It was, therefore, a splendid boast, that the deeds of the English chivalry at Agincourt made Henry's chronicle
———as rich with praise As is the ooze and bottom of the deep With sunken wreck and sumless treasuries
for it is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of ages, be collected together in the bed of the ocean, than will exist at any one time on the surface of the continents.
If our species be of as recent a date as is generally supposed, it will be vain to seek for the remains of man and the works of his hands imbedded in submarine strata, except in those regions where violent earthquakes are frequent, and the alterations of relative level so great, that the bed of the sea may have been converted into land within the historical era. We need not despair, however, of the discovery of such monuments, when those regions which have been peopled by man from the earliest ages, and which are at the same time the principal theatres of volcanic action, shall be examined by the joint skill of the antiquary and geologist.
Power of human remains to resist decay.—There can be no doubt that human remains are as capable of resisting decay as are the harder parts of the inferior animals; and I have already cited the remark of Cuvier, that "in ancient fields of battle the bones of men have suffered as little decomposition as those of horses which were buried in the same grave." (See above, p. 147.) In the delta of the Ganges bones of men have been found in digging a well at the depth of ninety feet;[1084] but as that river frequently shifts its course and fills up its ancient channels, we are not called upon to suppose that these bodies are of extremely high antiquity, or that they were buried when that part of the surrounding delta where they occur was first gained from the sea.
Fossil skeletons of men.—Several skeletons of men, more or less mutilated, have been found in the West Indies, on the north-west coast of the main land of Guadaloupe, in a kind of rock which is known to be forming daily, and which consists of minute fragments of shells and corals, incrusted with a calcareous cement resembling travertin, by which also the different grains are bound together. The lens shows that some of the fragments of coral composing this stone still retain the same red color which is seen in the reefs of living coral which surround the island. The shells belong to species of the neighboring sea intermixed with some terrestrial kinds which now live on the island, and among them is the Bulimus Gaudaloupensis of Férussac. The human skeletons still retain some of their animal matter, and all their phosphate of lime. One of them, of which the head is wanting, may now be seen in the British Museum, and another in the Royal Cabinet at Paris. According to M. König, the rock in which the former is inclosed is harder under the mason's saw and chisel than statuary marble. It is described as forming a kind of glacis, probably an indurated beach, which slants from the steep cliffs of the island to the sea, and is nearly all submerged at high tide.
Similar formations are in progress in the whole of the West Indian archipelago, and they have greatly extended the plain of Cayes in St. Domingo, where fragments of vases and other human works have been found at a depth of twenty feet. In digging wells also near Catania, in Sicily, tools have been discovered in a rock somewhat similar.
Buried ships, canoes, and works of art.—When a vessel is stranded in shallow water, it usually becomes the nucleus of a sand-bank, as has been exemplified in several of our harbors, and this circumstance tends greatly to its preservation. Between the years 1780 and 1790 a vessel from Purbeck, laden with three hundred tons of stone, struck on a shoal off the entrance of Poole harbor and foundered; the crew were saved, but the vessel and cargo remain to this day at the bottom. Since that period the shoal at the entrance of the harbor has so extended itself in a westerly direction towards Peveril Point in Purbeck, that the navigable channel is thrown a mile nearer that point.[1085] The cause is obvious; the tidal current deposits the sediment with which it is charged around any object which checks its velocity. Matter also drifted along the bottom is arrested by any obstacle, and accumulates round it, just as the African sand-winds, before described, raise a small hillock over the carcass of every dead camel exposed on the surface of the desert.
I before alluded to an ancient Dutch vessel, discovered in the deserted channel of the river Rother in Sussex, of which the oak wood was much blackened, but its texture unchanged. (See above, p. 316.) The interior was filled with fluviatile silt, as was also the case in regard to a vessel discovered in a former bed of the Mersey, and another disinterred where the St. Katherine Docks are excavated in the alluvial plain of the Thames. In like manner many ships have been found preserved entire in modern strata, formed by the silting up of estuaries along the southern shores of the Baltic, especially in Pomerania. Between Bromberg and Nakel, for example, a vessel and two anchors in a very perfect state were dug up far from the sea.[1086]
Several vessels have been lately detected half buried in the delta of the Indus, in the numerous deserted branches of that river, far from where the stream now flows. One of these found near Vikkar in Sinde, was 400 tons in burthen, old fashioned, and pierced for fourteen guns, and in a region where it had been matter of dispute whether the Indus had ever been navigable by large vessels.[1087]