THE HIGHLAND LIGHT. 
143 
but easier when it blowed off. This undertow, meeting 
the next surface wave on the bar which itself has made, 
forms part of the dam over which the latter breaks, as 
over an upright wall. The sea thus plays with the land 
holding a sand-bar in its mouth awhile before it swallows 
it, as a cat plays with a mouse; but the fatal gripe is 
sure to come at last. The sea sends its rapacious east 
wind to rob the land, but before the former has got far 
with its prey, the land sends its honest west wind to re¬ 
cover some of its own. But, according to Lieutenant 
Davis, the forms, extent, and distribution of sand-bars 
and banks are principally determined, not by winds and 
waves, but by tides. 
Our host said that you would be surprised if you were 
on the beach when the wind blew a hurricane directly 
on to it, to see that none of the drift-wood came ashore, 
but all was carried directly northward and parallel with 
the shore as fast as a man can walk, by the inshore cur¬ 
rent, which sets strongly in that direction at flood tide. 
The strongest swimmers also are carried along with it, 
and never gain an inch toward the beach. Even a large 
rock has been moved half a mile northward along the 
beach. He assured us that the sea was never still on 
the back side of the Cape, but ran commonly as high as 
your head, so that a great part of the time you could 
not launch a boat there, and even in the calmest weather 
the waves run six or eight feet up the beach, though 
then you could get off on a plgKik. Champlain and 
Pourtrincourt could not land here in 1606, on account of 
the swell {la houlle)^ yet the savages came off to them 
in a canoe. In the Sieur de la Borde’s “ Relation des 
Caraibes,” my edition of which was published at Am¬ 
sterdam in 1711, at page 530 he says: — 
