With new sensations of interest, we reached the China Sea. The Bashee group of Islands marks one entrance to it from the Pacific. We passed close to the island of Belintang. Here I had a first imaginary glimpse of the heathen world in a singular spectacle, which I would have said was an illusion had not all whom I asked to notice it agreed that it was a remarkable object.
About sixty feet from the island, in the water, stands a high rock, in the shape of a flattened ellipse, wholly isolated. Its base looks as though it were stuccoed with large sea-shells, the grooved side of each facing you. One half of the elevation is shapeless, but the other half is as good an image of a monstrous idol god as can be found.
“What seemed a head,
The likeness of a kingly crown had on,”
or, perhaps, a mitre or a fillet. The eyes are like the eyes of a plaster bust, made by two protuberances of the rock, volcanic blisters; and over the whole figure seems to be thrown a rude drapery, which a little fancy converts into a robe. The whole effect is that of a huge idol god. There it stands at the gateway of the China Sea; and, if superstition had employed sculptors and architects to set up an image of Buddha there, no better result could have been achieved. No hand, however, founded this on the seas and established it on the floods. There is a marine picturesqueness about the rock as a whole which is very fine. I am thus minute in the description, hoping that some who read these pages will, on seeing the Bashee image, make a more extended description.
ATLANTIC OCEAN SCENERY DESIRED.
The mind soon tires of tranquil scenes. On the way from the Sandwich Islands to China I had my fill of tranquility. I found myself yearning for a gale; felt great respect for the Gulf Stream, with waves as high as the main yard; longed to see breakers; wondered why the sea would not occasionally come over our rail. There seemed to be talent about the Rio de la Plata; Cape Horn was true genius; the North Atlantic a giant with a progeny in its own image. The halcyon waters of the Pacific impressed me as amiable but weak; their countenance wore a perpetual smile; they looked as though they believed themselves to have reached a sinless state. You long to see their temper tested; you would be willing to see them ruffled, even angry; hear them lift their voice out of its monotony with upbraiding, rather than be so unnaturally gentle. Does the sea have waves of mettle which it employs in hazardous enterprises, trusting them, and only them, in daring feats? I came to feel that there were waters which bore a character for hardihood, nurtured by tempests, voiced for symphonious concerts with typhoons, not counting their lives dear unto them but dying on the high places of the field. Let me see them once more! When will this trade wind region come to an end, and the sea utter its voice and lift up its hands on high? I felt that the sea reverenced greatness, honored its waters which stormed impregnable rocks and poured out their lives at the call of duty. These lines came to me, in this connection:
ELECT WAVES.
The sea has gallant troops, adventurous waves;
Tell me, intrepid mariner, where are they?