THE SIGHTS OF THE SEA.
The “sights” of the sea are not what they are cracked up to be. Some writer, Lowell, I believe, who was seduced into going seaward, had a sovereign contempt for everything connected with the sea. With a charming abandon, he says, “A whale looks like a brown paper parcel—the white stripes down his back resembling the pack-thread.” It is not hard to bring everything down to this standard.
The very motion of the waves, the cause of rhymes unnumbered, becomes terribly monotonous after the first day or two. The rise and relapse of the tinted water glistening in the sun, and blooming lilies on the wave-crest, is a pretty enough sight at first; but before long one longs to shiver the surface of the deep, and calm its eternal restlessness. The waves, wriggling up like a woman’s regrets from nowhere, come dragging themselves over the weary waste, and, plashing back upon each other, spring off on another uneasy remonstrance, until the brain of the looker-on is actually addled. I would have given a great deal to have had the power to have settled the upheaving waters for one hour, just as a schoolboy has the power, and the inclination, too, to break the inexorable calm of a mill-pond by splashing it with rocks. Nothing tires us like sameness; sameness, inactivity, is intolerable.
We saw some flying-fish. And we saw, what I valued much more, on board with us a man who knew a man whose cousin had seen the great sea-serpent. I have a great respect for a man who knows somebody that has seen the sea-serpent. He is a link between us and the supernatural in the ocean. He is a relic, stranded by the shore of science, of that world of wonders that began with the syrens, was modernized with the mermaids, and that ends in the devil-fish and sea-serpent. While he lives I want to be near him. When he dies I want his tooth set on my mantel-piece; it will be a sort of guarantee, under which I can read the weird stories of the old, unexplored ocean, that made boyhood joyous. Give me the sea-serpent as a fact, and I will swear to the mermaids, bet on the phantom ship, and pin my faith to the syrens.