22 



HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



At a later period, when, with the progress of time, the love 

 of adventure or the needs of commerce had drawn the navigator 

 from the Mediterranean through the Pillars of Hercules into 

 the Atlantic, and when some conception of the immensity of the 

 waters had forced itself upon minds dwarfed by the contracted 

 limits of the inland sea, then the ocean became in good earnest 

 a receptacle of gloomy and appalling horrors, and the marvels 

 narrated by those fortunate enough to return told how deeply 

 the imagination had been stirred by the new scenes opened to 

 their vision. Pytheas, who coasted from Marseilles to the 

 Shetland Isles, and who there obtained a glance at the bleak 

 and wintry desolation of the North Sea, declared, on reaching 

 home, that his further progress was barred by an immense black 

 mollusk, which hung suspended in the air, and in which a ship 

 would be inextricably involved, and where no man could breathe. 

 The menaces of the South were even more appalling than the 

 perils of the North; for he who should venture, it was said, 

 across the equator into the regions of the Sun, would be 

 ehanged into a negro for his rashness: besides, in the popular 

 belief, the waters there were not navigable. Upon the quaint 

 charts of the Middle Ages, a giant located upon the Canary 

 Islands forbade all farther venture westward, by brandishing his 

 formidable club in the path of all vessels coming from the east. 

 Upon these singular maps the concealed and treacherous horrors 

 of the deep were displayed in the grotesque shapes of sea- 

 monsters and distorted water-unicorns, which were represented 

 as careering through space and waylaying the navigator. 

 Even in the time of Columbus, and when the introduction of 

 the compass into European ships should have somewhat dimi- 

 nished the fantastic terrors of the sea, we find that the Arabians, 

 the best geographers of the time, represented the bony and 

 gnarled hand of Satan as rising from the waves of the Sea of 

 Darkness, — as the Atlantic was then called, — ready to seize and 

 ongulf the presumptuous mariner. The sailors of Columbus, 



