122 Idle Days in Patagonia. 
that of the landsman. Melville relates an anecdote 
of an old sailor who swooned from terror at the 
sight of an ocean white with the foam of breakers 
among which the ship was driven. He afterwards 
declared that it was not the thought of the danger, 
for to danger he was accustomed, but the whiteness 
of the sea that overcame him. And to his animistic 
mind that whiteness was nothing but the sign 
A milky Sea. 
Ma 
of ocean’s wrath—the sight of its tremendous 
passion and deadly purpose proved too appalling. 
There is no doubt that the conditions of the 
sailor’s life tend to bring out and strengthen the 
latent animism that is in all of us; the very ship he 
navigates is to his mind alive and intelligent, how 
much more the ocean, which, even to landsmen on 
each return to it after an interval, seems no mere 
expanse of water, but a living conscious thing. It 
