Naturally, the great sea is of great general regularity; subject to great periodical and uniform movements. Tempests are the occasional and transient violences into which the sea is lashed by the winds, by electric power, or by certain violent crises of evaporation. They are the mere accidents which reveal themselves on the surface, but tell us nothing about the real, the mysterious personality of the sea. It would be sad reasoning were we to judge of a human temperament by the ravings of a brain-fevered man; and by what better right do we judge the sea on account of the momentary and merely superficial movements which probably do not make themselves felt to the depth of a very few hundred feet? Everywhere that the sea is very deep, we may fairly assume that she is constantly calm, ever producing, ever nourishing, her quite literally countless brood. She takes no note of those petty accidents which occur only at the surface. The mighty hosts of her children that live, as we cannot too often repeat, in the depths of her peaceful night, and rise at the most only once a year within the influence of light and storm must love their great, calm, prolific mother as Harmony itself.
But these surface-disturbances of the great mother Ocean have too serious a bearing upon the life of man, to allow of his sparing any pains towards obtaining a thorough comprehension of them. And to obtain that comprehension is no easy matter; in making the necessary observations, the boldest of us is a little apt to lose his cool presence of mind. Even the most serious descriptions give only vague and general features, scarcely anything of the marked individuality which makes every tempest a thing of originality, a thing sui generis, the unforeseen result of a thousand unknown circumstances, potent in their influence, but obscure far beyond our power of search. He who safely gazes from his safe watch-tower on the shore, may, no doubt, see more clearly, as he is not distracted by his own danger. But for that very reason, he cannot so well appreciate the tempest in its grand and terrible entirety, as he can who is in the very centre of its rage and of its power, and looks in every direction upon that terrible panorama!
We mere landsmen are indebted to the bold navigators for at least the courtesy of giving what old Chaucer calls "faith and full credence" to what they tell us about what they have actually seen and suffered. It seems to me that there is exceedingly bad taste in that sceptical levity which men of the study, those stay-at-home travellers occasionally exhibit in their criticisms of what seamen tell us, for instance, about the height of the waves. They laugh at the seaman who tells us of waves a hundred feet in height. Engineers affect to be able to measure the tempest, and to assure us that twenty feet is the utmost height of a wave. On the other hand, an excellent observer assures us, on the testimony of his own sight, that standing in safety on the shore, observing calmly, and in absence of all distraction, he has seen waves that would overtop the towers of Notre Dame, and the heights of Montmartre. It is abundantly evident that these opposing witnesses speak of two totally different things; and hence their flat contradiction. If we speak of the lower bed of the tempest, of those long bowling waves which even in their fury preserve a certain regularity, probably the calculation of the engineers is pretty exact. With their rounded crests alternating with depressed valleys, it is likely enough that their utmost height does not greatly exceed twenty or five-and-twenty feet. But your chopping sea, where cross wave furiously hurls itself against cross wave, rises far higher. In their fierce collision they hurl each other to a quite prodigious height, and fall with a crushing weight, assailed by which the stoutest craft would open her seams, and go bodily down into the dark depths of the angry sea. Nothing so heavy as sea water, in those mighty shocks, those enormous falls of which sailors truthfully speak, and of which none but those who have witnessed them, can calculate the tremendous greatness and power.
On a certain day, not of tempest but of emotion, when old Ocean indulged only in wild and graceful gaieties, I was tranquilly seated upon a beautiful headland of some eighty feet in height, and I enjoyed myself in watching the waves as upon a line of a quarter of a league they rushed in as if to assail my rocky seat, the green crest of each wave rounding and rearing, wave urging wave as though in actual and intelligent racing. Now and then a sea would strike so that my very headland seemed to tremble, and burst as with a thunder clap at my very feet. Advancing, retiring, returning, breaking, the wildly sportive waves were for a long time quite admirably regular in their movements. But on a sudden this regularity was at an end. Some wild cross wave from the west suddenly struck my great regular and hitherto well behaved wave from the south. Such was the crash that in an instant the very sky above me was darkened by the blinding spray; and on my lofty promontory I was covered, not with the many colored and fleeting mist, but with a huge, dark, massive wave, which fell on me, heavy, crushing, and thoroughly saturating. Ah! Just then I should very much have liked the company of those very learned Academicians and ultra positive Engineers, who are so well posted up in the combats of the Ocean, and so very certain that the utmost height of a wave is just twenty feet! No; tranquilly seated in our studies we should not lightly question the veracity of so many bold, hardy, and resolved men, who have looked Death in the face too often to be guilty of the childish vanity of exaggerating the dangers which they have often braved—and are ready to brave again. Nor should we ever oppose the calm narratives of ordinary navigators on the great and well known courses to the animated and often thrilling pictures occasionally presented to us by the bold discoverers who seek the very reefs and shoals which the common herd of sailors so carefully avoid. Cook, Peron, Durville—discoverers such as these incurred very real dangers in the then unfrequented Australian and Coraline seas, compelled as they were to dare the continually shifting sand bank, and the conflicting currents which raise such frightful commotions in the narrow channels.
"Without tempest, with only rollers to deal with, and with a moderate wind right abaft, a cross wave will give your craft such a shock, that the ship's bell will strike, and if these big rollers with their sweeping motion, continue for any time, your masts will go by the board, your seams will open—you will be a wreck." So says the experienced Durville—gallant sailor, if ever there was one. And he tells us that he has himself seen waves from eighty to a hundred feet high. "These waves," he says, "only boarded us with their mere crests, or the craft must have been swamped. As it was she staggered, and then for an instant stood still, as though too terrified to understand what was the matter. The men upon the deck were for moments completely submerged. For four long hours that night this horrible chaos endured; and those hours seemed an eternity to turn one's hair grey. Such are the southern tempests, so terrible that even ashore the natives have a presentiment of their approach, and shelter themselves in caves."
However exact and interesting these descriptions may be, I do not care to copy them; still less would I be bold enough to invent descriptions of what I have not seen. I will only speak briefly about tempests which I have seen, and which have, as I believe, taught me the different characteristics of the Ocean and the Mediterranean.
During half a year that I passed at about two leagues from Genoa, on the prettiest shore in the world, at Nervi, I had in that sheltered spot but one little sudden tempest, but while it lasted it raged with a quite wonderful fury. As I could not, quite so well as I wished, watch it from my window, I went out and along the narrow lanes that separate the palaces, I ventured down, not indeed, to the beach, for in reality, there is none worthy the name, but to a ledge of black, volcanic rock, which forms the shore, a narrow path, often not exceeding three feet in width, and as often overhanging the sea at varying heights of from thirty up to sixty feet. One could not see far out; the spray continually raised by the whirlwind, drew the curtain too closely too allow of one's seeing far, or seeing much, but all that was to be seen was sufficiently frightful. The raggedness, the salient and cutting angles, of this iron-bound coast, compelled the tempest to make incredible efforts, to take tremendous leaps, as, foaming and howling, it broke upon the pitiless rocks. The tumult was absurd, mad; there was nothing connected, nothing regular; discordant thunders were mingled or followed by sharp shrill shrieks, like those of the steam engine; piercing shrieks, against which one only in vain tried to stop his ears. Stunned by this wild scene, which assailed sight and hearing at once, I steadied myself against a projecting wall of rock, and thus comparatively sheltered, I was better able to study the grandly furious strife. Short and chopping were the waves, and the fiercest of the strife was on this side where the sea broke on the ragged, yet sharply pointed rocks, as they rose boldly above, and ran out far beneath the waves, in long, shelving, reefs. The eye, as well as the ear was vexed, for a blinding snow was falling, its dazzling whiteness heightened by contrast with the dark waves into which it fell.
On the whole, I felt that the Sea had less to do than the land in rendering the scene terrible; it is exactly the contrary on the Ocean.