What chiefly rendered those ancient heroes so sublime was their very ignorance, their blind courage, their desperate resolution. They knew but little of the sea, and of the Heavens they knew still less; the compass, their only instructor and their only reliance, they dared the most alarming phenomena without being able even to guess at their causes. They had none of our instruments which speak to us so plainly and so unmistakably. They went blindfolded towards, and fearlessly into, the uttermost darkness. They, themselves, confess that they feared, but also, they would not yield. The sea's tempests, the air's whirlwinds and water spouts, the tragic dialogues of those two Oceans, of air and water, the striking, and, not so long since, ominous phenomena of the Aurora Borealis, all this strange and wild phantasmagoria seemed to them the fury of irritated Nature, a veritable strife of Demons against which man could dare all—as they did—but could do what they also did—nothing.
During three centuries but little progress was made. Read Cook, read Peron, and you will readily comprehend how difficult, uncertain, and perilous was navigation, even up to an hour so near our own.
Cook, that man of immense courage, but also, of most lively imagination, himself confesses, as his Journal testifies, that he knew how uncertain and perilous was the profession of the seaman even so lately as his day. In his Journal, we read; "The dangers are so great, that I venture to say, that no one will dare to go farther than I have gone."
Now it is precisely since then that voyages have become, at once, more distant, more regular, and less dangerous.
A great age, a Titanic age, the 19th century, has coolly, intelligently, and sternly noted all those phenomena which the old navigators braved, but did not examine. In this century it is that we, for the first time, have dared to look the Tempest squarely, and fearlessly, and scrutinizingly, in the eyes. Its premonitory symptoms, its characteristics, its results;—each and all have been calmly watched, and carefully and systematically registered; and, then, from that registration, necessarily come explanation and generalization, and thence, the grand, bold—and, as our not very distant ancestors would have said, impious system—the Law of Storms.
So! What we took, what we in the old, bold, but blind day, took for matter of caprice, is really, after all, reducible to a system, obedient to a Law! So! then, those terrible facts, that made the brain swim, the boldest quail, because they fought shadows and walked in the darkness, so! then, those terrible facts have a certain regularity of recurrence, and the seaman, resolute and strong, calmly considers whether he cannot oppose to those regular attacks a defence no less regular. In brief, if the Tempest has its science, can we not create and use an art? An art not merely to survive the Tempest but even to make it useful?
But our science and our art cannot be called into life and activity until we shall have laid aside our old and ill founded notion that Tempests are caused by "the caprice of the winds." Attentive observation has taught us that the winds are not capricious, that they are the accident, sometimes, also, the agent of the Tempest, but that, generally speaking, the Tempest is an electrical phenomenon, and often occurs in the absence of gales.
Romme (brother of the Conventionalist, principal author of the Calendar) laid the foundations of our very important science. English seamen had remarked that in the tempests in the Indian Seas, they sailed for days together, and yet made no headway. Romme collected and systematized all their observations, and pointed out the important fact that the same occurred in the tempests of China, Africa, and the Antilles. He also first pointed out that rectilinear winds are of rare occurrence, and that, usually, tempests have a circular character,—are, literally, a whirl wind. The great whirling tempests of the United States in 1815, and that of 1821 (the year of the great eruption of Hecla) when the winds blew from all points to a common centre, aroused philosophical attention, both in America and Europe. Brande, in Germany, and at the same time, Redfield in New York, were the next after Romme in profiting by these facts to lay down the law that, generally, the tempest is a Whirl-wind, advancing, and at the same time revolving on its own base. In 1838, the English engineer, Reid, being sent to Barbadoes after the too celebrated tempest which killed fifteen hundred people, ascertained, with mathematical precision, this double movement of advance and rotation. But his still more important discovery was that in our northern hemisphere the tempest turns from right to left, that is to say from East to North, and round the compass, back to East; while in southern tempests it turns from left to right. A most important fact to regulate the seaman's course.
Reid very rightfully gave his book the bold title of—"On the Law of Storms."
But it was the law of their Motion, not the explanation of their cause; it told nothing, either, of what Storms do, or of what they are.