TIDE-RIPS AI>D SEA DRIFT. 407 



latitudes, the variable character of all the currents of the sea — 

 now fast, now slow (§ 401), now running this way, then that — 

 all of which may be taken as so many signs of the tremendous 

 throes which occur in the bosom of the ocean. Sometimes the 

 sea recedes from the shore, as if to gather strength for a great 

 rush against its barriers, as it did when it fled back to join with 

 the earthquake and overwhelm Callao in 1746, and again Lisbon 

 nine years afterward. 



the rate, I sliould judge, of twenty-five miles an hoitr — it assumed the appear- 

 ance of an alabaster wall, or, rather, of a cataract four or five miles across, and 

 about thu-ty feet high, moving bodily onward. Soon it reached the advanced 

 guard of the immense assemblage of vessels awaiting its approach. Kriow'ing 

 that the bore of the Hooghly, which scarcely deserves mention in connection 

 with the one before me, invariably overturned boats which were not skilfully 

 managed, I could not but feel apprehensive for the lives of the floating multi- 

 tude. As the foaming wall of water dashed impetuously onward, they were 

 silenced, all being intensely occupied in keeping their prows towards the wave 

 which threatened to submerge everything afloat ; but they all vaulted as it 

 were to the summit with perfect safety. The spectacle was of great interest 

 when the eagre had passed about one half way among the craft. On one side 

 they were quietly reposing on the surface of the unrufiled stream, while tho^ 

 on the nether portion were pitching and heaving in tumultuous confusion on 

 the flood ; others were scaling with the agility of salmon the formidable cascade. 

 This grand and exciting scene was but of a moment's duration ; it passed up 

 the river in an instant, but from this point with gi-adually diminishing force, 

 size, and velocity, until it ceased to be perceptible, which Chinese accounts re- 

 present to be eighty miles distant from the city. From ebb to flood tide the 

 change was almost instantaneous ; a slight flood continued after the jDassage of 

 the wave, but it soon began to ebb. Having lost my memoranda, I am obliged 

 to write from recollection. My impression is that the fall was about twenty 

 feet ; the Chinese say that the rise and fall is sometimes forty feet at Hang-chow, 

 The maximum rise and fall at spring-tides is probably at the mouth of the river, 

 or upper part of the bay, where the eagre is hardly discoverable. In the Bay of 

 Fundy, where the tides rush in with amazing velocity, there is at one place a 

 rise of seventy feet ; but there the magnificent phenomenon in question does 

 not appear to be known at all. It is not, therefore, where tides attain their 

 gi-eatest rapidity, or maximum rise and fall, that this wave is met with, but 

 where a river and its estuary both present a peculiar configiiration. 



" Dryden's definition of an eagre, appended in a note to the verse above 

 quoted from the Threnodia Atigustalis, is, 'a tide swelling above another tide,* 

 which he says he had himself observed in the Eiver Trent. Such, according to 

 Chinese oral accounts, is the character of the Tsien-Tang tides— a wave of con- 

 siderable height rushes suddenly in from the bay, which is soon followed by one 

 much larger. Other accounts represent three successive waves riding in ; hence 

 the name of the temple mentioned, that of the Tliree Waves. Both here and 

 on the Hooghly I observed but one wave ; my attention, however, was not par- 



