The Sea for us has a vivid personality. We know grand old Neptune so well, with his trident and his snowy hair, his dashing waves and his impenetrable depths, his gentle breezes and his furious gales, his moods of mild serenity and his fits of vehement wrath. He has his faults; but in spite of all we love him.
At one time the Sea was for men a type of the Infinite, of the Immeasurable, of the Boundless. We use still the same words; but they have lost some of their force.
In these days the whole ocean has been mapped out from shore to shore. We know exactly what countries lie round each part of it. We can tell how long and how wide it is in any direction. As we stand on the shore, and talk of the “boundless ocean,” we are perfectly well aware that we are looking across to France or Spain, to Germany or Ireland or America. Grand and far-reaching the sea still is, but to us no longer “boundless.”
In ages gone by, those who stood upon the coasts of Palestine or Egypt, of Greece or Italy, gazed towards unknown horizons, across what was to them an illimitable ocean. The civilised world consisted of a few countries bordering the Mediterranean on the east; and those countries shaded off into unexplored barbaric regions. As for the “great Sea,” as they called that which we regard as hardly more than a huge inland lake, it was in their eyes the embodiment of Infinitude.
At a very early period, long before the English Nation was dreamt of, before the Roman Empire had grown into being, while the polished Greek of the future was still a semi-savage, a nation of Ocean-lovers already existed. These were the Phenicians, foreshadowing in their pluck and enterprise the sea-going British of later times.
They, unlike the sailors of other nations, did not merely hug the shore, but ventured out into the trackless ocean. They, unlike the sailors of other nations, did not go upon the sea only in daylight, but they traversed it also in the dark hours of night.
At first they were content with the nearer reaches of the Indian Ocean, and with the more eastern parts of the Mediterranean. But gradually they wandered farther. Colony after colony was planted beyond Egypt, till they reached the Pillars of Hercules, known to us as the Straits of Gibraltar, to face a wild and strange Ocean, full of mystery.
There they made a startling discovery, enough to impress the more thoughtful minds among them. Far to the east, in the “Indian Ocean” of our days, their sailors had been acquainted with high and low tides; while throughout the Mediterranean scarcely any tides existed. But in the open sea, outside the narrow Channel, they found the very same tidal changes as in the eastern ocean.
It is hardly to be supposed that any one of them had a mind of such far-seeing grasp that he should be able to conjecture the grand truth of eastern and western oceans being ONE—swayed by the same influences, governed by the same laws.
A Phenician of those days, catching a glimpse of this truth, would have been worthy to take rank beside our Sir Isaac Newton of after days. They are believed to have observed the coincidence; no doubt with a feeling of wonder; and probably it was to them merely a coincidence. Very little was then understood of the most everyday and commonplace workings of Nature.