20 



HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



when the timid mariner hugged the coast by day and prudently 

 cast anchor by night, to the time when the steamship, appa- 

 rently endowed with reason, or at least guided by instinct, seems 

 almost to dispense with the aid of man, — such a theme seems 

 to offer topics of interest which it would be difficult to find in 

 any other subject. The reader will readily perceive its scope 

 when we have briefly rehearsed what the sea once was to man, 

 and what it now is, — the purpose of the work being to narrate 

 how from the one it has become the other. 



In early times, in the scriptural and classic periods, the great 

 oceans were unknown. Mankind — at least that portion whose 

 history has descended to us — dwelt upon the borders of an in- 

 land, mediterranean sea. They had never heard of such 

 an expanse of water as the Atlantic, and certainly had never 

 seen it. The land-locked sheet which lay spread out at their 

 feet was at all times full of mystery, and often even of dread 

 and secret misgiving. Those who ventured forth upon its 

 bosom came home and told marvellous tales of the sights they 

 had seen and the perils they had endured. Homer's heroes 

 returned to Ithaca with the music of the sirens in their ears and 

 the cruelties of the giants upon their lips. The Argonauts saw 

 whirling rocks implanted in the sea, to warn and repel the 

 approaching navigator ; and, as if the mystery of the waters had 

 tinged with fable even the dry land beyond it, they filled the 

 Caucasus with wild stories of enchantresses, of bulls that breathed 

 fire, and of a race of men that sprang, like a ripened harvest, 

 from the prolific soil. If the ancients were ignorant of the 

 shape of the earth, it was for the very reason that they were 

 ignorant of the ocean. Their geographers and philosophers, 

 whose observations were confined to fragments of Europe, Asia, 

 and Africa, alternately made the world a cylinder, a flat sur- 

 face begirt by water, a drum, a boat, a disk. The legends 

 that sprang from these confused and contradictory notions made 

 the land a scene of marvels and the water an abode of terrors. 



