STRANGE SEA INDUSTRIES AND ADVENTURES.
The wrecker on the Florida reefs, who steps from the Peninsula into the marine world, will tell you there is nothing so like the land as the water. The crystal atmosphere of this land of meridional spring, the masses of tawny green in forests of the pine, and the deeper foliage of the live-oak and wild-orange, even that fire of flower in phaenogamous plants peculiar to the Peninsula, have their fellowship and counterparts in the lustrous scenery of the submarine world. Even the beauty of moon-like lakes and river springs is realized in the salt envelope of the under-world. Washing the keel of the submerged vessel, or bursting with a sudden chill through the tepid waters of the Gulf, with a sensible difference to feeling and to sight, the diver recognizes a river in the strata, a wayside spring in the mid-sea fountain.
As the huge volume of many Florida springs, and their peculiar characteristic of sudden sinking, give them a distinguishable quality, so the like may be recognized in the fresh-water outbursts of the neighboring seas. Silver Spring in Marion county tosses out three hundred million gallons per day; Manatee Spring discharges a less volume, but is noted for the presence of the sea-cow (Trichecus muriatus); Santa Fé, Econfinna, Chipola and Oscilla are rivers which, like classic Acheron, descend and disappear with a full head—lost rivers, as they are aptly named. Pass to the marine world, and south-west of Bataban, in the Gulf of Xagua (Cuba), a river-fountain throws up a broad white disk like a flower of water on a liquid stem, visible on the violet phosphorescence of the Caribbean Sea. Its impetuous force makes it dangerous to unwary crafts; and, to add to its recognizable characteristics, in its pure waters is to be found the sea-cow—found there and in Manatee Bay and Spring alone. To the geologist such rivers are not mysteries. The lower strata of the limestone formation are hollowed out into vast cavernous channels and chambers, through which rolls for ever the hoarse murmur of multitudinous waters. It would require the conception of a Milton or the stern Florentine who pictured Malebolge to depict those hollow passages and lofty galleries, wrought into fantastic shapes by carbon chisels, and all pure snow-white, yet unrecognizable in the sublime horror of great darkness.
It is to the animal and vegetable coral the sea owes its arborescent and floriform scenery, the counterpart of the forest and phaenogamous beauty that adorns the land. The home of these wonderful creatures must be visited to realize the beauty of their dwellings and the wonderful structures they produce. A diver who explored the serene sea about the Hayti banks gives a beautiful description of the splendors of the under-world. The white, chalky bottom is visible from the surface at a depth of one hundred feet. Over that brilliant floor the filtered sunshine spreads a cloth of gold continually flecked with sailing shadows and fluctuating tints. The singular clearness of the medium removes that lovely violet drapery which surrounds like a pavilion the submarine palace, and allows a wider scope of vision. But the scene here is not the play of sunbeams or the magic glory of the prismal waters. Form adds its grace to the loveliness of color and the play of light and shadow. The structures, the work of astraea, madrepores, andreas and meandrinas, bear a singular resemblance to fabrications of the architect. One massive dome or archway, a hundred feet in diameter, rises to the surface. Its front is carved in elaborate tracery and crusted with serpulae, looking like the fret-and flower-work that covers Saracenic architecture. Looking through this into the violet ambuscade, the eye falls upon colonnades, light slender shafts a foot in diameter, that seem to support the paly-golden, lustrous roof. It is curiously like a vast temple, spreading every way in vault and colonnade, on which religious enthusiasm or barbaric royalty has worked with a reckless waste of art and labor. Nor is it the cold and shapely beauty of the stone: it seems to be a temple built of many-colored glass. To understand the magnificence of the wonderful structure, the reader must have in mind the laws affecting light in transmission through water—the frangibility of the rays, the frequent alternations in dispersion, reflection, interference and accidental and complementary color. He must recollect that every indentation, every twist of stony serpulae or fluting of the zoophyte catches the light and divides and splinters it into radiance, burning with a fringe of silver fire or flashing steel. When the mind has conceived of that, there is to add the vivid beauty of the living coral, its hue of molten colored glass spreading a radiant mucus over the stony skeleton.
But he has not yet entered into an entire conception of its loveliness. The arborescent and phaenogamous forms of the coral are to be noticed. Here is a plant: it has a pale, gray-blue stalk, and all over it are delicate green leaves, fronds or tentacles, as you please to call them. There is a fan-shaped shrub whose starry fronds recall the Chaemerops serrulata of the adjacent shore. The ament, so to speak, of the Parasmilia centralis, the catkin of the sea, recalls its terrene counterpart. There are other flowers in fascicles and corymbs. The rose is not lacking, but glows with the radiant beauty of its petaliferous sister; the columnar trunks of stony trees, covered with green, flossy mosses, are scattered about; and fresh fountains gush from the rocks, the white water as clearly distinguishable from the ultramarine as in the upper atmosphere.[1]
But some varieties of beauty in the coral belong to calmer seas: among others, the Red Sea is noticed for the exquisite loveliness of its coralline formations. An American explorer, well known in submarine diving, once visited that gulf sacred in history, and for a purpose certainly as singular as anything he found there. It was, to use his own words, "to fish for Pharaoh's golden chariot-wheels," lost in that famous pursuit. Is it possible, in the nature of things, for such an expedition to be made by any but an American? It takes a strong Bible faith, allied to a simple but strong self-confidence, to start a man on such an adventure. The curious transforming magic of the sea had its effect on the Arab dragoman he had engaged to assist him. Having settled on the exact spot, the swart Arabian descended, but signaled to return almost immediately, and was brought to the surface in open-eyed wonder. With all the hyperbole of Oriental imagination he swore positively to the finding of the chariot-wheels, and added the jewelry of Pharaoh's household. He was so earnest and so exact in the matter of the golden wheel, set with precious stones, that, though the captain dryly asked if he did not meet King Pharaoh himself, taking a moist throne and keeping court with the fishes, he none the less had the line attached and drew up—the rude wheel of a Tartar wagon, transformed under water, but plain and ugly enough above.
"The djin did it," explained the Arab. "It is a palace of the djins, howadji."
Though the adventurous explorer failed in his design on the defunct Egyptian, he was rewarded by some compensating views and discoveries. He saw there the Xenia elongata, a shrub-like coral distinguished for the beauty of its colors, having stellar tentacles, rose-colored, blue and lilac, an inch in diameter, and looking like flowers of living jewelry; another with a long cue, like a tress of hair, and others of allied beauty.
The coral-stone is seen and admired on centre-tables and in jewelry, but this is really the least pleasing beauty in the organism. The animal, subjected to exposure, is a brown mucus that dissipates in the sun and air, but clothed in its native element this glutinous substance is instinct with radiant life, the bodies being rose-color and the arms a pure white. Sometimes they grow in clusters and corymbs, gleaming with a pure, translucent color that fluctuates and changes in the light
Like colors of a shell,