Then, after a few centuries, the English woke up again to the sea most furiously, in the turn of the Middle Ages. The sea moves them less and less later on. They half forget it. And again, 350 years ago, it catches them again, and they became great captains and have so remained, the English.
This makes me think of another thing, which is the difference in the way the sea has affected the literature of one seafaring nation and another. And there again I can find no explanation. The poems of Homer (which were not, if I may humbly suggest it, written by a committee, but by one man, for it is a rare and individual thing to write a good poem, and these poems are good) are not so much influenced by the sea as are themselves the sea. The Iliad and the Odyssey are epics of the sea—yes, not only the Odyssey, but the Iliad too. The sea comes in all the time and mixes up with the story in a way it does with no other story, not even with the story of Tristan. The moment a word or two on the sea comes into the Iliad the phrase wakes up and moves, and, what is more, there you get exact physical description, physical description by a man who has sailed. In most of Homer what is vivid is either a knowledge of what was in men's minds, or a thing told to the writer by others, or the gentle contemplation of some art of which he was himself ignorant and which seemed to him marvellous. But in the matter of the sea it is quite another thing. The names of the Nereids, of the "Nereids as many as there are in the depths of the salt," from the thirty-eighth to the forty-eighth line, those ten lines of marvel, are the names of waves, and of waves seen by the eye of a man. They are not at second hand. They are all the aspects and all the revelations of the wave.
I am told also that the poet Hesiod gave a complete catalogue of these same ladies, but did it rather less well. Homer has a heavenly roll-call of them, and the best of their names, in my unfortunate judgment, is "Limnoreia," "the wave that runs along the shore." For I also have seen Her, gently running in easy weather along the half-ebb glistening sand, a distant shore. But all their names are at once beautiful and true.
Then also, how exact are his words for the noise of a boat speaking through the depths of the water! And what an epithet for the sea is "cloud-shadowed," or, for the matter of that, "wine dark," though it is true the same word is granted to oxen.
But the thing is not to be argued. You feel it or you do not. I think that conception of horses running on wave-tops was written by a man who had often sailed the sea.
I am tempted to go on with the theme. But if I went further I should be tedious, and perhaps I am so already, for all I know.
To continue, therefore (for if you are being tedious you cannot let go, any more than a tired horse can stop running lest it fall); there are cities made for the sea, and yet they allow themselves to be visited, and do not themselves attempt the sea at all. While there are other cities which you would think long fate and suffering would cure of desperate attempts to use the sea, and yet they use it in the teeth of fate; among which last I count—though they are not cities at all, but only little towns—my own small harbours of the Channel.
These holes in the land are for the most part quite unsuited to the business of navigation. But how gallantly they keep it up! I know one of them where there forms with regularity every few weeks an enormous island of shingle right in the fairway. It is a harbour out of which no man can come (without a tug) except once in twelve hours on the top of the tide. And even so that huge mass of shingle is piled up plumb in the mouth of it by the south-west wind after every gale, and the gales come every week in winter. Yet do these hearty people dredge that shingle away year after year, and they have done so, I suppose, for two thousand years, rather than forego their occupation of the sea.
What sort of people do you suppose were those fellows of the Morbihan who produced vast ships rigged with iron chains, and boasting leathern sails, yet having nowhere, you would say, whither they could trade? The indomitable Romans defeated them at last in their own waters a little north of St. Nazaire, under Quiberon; but what a fight they put up! I think they must have gone to sea for the mere love of it, these men of the Morbihan, as do their descendants to this day. For they are all poor men and get little from their occupation beyond dreams and death.
I know a town also with which the name of Columbus is associated, and some even say (falsely) that his family came from there. It is a town about a day's march north of Vigo, on the Galician coast, and is called "The Green Port," lying at the head of a land-locked bay. One would have thought that Vigo close by, with its incomparable harbour, would have killed it. But, on the contrary, it flourishes because it is in love with the sea. It is the neatest, whitest little town in the world.