XXII.
It seems to me that no man born and truthful to himself could
declare that he ever saw the sea looking young as the earth looks
young in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with
understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the
immemorial ages had been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of
ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old.
From a distance of years, looking at the remembered aspects of the
storms lived through, it is that impression which disengages itself
clearly from the great body of impressions left by many years of
intimate contact.
If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a
storm. The grayness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows
upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam, tossed about
and waving, like matted white locks, give to the sea in a gale an
appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as
though it had been created before light itself.
Looking back after much love and much trouble, the instinct of
primitive man, who seeks to personify the forces of Nature for his
affection and for his fear, is awakened again in the breast of one
civilized beyond that stage even in his infancy. One seems to have
known gales as enemies, and even as enemies one embraces them in
that affectionate regret which clings to the past.
Gales have their personalities, and, after all, perhaps it is not
strange; for, when all is said and done, they are adversaries whose
wiles you must defeat, whose violence you must resist, and yet with
whom you must live in the intimacies of nights and days.
Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a
navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of
passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon
the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their
nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous
to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen,
good men as they are, cannot hope to know. And, besides, your
modern ship which is a steamship makes her passages on other
principles than yielding to the weather and humouring the sea. She
receives smashing blows, but she advances; it is a slogging fight,
and not a scientific campaign. The machinery, the steel, the fire,
the steam, have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern
fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a
highway. The modern ship is not the sport of the waves. Let us
say that each of her voyages is a triumphant progress; and yet it
is a question whether it is not a more subtle and more human
triumph to be the sport of the waves and yet survive, achieving
your end.
In his own time a man is always very modern. Whether the seamen of
three hundred years hence will have the faculty of sympathy it is
impossible to say. An incorrigible mankind hardens its heart in
the progress of its own perfectability. How will they feel on
seeing the illustrations to the sea novels of our day, or of our
yesterday? It is impossible to guess. But the seaman of the last
generation, brought into sympathy with the caravels of ancient time
by his sailing-ship, their lineal descendant, cannot look upon
those lumbering forms navigating the naive seas of ancient woodcuts
without a feeling of surprise, of affectionate derision, envy, and
admiration. For those things, whose unmanageableness, even when
represented on paper, makes one gasp with a sort of amused horror,
were manned by men who are his direct professional ancestors.
No; the seamen of three hundred years hence will probably be
neither touched nor moved to derision, affection, or admiration.
They will glance at the photogravures of our nearly defunct
sailing-ships with a cold, inquisitive and indifferent eye. Our
ships of yesterday will stand to their ships as no lineal
ancestors, but as mere predecessors whose course will have been run
and the race extinct. Whatever craft he handles with skill, the
seaman of the future shall be, not our descendant, but only our
successor.
