78 OUR HERITAGE THE SEA 



except for an occasional squall, you will not have 

 any really heavy wind. But really that remark 

 only applies to the Atlantic Ocean. As we have 

 already noticed, during the south-west monsoon in 

 the Indian Ocean the wind often rises to gale force, 

 and the weather is emphatically \dirty, while during 

 the north-east monsoon the dreaded hurricane is 

 always probable. But in the North Pacific, either on 

 the American or Asian coasts, the weather is frequently 

 of as bad a character within the tropics as it is with- 

 out, excepting, of course, that it is not so cold. From 

 December to May, on the coasts of Mexico and Central 

 America, the weather is fairly fine, but during the rest 

 of the year it is really bad, and the mariner must be 

 prepared not merely for occasional squalls, but for 

 frequent heavy gales, extending for several hundreds 

 of miles off the coast and often lasting for four or five 

 days, such conditions, in short, as are unknown in 

 the North Atlantic in the same latitudes. And as the 

 weather is on the American coast, so it will be found 

 on the shores of China and the Philippines : unpleasant, 

 uncertain, and gusty, not to say frequently of gale 

 force all of which conditions are only what may be 

 expected from the physical circumstances of environ- 

 ment, but all militating against the right of this great 

 ocean to be called the Pacific. 



When we get farther north all the unpleasant con- 

 ditions of the North Atlantic, the Western ocean of the 

 sailors, are reproduced and accentuated. The great 

 oceanic current which sweeps northward along the 

 Japanese coasts as the Gulf Stream does along the 

 shores of America produces, by reason of its warm 

 waters and the cold atmosphere above, the counterpart 



