—but hits a terribly hard blow. Trust yourself upon that vast and ever-heaving bosom, bold swimmer, and marvellously will you be upheld; the mighty thing that upholds you dominates you, too; you are a mere weak child, upheld, indeed, for the instant by a giant-hand—in another moment that giant-hand may smite you with a giant's fatal force.

      Her anchor once tripped, who can tell whither the good ship may be urged by some sudden wind, or some unsuspected but irresistible current? Thus it was that our northern fishermen, not only without their intention, but even in spite of it, discovered polar America, and supped full of the horrors of funereal Greenland. Not a nation upon the earth but has its tales and traditions of the sea. Homer and the Arabian Nights, have handed down to us a goodly number of those frightful legends, of shoals and tempests and of calms no less murderous than tempests—those calms during which the hardiest sailor agonizes, moans, loses all courage and all hope in the tortures of the hours, days, haply even weeks, when, with cracked lip and blood-shotten eye, he has around him, heaving upward and sinking downward, but never progressing a cable's length,

      "Water, water, everywhere,

       But not a drop to drink."

      Thrilling and saddening legends have all our old writers handed down to us of the Anthropophagi, those loathsome man-eaters, and of the Leviathan, the Kraken, the great sea-serpent, &c. The name given to the great African desert—The Abode of Terror—may very justly be transferred to the sea. The boldest sailors, Phœnicians and Carthaginians, the conquering Arabs who aspired to encircle and grasp the whole world, seduced by what they heard of the Hesperides and the land of gold, sailed out of the Mediterranean to the wide ocean, but soon were glad to seek their port again. The gloomy line eternally covered with clouds and mist which they found keeping their stern watch before the equator, intimidated them. They lay to; they hesitated; from man to man ran the murmur "It is the Sea of Darkness—and, then, back went they to port and, there told to wondering landsmen what wonders they had seen, and what horrors they had imagined." Woe to him who shall persist in his sacrilegious espionage of that dread region! On one of those weird and far isles stands a sternly-threatening Colossus, whose sempiternal menace is—"Thus far thou hast come—farther thou shalt not go!"

      Childish as we may think those terrors of the long by-gone ages they really were much the same as the emotions which we may any day see evinced by an inland-born novice who for the first time looks upon the sea. And not merely man, but all animals, experience the same surprise, the same shock, when suddenly brought face to face with the mighty water-world. Even at ebb tide, when the water so gently and so lovingly caresses, as it leaves, that shore to which it shall so boisterously return, your horse quite evidently likes it not; he shudders, balks, snorts—and very often bolts from it at the very top of his speed. Your dog recoils, howls, and, after his own canine fashion, returns insult for insult to the waves that annoy and terrify him; he never concludes a real peace with the element which to him seems less doubtful than positively hostile. A certain traveller tells us that the Kamtschatkan dogs, accustomed as they are to the sight of the sea, are nevertheless irritated and alarmed by it. During the long nights immense troops of them howl back to the howling waves that break, in their furious might, upon the iron-bound shores of the northern ocean.

      The natural introduction, the portico, the ante-room, of the Ocean, which prepares us thoroughly to appreciate its vast and melancholy extent, is to be found in the dreary course of the rivers of north-western France, the vast sands of the South, or the sad and rarely trodden Landes of Brittany. All who approach the sea by any of those routes are greatly impressed by that intermediate region. All along the rivers, there is a seemingly infinite chaos of roots and stumps, of willows and the like water-loving vegetation, and the waters becoming more and more brackish, at length become absolutely salt—the veritable sea-water. In the Landes, on the other hand, as we approach the sea, we have a preliminary and preparatory sea of low-growing and coarse shrubs, broom, and bushes. Proceed a league or two, and you see sickly and drooping trees which seem, after their manner, to tell you how much they suffer from the blighting breath of their near neighbor, and great tyrant, the Sea. Evidently, if they were not held there