Mare Nostrum (Our Sea): A Novel

by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

These are no more than cutaneous shudderings. The storms, so deadly for mankind, merely contract the marine epidermis while the profound mass of its waters remains in murky calm, fulfilling its great function of nourishing and renewing life. Father Ocean completely ignores the existence of the human insects that dare to slip across his surface in microscopic cockle-shells. He does not inform himself as to the incidents that may be taking place upon the roof of his dwelling. His life continues on,—balanced, calm, infinite, engendering millions upon millions of beings in the thousandth part of a second.

The majesty of the Atlantic on tropical nights made Ulysses forget the wrathful storms of its black days. In the moonlight it was an immense plane of vivid silver streaked with serpentine shadows. Its soft doughlike undulations, replete with microscopic life, illuminated the nights. The infusoria, a-tremble with love, glowed with a bluish phosphorescence. The sea was like luminous milk. The foam breaking against the prow sparkled like broken fragments of electric globes.

When it was absolutely tranquil and the ship remained immovable with drooping sail, the stars passing slowly from one side of the mast to the other, the delicate medusae, that the slightest wave was able to crush, would come to the surface floating on the waters, around the island of wood. There were thousands of these umbrellas filing slowly by, green, blue, rose, with a vague coloring similar to oil-lights,—a Japanese procession seen from above, that on one side was lost in the mystery of the black waters and incessantly reappeared on the other side.

The young pilot loved navigation in a sailing ship,—the struggle with the wind, the solitude of its calms. He was far nearer the ocean here than on the bridge of a transatlantic liner. The bark did not beat the sea into such rabid foam. It slipped discreetly along as in the maritime silence of the first millennium of the new-born earth. The oceanic inhabitants approached it confidently upon seeing it rolling like a mute and inoffensive whale.

In six years Ulysses changed his boat many times. He had learned English, the universal language of the blue dominions, and was refreshing himself with a study of Maury's charts—the sailors' Bible—the patient work of an obscure genius who first snatched from ocean and atmosphere the secret of their laws.

Desirous of exploring new seas and new lands, he did not stop in the usual travel zones or ports, and the British, Norwegian, and North American captains received cordially this good-mannered official so little exacting as to salary. So Ulysses wandered over the oceans as had the king of Ithaca over the Mediterranean, guided by a fatality which impelled him with a rude push far from his country every time that he proposed to return to it. The sight of a boat anchored near by and ready to set sail for some distant port was a temptation that invariably made him forget to return to Spain.

He traveled in filthy, old, happy-go-lucky sea-tramps, in which the crews used to spread all the sails to the tempest, get drunk and fall asleep, confident that the devil, friend of the brave, would awaken them on the following morning. He lived in white boats as silent and scrupulously clean as a Dutch home, whose captains were taking wife and children with them, and where white-aproned stewardesses took care of the galley and the cleaning of the floating hearthside, sharing the dangers of the ruddy and tranquil sailors exempt from the temptation that contact with women provokes. On Sundays, under the tropic sun or in the ash-colored light of the northern heavens, the boatswain would read the Bible. The men would listen thoughtfully with uncovered heads. The women had dressed themselves in black with lace headdress and mittened hands.

He went to Newfoundland to load codfish. There is where the warm current from the Gulf of Mexico meets that from the Poles. In the meeting of these two marine rivers the infinitesimal little beings that the gulf stream drags thither die, suddenly frozen to death, and a rain of minute corpses descends across the waters. The cod gather there to gorge themselves on this manna which is so abundant that a great part of it, freed from their greedy jaws, drops to the bottom like a snowstorm of lime.

In Iceland (the Ultima Thule of the ancients), they showed Ulysses bits of wood that the equatorial current had brought thither from the Antilles. On the coasts of Norway, as he watched the herring during the spawning season, he marveled at the formidable fertility of the sea.

From their refuge in the shadowy depths, these fish mount to the surface moved by the message of the spring, desirous of taking their part in the joy of the world. They swim one against another, close, compact, forming strata that subdivide and float out to sea. They look like an island just coming to the surface, or a continent beginning to sink. In the narrow passages the shoals are so numerous that the waters become solidified, making almost impossible the advance of a row boat. Their number is beyond the possibilities of calculation, like the sands and the stars.