Calculations are somewhat misleading at times. For instance, when we were near the Aleutian Islands, I chanced to compare the records of that day's run as posted in the first saloon with those posted in the second saloon. The first read 4,240 miles from Yokohama; the second, 4,235 miles. Japanese handling of figures made the prow of the ship five miles nearer its destination than the stern. Japanese historians also have a tendency to make such innocent mistakes in their imperialistic calculations. Japan's feet do not seem to be able to keep pace with her desires.
As though to investigate this phenomenon, a little bird,—slightly larger than a sparrow, with the same kind of feathered back, but with a white breast, flitted down upon the deck before me,—and began hopping about. It approached to within two feet of me, then sneaked into a warm place out of sight. A stowaway from birdland, stealing a ride and planning, most likely, to enter America without a passport. Perhaps it thought that being near the stern of the boat, according to the calculations above quoted, it could still remain beyond the three-mile limit.
Then the homeward-bound spirit took possession of me,—that selfsame realization of my direction which had come over me upon sight of the Australian coast three years previously, a psychological twisting which baffled me for a time. Another day and we were within the last square marked off by the latitudinal and longitudinal lines,—the nearest I had been to America in nearly five years. To remind me of my wanderings, the flags of the nations hung in the dining-saloon: under nearly every one of them I had at some time found hospitality.
3
The reader who has followed me thus far has been with me about three months on the sea. What to the Greeks and the Romans was the Mediterranean, the Pacific will be to us seventy times over. Already there is a wealth of literature and of science which has come to us through the inspiration of that great waterway. For Darwin and Stevenson and O'Brien the Pacific has been mother of their finest passions. In the near future, our argosies will cross and recross those tens of thousands of miles as numerously as those of the Phœnicians on the Mediterranean in antiquity. They will bring us back the teas and spices and silks of the Orient. But there are those of us who have watched the "White Shadows" of the Pacific who would wish that something were brought away besides the ephemeral materials. For there is in the sea a kinship with the infinite and the absolute, and who studies its moods comes nearer understanding life.
I wandered along one night with a New Zealand man, without knowing where he was leading me. Suddenly we came, by way of a narrow pathway, against a wall of darkness. We were at the seashore. It was as though we had come to the world's end and the white glistening breakers arrived as messengers from eternity, warning us against venturing farther. I strained my eyes to see into that pitch-black gulch, but I might just as well have shut my eyes and let the persistent breakers tell the story of the sea in their own way. Afterward I often made my way out to that beach and sat for hours, or trod the sands till night left of the sea nothing but mournful whisperings.
One day in August, when the first snow fell over our little winter world in the far South, I had climbed the hills up to the belt of wildwood that girds the city of Dunedin. The very joy of life was in the air. Keenly I sensed the larger season,—that of human kinship merged in the centuries. I looked across the hills to mountains I had known; but it was then not the Alps I saw, not the Rockies, the Aeta Roa under the Southern Cross, nor yet the Himalayas nor the snow-packed barriers of the Uriankhai, the unrenowned Turgan group. In truth, I was not seeing impassable peaks at all, but imprisoned ranges which were themselves trying to outreach their altitudinal limitations. It was a world consciousness which was mine, and I towered far above the highest peaks, above the world itself. I saw no single group, no political sections nor geographical divisions, the conquest of ridges, the commingling of noises, the concord of peoples. And when men come to this world consciousness they will recognize and accept all, include the barrier and the plain. They will see these great, sheer rugged peaks knifing the floating clouds, yielding to the creeping glaciers, yet one and all, when released sweeping down the valleys as impassioned rivers, filling the lowest depths of earth, depths deeper than the sea, lower than the deserts. In such moments of world consciousness men will have to step downward from the bottom of the sea and upward from the summit of McKinley. Then barriers will become beacons. Mankind lives at sea-level. We care little about our neighbors over the ranges. That mental attitude makes barriers real and valleys dark. But when we turn them into beacons we shall climb the barriers in order to look into the valleys of our neighbors and they will become the ladders of heaven and the light unto nations. That is the lesson of the sea.
At present we live at a sea-level, but beneath and behind the barriers, are the peaks of earth. Hence walls of houses are as great barriers as mountains. Hence even thoughts are barriers and ideals become terrible, cold, insurmountable prominences.
But in world consciousness, which is the lesson of the sea, we do not reject anything,—the religions, the political parties, the anti-religions, and the negations,—but we bring them to the level of human understanding by absorption, by taking them in. That is the story of the sea.
The ocean breaks incessantly before us, but only the one majestic wave thrills as it rises and overleaps the rocky barrier. A forest is densely grown, yet only the stately, beautiful tree stirs the forest-lover. The street swarms with human beings all of whom are material for the friend-maker, yet only one of the mass, in passing, steeps the day's experience in the essence of love. But loving that one wave, or tree, or being does not shut us against the source of its becoming; rather does it teach us the possibilities latent in the mass. That is the moral of the sea.