Chapter 15

A REALM OF MYSTERY

AT this, the holiday season, our thoughts turn instinctively to the sea. It is true that we are concerned only with the side of the sea-the sands and the shells and the pools and the shallows. Yet it is impossible to flirt with the ocean even in that superficial way without catching glimpses of its immensities and profundities. From time immemorial the ocean has been regarded as a mass of mystery. The ancients looked upon its expanse with a shudder. It was to them the emblem of uncertainty, of instability, of treachery and of illimitable power governed by caprice rather than by principle. It was beautiful one day and terrible the next; yet, to all appearances, destitute of any intelligible reason for its change of mood and temper.

Generally speaking, the Oriental hated the sea. The dreamers and philosophers of the brooding East spoke of it with apprehension, with distrust and with awe. Even the Jew, who represents the natural link between the East and the West, between the ancient and the modern, looked askance upon the waste of waters. With one possible exception, the Hebrew poets employ the imagery of the ocean only as symbolic of the forces of rebellion, anarchy, and defiance, whilst one of the most glowing passages in apocalyptic literature reaches its glowing climax with the triumphant assurance that, in the world to come, there shall be no more sea. The ocean stood for insurgence and revolt; it represented the things that cannot be subjugated or tamed. It separated nation from nation; and, if one dared to cross it, it threatened to engulf him in the passage or at least to cut him off from all intercourse with his former friends. For centuries the toll of the deep was considered moderate if two-thirds of the ships that sailed arrived safely at their destinations. Was it any wonder that men spoke of it as the salt, estranging sea? How could they be expected to feel the faintest fondness for those rapacious powers that lurked grimly and ominously in the turbulent waters?

Nor is this sentiment of suspicion and of terror altogether a thing of the past. It springs to vigorous life once more whenever a wreck of any magnitude occurs. Neither the carnage caused by a great battle, the horrors attendant upon a frightful earthquake, the pitiless ravages of a cruel pestilence, the majestic sweep of a terrific conflagration, nor the awful desolation of a gaunt and widespread famine affects us with the dramatic force and vividness of which we are all conscious when a stately liner founders on one of the highways of our mercantile traffic. The most obvious reason is that the scene can be so easily conjured up. Everybody has seen a ship; everybody has seen the sea; and therefore everybody has seen the entire setting and stage-scenery of the dreadful tragedy. For all practical purposes, one large steamer is very much like another, and the sea is the same everywhere.

It is true that the sea is often spoken of as the natural emblem of all that is fickle and changeful; but this is pure illusion. It is the symbol of immutability. ‘Look at the sea!’ exclaims Max Pemberton, in Red Mom, ‘how I love it! I like to think that those great rolling waves will go leaping by a thousand years from now. There is never any change about the sea. You never come back to it and find yourself shocked by the alterations that have been made in it. I suppose that if one stood here for a million years, the sea would not be different. You feel quite sure of it and it never disappoints you.’ The land, with a greater semblance of stability, is for ever changing; but the sea remains the same age after age. He who has seen the ocean in the days of Elizabeth II has seen the ocean in the days of Rameses I. He who has looked upon the waters of the English Channel or the Tasman Sea has, to all intents and purposes, seen the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Adriatic and the Mediterranean. Every seascape is a cross-section of antiquity and infinity.

This familiarity with the surface of the sea enhances our sense of mystery when we transfer our thoughts to its unplumbed depths. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes compares a home among the mountains with a home by the side of the sea. You become familiar with the phenomena of the hills. You get to know the trees; you know exactly what to expect when you turn a certain corner: you see a light twinkling in the distance and you know from whose window it shines. But the sea is totally different. You never get to know it. It holds you at arm’s length and encourages no intimacies. The sea,’ Dr. Holmes declares, ‘is feline. It licks your feet; its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you for all that, and wipe the crimson foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened.’ On the land, when disaster occurs, all the wreckage is left to tell its own tale; but, on the ocean, Fate instantly obliterates all her tracks. The sea remembers nothing; it records nothing; it reveals nothing. The vanished cities that lie buried in the deep; the great ships that, having set sail, have never again been heard of; the unimaginable creatures that move among the dark and eerie silences of submarine forests; all this is enfolded in the most impenetrable mystery.

Happily, however, when knowledge and reason come to the end of their resources, faith asserts itself. For those ancient prophets who emphasized in all their utterances the sense of dread inspired by the restless waters were nevertheless the most insistent in their proclamation that, however lawless those forces might seem, they were nevertheless under control. The sea is His and He made it!’ they cried. And, at a later and more familiar stage of revelation they present the impressive spectacle of One who, amidst other wonders, commanded the winds and the waves and elicited from them immediate and implicit obedience.

Dr. Andrew Corbett