The Sea (La Mer). Jules Michelet

The marine life shuns precisely those enchanting shores whose vegetable life is the most abounding and the most brilliant. They are rich, but rich only in fossils; very curious are they to the geologist, but they yield to him only the bones of the dead. The stern granite, on the contrary, looks down upon the sea swarming with its piscine life, and supports upon its massive breast the humble, but none the less interesting little molluscæ whose laborious life makes the serious charm, the great moral of the sea.

      And yet amidst all that teeming life there is a deep silence; that infinite population is ever and inevitably silent. Its life is self-concentrated, its labors unmarked, uncheered, by a sound; it has no connection with you or me—to us, that life is only another aspect of Death. A great and a dead solitude, says some feminine heart; it alarms, it saddens me.

      Wrong! All here is lovable and friendly. These little creatures speak not to the world, but they all the time are hard at work for it. They yield themselves up to the sublime voice of their sublime parent, the Ocean, that speaks for them; by his great utterance, they speak, confidingly, and by proxy.

      Between the silent earth and the mute tribes of the sea, a great, strong, grave, and sympathetic dialogue is constantly carried on—the harmonious agreement with the Great I AM, with himself and his great work—that great eternal conflict which, everywhere and always, is Love.

      CHAPTER V.

      THE FIERY AND THE WATERY CIRCLE—THE CURRENTS OF THE SEA.

      Scarcely has the earth cast one glance upon herself ere she not merely compares herself to the Heavens above, but vaunts her own superiority. Geology, the mere infant, hurls a Titanic cry against her elder sister, Astronomy, that haughty and splendid queen of all the sciences. "Our mountains," exclaims Geology, "are not cast confusedly hither and thither like those stars in the sky; our mountains form systems in which are found the elements of a general and orderly arrangement of which the celestial constellations present no trace." Such is the bold and impassioned phrase which is uttered by a man as modest as he is illustrious—M. Elias de Beaumont. Doubtless, we have not yet developed the order, which, yet, we may not doubt is great, which prevails in the seeming confusion of the Milky Way, but the more obvious regularity of the surface of the globe, the result of the revolutions in its unfathomed and unfathomable depths, preserve still, and ever will preserve, for the most ingenious science, many clouds and many mysteries. The forms of that great mountain, upheaved from the mighty mass of waters, which we call the Earth, shows many arrangements which, while they are sufficiently symmetrical, are still not reducible to what would seem a perfect system. The dry and elevated portions show themselves more or less as the waters leave them bare. It is the limiting line of the sea which, in reality, traces out the form of continent and of island; it is by the Sea that we commence all true understanding of Geography.

      Let us note another fact, which has been discovered only within a few years past. The Earth presents us with some seemingly antagonistic features. The New World, for instance, stretches from north to south, the Old World from east to west; the sea, on the contrary, exhibits a great harmony, an exact correspondence between the two hemispheres. It is in the fluid portion of our world, that portion which we have deemed to be so capricious, that the greatest regularity exists. That which this globe of ours presents of the most rigidly regular, the most symmetrical, is just that which appears to be most utterly free, most entirely the mere sport of unrestricted motion. No doubt, the vertebræ and the bones of that vast creature have peculiarities which we, as yet, are not qualified to comprehend. But its living movements which cause the ocean currents, convert salt water into fresh water, which anon is converted to vapor to return again to the salt water, that admirable mechanism is as perfect and systematic as the sanguineous circulation of the superior animals; as perfect a resemblance as possible to the constant transformation of your own venous and arterial blood.

      The world would wear quite another aspect, were we to class its regions, not by chains of mountains but by maritime basins.

      Southern Spain, resembles Morocco, more than Navarre; Provence, resembles Algeria, rather than Dauphiny; Senegambia, the Amazon, rather than the Red Sea; and the great valley of the Amazon, is more like to the moist regions of Africa than it is to its arid neighbors, Peru, Chili, &c.

      The symmetry of the Atlantic is still more striking in its under-currents and the winds and breezes that sweep over it. Their action potently helps to create these analogies, and to form what we may call the fraternity of the shores.

      The principle of Geographical unity, will be more and more sought for in the maritime basin, where the waters and the winds, faithful intermediaries, create the relation, the assimilation, of the opposite shores. Far less can we ask this illustration of Geographical unity from the mountains, where two slopes frequently present to you, under the same latitude, both a Flora and a population absolutely different; on the one slope, eternal summer, on the other, eternal winter, according to the aspect of each. The mountain rarely gives unity of country; far more frequently, duality, discordance, actual diversity.

      This striking state of the case was first pointed out by Borg. de Saint Vincent, and has since, in a thousand instances, been confirmed by the discoveries of Maury.

      In the immense valley of the sea, beneath the double mountain of the two continents, there are, strictly speaking, only two basins:—

      1. The basin of the Atlantic;

      2. The great basin of the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific.

      We cannot give the name of basin to the indeterminate cincture of the great Austral Ocean, which has no boundary save that on the north it is touched by the Indian Ocean, the Coraline and the Pacific.

      The Austral Ocean alone exceeds in extent all other seas together, and covers almost one-half of the entire globe. Apparently, the depth of that sea is in proportion to its extent. While recent soundings of the Atlantic give a result of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, Ross and Denham found in the Southern Ocean from 14,000 to 46,000 feet. Here, too, we may note the mass of the Antarctic ice, infinitely more vast than the Arctic. We shall not be very wide of the truth, if we say that the southern hemisphere is the world of waters, the northern the world of land.

      He who sails from Europe to cross the Atlantic, having been fortunate enough to get clear of our ports in which he too frequently is imprisoned by the westerly wind, and having cleared the variable zone of our capricious seas, speedily gets into the fine climate and constant serenity which the N. E. breezes, the genial trade-winds, spread over sea and sky. Above and around, everything favors him, everything smiles upon him, but, as he approaches the Line, the inspiring breezes cease to breathe balmily upon him, and the air is almost suffocating. He enters the circle of those calms which prevail under the Equator, and present unchangeably their barrier between our northern trade-winds and those of the south. Heavy mists and clouds are all above and around him, and the tropical rains descend in mighty torrents. Bitterly the seaman complains of those gloomy and deluging clouds, but only for their gloomy screen what scathing beams would descend upon the poor dizzy heads, and be reflected in smiting power from the bright, broad mirror of the Atlantic? But for those torrents which fall upon the other face of our globe, the Indian Ocean and the sea of Coral, what would be their fermentation in the craters of their antique volcanoes! That dark mass of blackest clouds, once the terror of the navigator and the obstacle to navigation, that sudden and dense night extended over those broad waters form precisely the safeguard, the protecting facility which softens our passage and enables us, sailing southward still, to meet again the bright sun, the clear sky, and the balmy mildness of the regular winds.

      Quite naturally, quite inevitably, the heats of the Line raise the waters in masses of vapor, and form that dark band, so threatening in appearance, but in reality so beneficent.

      The observer who from some other planet could look upon our world would see around her a ring of clouds not unlike the belt of Saturn. Did he seek the purpose and the use of that ring, he might, in reply, be told—"It is the regulator which, by turns absorbing and giving forth, equalizes the evaporation and fall of the waters, distributes the rains and dews, modifies the heat of each country, interchanges the vapors of the two worlds, and borrows from the southern world the rivers and streams of