The bodies of men, together with those of the inferior animals, are occasionally washed down during river inundations into seas and lakes. (See pp. 726-728.) Belzoni witnessed a flood on the Nile in September, 1818, where, although the river rose only three feet and a half above its ordinary level, several villages, with some hundreds of men, women, and children, were swept away.[1079] It was before mentioned that a rise of six feet of water in the Ganges, in 1763, was attended with a much greater loss of lives. (See above, p. 278.)
In the year 1771, when the inundations in the north of England appear to have equalled the floods of Morayshire in 1829, a great number of houses and their inhabitants were swept away by the rivers Tyne, Can, Wear, Tees, and Greta; and no less than twenty-one bridges were destroyed in the courses of these rivers. At the village of Bywell the flood tore the dead bodies and coffins out of the churchyard, and bore them away, together with many of the living inhabitants. During the same tempest an immense number of cattle, horses, and sheep, were also transported to the sea, while the whole coast was covered with the wreck of ships. Four centuries before (in 1338), the same district had been visited by a similar continuance of heavy rains, followed by disastrous floods, and it is not improbable that these catastrophes may recur periodically, though at uncertain intervals. As the population increases, and buildings and bridges are multiplied, we must expect the loss of lives and property to augment.[1080]
Fossilization of human bodies in the bed of the sea.—If to the hundreds of human bodies committed to the deep in the way of ordinary burial we add those of individuals lost by shipwrecks, we shall find that in the course of a single year, a great number of human remains are consigned to the subaqueous regions. I shall hereafter advert to a calculation by which it appears that more than five hundred British vessels alone, averaging each a burthen of about 120 tons, are wrecked, and sink to the bottom, annually. Of these the crews for the most part escape, although it sometimes happens that all perish. In one great naval action several thousand individuals sometimes share a watery grave.
Many of these corpses are instantly devoured by predaceous fish, sometimes before they reach the bottom; still more frequently when they rise again to the surface, and float in a state of putrefaction. Many decompose on the floor of the ocean, where no sediment is thrown down upon them; but if they fall upon a reef where corals and shells are becoming agglutinated into a solid rock, or subside where the delta of a river is advancing, they may be preserved for an incalculable series of ages.
Often at the distance of a few hundred feet from a coral reef, where wrecks are not unfrequent, there are no soundings at the depth of many hundred fathoms. Canoes, merchant vessels, and ships of war, may have sunk and have been enveloped, in such situations, in calcareous sand and breccia, detached by the breakers from the summit of a submarine mountain. Should a volcanic eruption happen to cover such remains with ashes and sand, and a current of lava be afterwards poured over them, the ships and human skeletons might remain uninjured beneath the superincumbent mass, like the houses and works of art in the subterranean cities of Campania. Already many human remains may have been thus preserved beneath formations more than a thousand feet in thickness; for, in some volcanic archipelagoes, a period of thirty or forty centuries might well be supposed sufficient for such an accumulation. It was stated, that at the distance of about forty miles from the base of the delta of the Ganges there is an elliptical space about fifteen miles in diameter, where soundings of from 100 to 300 fathoms sometimes fail to reach the bottom. (See above, p. 279.) As during the flood season the quantity of mud and sand poured by the great rivers into the Bay of Bengal is so great that the sea only recovers its transparency at the distance of sixty miles from the coast, this depression must be gradually shoaling, especially as during the monsoons, the sea loaded with mud and sand, is beaten back in that direction towards the delta. Now, if a ship or human body sink to the bottom in such a spot, it is by no means improbable that it may become buried under a depth of a thousand feet of sediment in the same number of years.
Even on that part of the floor of the ocean to which no accession of drift matter is carried (a part which probably constitutes, at any given period, by far the larger proportion of the whole submarine area), there are circumstances accompanying a wreck which favor the conservation of skeletons. For when the vessel fills suddenly with water, especially in the night, many persons are drowned between decks and in their cabins, so that their bodies are prevented from rising again to the surface. The vessel often strikes upon an uneven bottom, and is overturned; in which case the ballast, consisting of sand, shingle, and rock, or the cargo, frequently composed of heavy and durable materials, may be thrown down upon the carcasses. In the case of ships of war, cannon, shot, and other warlike stores, may press down with their weight the timbers of the vessel as they decay, and beneath these and the metallic substances the bones of man may be preserved.
Number of wrecked vessels.—When we reflect on the number of curious monuments consigned to the bed of the ocean in the course of every naval war from the earliest times, our conceptions are greatly raised respecting the multiplicity of lasting memorials which man is leaving of his labors. During our last great struggle with France, thirty-two of our ships of the line went to the bottom in the space of twenty-two years, besides seven 50-gun ships, eighty-six frigates, and a multitude of smaller vessels. The navies of the other European powers, France, Holland, Spain, and Denmark, were almost annihilated during the same period, so that the aggregate of their losses must have many times exceeded that of Great Britain. In every one of these ships were batteries of cannon constructed of iron or brass, whereof a great number had the dates and places of their manufacture inscribed upon them in letters cast in metal. In each there were coins of copper, silver, and often many of gold, capable of serving as valuable historical monuments; in each were an infinite variety of instruments of the arts of war and peace; many formed of materials, such as glass and earthenware, capable of lasting for indefinite ages when once removed from the mechanical action of the waves, and buried under a mass of matter which may exclude the corroding action of sea-water. The quantity, moreover, of timber which is conveyed from the land to the bed of the sea by the sinking of ships of a large size is enormous, for it is computed that 2000 tons of wood are required for the building of one 74-gun ship; and reckoning fifty oaks of 100 years growth to the acre, it would require forty acres of oak forest to build one of these vessels.[1081]
It would be an error to imagine that the fury of war is more conducive than the peaceful spirit of commercial enterprise to the accumulation of wrecked vessels in the bed of the sea. From an examination of Lloyd's lists, from the year 1793 to the commencement of 1829, Captain W. H. Smyth ascertained that the number of British vessels alone lost during that period amounted on an average to no less than one and a half daily; an extent of loss which would hardly have been anticipated, although we learn from Moreau's tables that the number of merchant vessels employed at one time, in the navigation of England and Scotland, amounts to about twenty thousand, having one with another a mean burthen of 120 tons.[1082] My friend, Mr. J. L. Prevost, also informs me that on inspecting Lloyd's list for the years 1829, 1830, and 1831, he finds that no less than 1953 vessels were lost in those three years, their average tonnage being about 150 tons, or in all nearly 300,000 tons, being at the enormous rate of 100,000 tons annually of the merchant vessels of one nation only. This increased loss arises, I presume, from increasing activity in commerce.
Out of 551 ships of the royal navy lost to the country during the period above mentioned, only 160 were taken or destroyed by the enemy, the rest having either stranded or foundered, or having been burnt by accident; a striking proof that the dangers of our naval warfare, however great, may be far exceeded by the storm, the shoal, the lee-shore, and all the other perils of the deep.[1083]
Durable nature of many of their contents.—Millions of silver dollars and other coins have been sometimes submerged in a single ship, and on these, when they happen to be enveloped in a matrix capable of protecting them from chemical changes, much information of historical interest will remain inscribed, and endure for periods as indefinite as have the delicate markings of zoophytes or lapidified plants in some of the ancient secondary rocks. In almost every large ship, moreover, there are some precious stones set in seals, and other articles of use and ornament composed of the hardest substances in nature, on which letters and various images are carved—engravings which they may retain when included in subaqueous strata, as long as a crystal preserves its natural form.