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THE OCEAN AND ITS WONDERS, BY R.M. BALLANTYNE.

WHAT THE OCEAN HAS TO SAY--ITS WHISPERS--ITS THUNDERS--ITS SECRETS.

There is a voice in the waters of the great sea. It calls to man continually. Sometimes it thunders in the tempest, when the waves leap high and strong and the wild winds shriek and roar, as if to force our attention. Sometimes it whispers in the calm, and comes rippling on the shingly beach in a still, small voice, as if to solicit our regard. But whether that voice of ocean comes in crashing billows or in gentle murmurs, it has but one tale to tell,--it speaks of the love, and power, and majesty of Him who rides upon the storm, and rules the wave.

Yes, the voice of ocean tells but one tale; yet there are many chapters in that wonderful story. The sea has much to say; far more than could possibly be comprehended in one volume, however large. It tells us of the doings of man on its broad bosom, from the day in which he first ventured to paddle along shore in the hollow trunk of a tree, to the day when he launched his great iron ship of 20,000 tons, and rushed out to sea, against wind and tide, under an impulse equal to the united strength of 11,500 horses. No small portion of the ocean's tale this, comprising many chapters of deeds of daring, blood, villainy, heroism, and enterprise. But with this portion of its story we have nothing to do just now. It tells us, also, of God's myriad and multiform creatures, that dwell in its depths, from the vast whale, whose speed is so great, that it might, if it chose, circle round the world in a few days, to the languid zoophyte, which clings to the rock, and bears more resemblance to a plant than to a living animal.

The sea has secrets, too, some of which it will not divulge until that day when its Creator shall command it to give up its dead; while others it is willing to part with to those who question it closely, patiently, and with intelligence.

Among the former kind of secrets are those foul deeds that have been perpetrated, in all ages, by abandoned men; when no human ears listened to the stifled shriek, or the gurgling plunge; when no human eyes beheld the murderous acts, the bloody decks, the blazing vessels, or the final hiss of the sinking wrecks.

Among the latter kind of secrets are the lives and habits of the creatures of the deep, and the causes and effects of those singular currents of air and water, which, to the eye of ignorance, seem to be nothing better than irregularity and confusion; but which, to the minds of those who search them out, and have pleasure therein, are recognised as a part of that wonderful, orderly, and systematic arrangement of things that we call Nature: much of which we now know, more of which we shall certainly know, as each day and year adds its quota to the sum of human knowledge; but a great deal of which will, doubtless, remain for ever hidden in the mind of nature's God, whose ways are wonderful, and past finding out. It is the latter class of secrets to which we purpose directing the readers attention in the following pages.

Let us, reader, act in a somewhat similar manner. Let us touch here, and there, and everywhere, on the wonders of the sea, and listen to such notes of the Ocean's Voice as strike upon our ears most pleasantly.

Before proceeding to the consideration of the wonders connected with and contained in the sea, we shall treat of the composition of the sea itself and of its extent, depth, and bottom.

What is the sea made of? Salt water, is the ready reply that rises naturally to every lip. But to this we add the question,--What is salt water? or, as there are many kinds of salt water, of what sort of salt water does the sea consist? To these queries we give the following reply, which, we doubt not, will rather surprise some of our readers.

Fresh water, as most people are aware, is composed of two gases--oxygen and hydrogen. Sea water is composed of the same gases, with the addition of muriate of soda, magnesia, iron, lime, sulphur, copper, silex, potash, chlorine, iodine, bromine, ammonia, and silver. What a dose! Let bathers think of it next time they swallow a gulp of sea water.

Most of these substances, however, exist in comparatively small quantity in the sea, with the exception of muriate of soda, or common table salt; of which, as all bathers know from bitter experience, there is a very considerable quantity. The quantity of silver contained in sea water is very small indeed. Nevertheless, small though it be, the ocean is so immense, that, it has been calculated, if all the silver in it were collected, it would form a mass that would weigh about two hundred million tons!

The salt of the ocean varies considerably in different parts. Near the equator, the great heat carries up a larger proportion of water by evaporation than in the more temperate regions; and thus, as salt is not removed by evaporation, the ocean in the torrid zone is salter than in the temperate or frigid zones.

The salts of the sea, and other substances contained in it, are conveyed thither by the fresh-water streams that pour into it from all the continent of the world. Maury, in his delightful work, "The Physical Geography of the Sea," tells us that "water is Nature's great carrier. With its currents it conveys heat away from the torrid zone, and ice from the frigid; or, bottling the caloric away in the vesicle of its vapour, it first makes it impalpable, and then conveys it by unknown paths to the most distant parts of the Earth. The materials of which the coral builds the island, and the sea-conch its shell, are gathered by this restless leveller from mountains, rocks, and valleys, in all latitudes. Some it washes down from the Mountains of the Moon in Africa, or out of the gold-fields of Australia, or from the mines of Potosi; others from the battle-fields of Europe, or from the marble quarries of ancient Greece and Rome. The materials thus collected, and carried over falls and down rapids, are transported to the sea."

Here, as these substances cannot be evaporated, they would accumulate to such a degree as to render the ocean uninhabitable by living creatures, had not God provided against this by the most beautiful compensation. He has filled the ocean with innumerable animals and marine plants, whose special duty it is to seize and make use of the substances thus swept from the land, and reconvert them into solids. We cannot form an adequate conception of the extent of the great work carried on continually in this way; but we see part of it in the chalk cliffs, the marl beds of the sea shore, and the coral islands of the South Seas,--of which last more particular notice shall be taken in a succeeding chapter.

The operations of the ocean are manifold. Besides forming a great reservoir, into which what may be termed the impurities of the land are conveyed, it is, as has been shown, the great laboratory of Nature, where these are reconverted, and the general balance restored. But we cannot speak of these things without making passing reference to the operations of water, as that wonder-working agent of which the ocean constitutes but a part.

Nothing in this world is ever lost or annihilated. As the ocean receives all the water that flows from the land, so it returns that water, fresh and pure, in the shape of vapour, to the skies; where, in the form of clouds, it is conveyed to those parts of the earth where its presence is most needed, and precipitated in the form of rain and dew, fertilising the soil, replenishing rivers and lakes, penetrating the earth's deep caverns; whence it bubbles up in the shape of springs, and, after having gladdened the heart of man by driving his mills and causing his food to grow, it finds its way again into the sea: and thus the good work goes on with ceaseless regularity.

Water beats upon the rocks of the sea-shore until it pounds them into sand, or rolls them into pebbles and boulders. It also sweeps the rich soil from the mountains into the valleys. In the form of snow it clothes the surface of the temperate and frigid zones with a warm mantle, which preserves vegetable life from the killing frosts of winter. In the form of ice it splits asunder the granite hills; and in the northern regions it forms great glaciers, or masses of solidified snow, many miles in extent, and many hundred feet thick. These glaciers descend by slow, imperceptible degrees, to the sea; their edges break off and fall into it, and, floating southward, sometimes in great mountainous masses, are seen by man in the shape of icebergs. Frequently huge rocks, that have fallen upon these glaciers from cliffs in the arctic regions, are carried by them to other regions, and are deposited on flat beaches, far from their native cliffs.

The saltness of the sea rendering it more dense, necessarily renders it more buoyant, than fresh water. This is obviously a great advantage to man in the matter of commerce. A ship does not sink so deep in the sea as it does in a fresh-water lake; hence it can carry more cargo with greater facility. It is easier to swim in salt than in fresh water.

The only disadvantage to commerce in the saltness of the sea is the consequent unfitness of its water for drinking. Many and harrowing are the accounts of instances in which sailors have been reduced to the most terrible extremities for want of fresh water; and many a time, since navigation began, have men been brought to feel the dread reality of that condition which is so forcibly expressed in the poem of the "Ancient Mariner":--

"Water, water everywhere, And not a drop to drink."

The salts of the ocean have something to do with the creating of oceanic currents; which, in their turn, have a powerful influence on climates. They also retard evaporation to some extent, and have some effect in giving to the sea its beautiful blue colour.

The ocean covers about two-thirds of the entire surface of the Earth. Its depth has never been certainly ascertained; but from the numberless experiments and attempts that have been made, we are warranted in coming to the conclusion that it nowhere exceeds five miles in depth, probably does not quite equal that. Professor Wyville Thompson estimates the average depth of the sea at about two miles.

Of the three great oceans into which the sea is naturally divided--the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Arctic--the Atlantic is supposed to be the deepest. There are profundities in its bosom which have never yet been sounded, and probably never will be.

The difficulty of sounding great depths arises from the fact that, after a large quantity of line has been run out, the shock of the lead striking the bottom cannot be felt. Moreover, there is sufficient force in the deep-sea currents to sweep out the line after the lead has reached the bottom so that, with the ordinary sounding-lines in use among navigators, it is impossible to sound great depths. Scientific men have, therefore, taxed their brains to invent instruments for sounding the deep sea--for touching the bottom in what sailors call "blue water." Some have tried it with a silk thread as a plumb-line, some with spun-yarn threads, and various other materials and contrivances. It has even been tried by exploding petards and ringing bells in the deep sea, when it was supposed that an echo or reverberation might be heard, and, from the known rate at which sound travels through water, the depth might thus be ascertained. Deep-sea leads have been constructed having a column of air in them, which, by compression, would show the aqueous pressure to which they had been subjected; but the trial proved to be more than the instrument could stand.

Captain Maury, of the American Navy--whose interesting book has been already referred to--invented an instrument for sounding the deep sea. Here is his own description of it:--"To the lead was attached, upon the principle of the screw-propeller, a small piece of clock-work for registering the number of revolutions made by the little screw during the descent; and it having been ascertained by experiment in shoal water that the apparatus, in descending, would cause the propeller to make one revolution for every fathom of perpendicular descent, hands provided with the power of self-registering were attached to a dial, and the instrument was complete. It worked beautifully in moderate depths, but failed in blue water, from the difficulty of hauling it up if the line used were small, and from the difficulty of getting it down if the line used were large enough to give the requisite strength for hauling it up." One eccentric old sea captain proposed to sound the sea with a torpedo, or shell, which should explode the instant it touched the bottom. Another gentleman proposed to try it by the magnetic telegraph, and designed an instrument which should telegraph to the expectant measurers above how it was getting on in the depths below. But all these ingenious devices failed, and it is probable that the deepest parts of the ocean-bed still remained untouched by man.

With this instrument the Americans went to work with characteristic energy, and, by always using a line of the same size and make, and a sinker of the same shape and weight, they at last ascertained the law of descent. This was an important achievement, because, having become familiar with the precise rate of descent at all depths, they were enabled to tell very nearly when the ball ceased to carry out the line, and when it began to go out in obedience to the influence of deep-sea currents. The greatest depth reached by Brooke's sounding-line is said to have been a little under five miles in the North Atlantic.

Another discovery that has been made by deep-sea sounding is, that the lowest depths of the ocean are always in a state of profound calm. Oceanic storms do not extend to the bottom. When the tempest is lashing the surface of the sea into a state of the most violent and tremendous agitation, the caverns of the deep are wrapped in perfect repose. This has been ascertained from the fact that in many places the bottom of the sea, as shown by the specimens brought up by Brooke's apparatus, and more recently by Professor Thompson's deep-sea dredge, is composed of exceedingly minute shells of marine insects. These shells, when examined by the microscope, are found to be unbroken and perfect, though so fragile that they must certainly have been broken to pieces had they ever been subjected to the influence of currents, or to the pulverising violence of waves. Hence the conclusion that the bottom of the sea is in a state of perpetual rest and placidity.

Indeed, when we think of it, we are led to conclude that this must necessarily be the case. There are, as we shall presently show, currents of vast size and enormous power constantly flowing through the ocean; and when we think of the tremendous power of running water to cut through the solid rock, as exemplified in the case of Niagara, and many other rivers, what would be the result of the action of currents in the sea, compared with which Niagara is but a tiny rivulet? Ocean currents, then, flow on a bed of still water, that protects the bottom of the sea from forces which, by calculation, we know would long ago have torn up the foundations of the deep, and would probably have destroyed the whole economy of nature, had not this beautiful arrangement been provided by the all-wise Creator.

WAVES--SYSTEM IN ALL THINGS--VALUE OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE--ILLUSTRATIVE ANECDOTE--HEIGHT OF WAVES--DR. SCORESBY--SIZE, VELOCITY, AND AWFUL POWER OF WAVES--ANECDOTES REGARDING THEM--TIDES.

When a man stands on the deck of some tight-built ship, holding on to the weather bulwarks, and gazing with unphilosophic eye through the blinding spray at the fury of the tempest--by which the billows are made to roll around him like liquid mountains, and the ship is tossed beneath him like a mere chip, the sport and plaything of the raging waters--he is apt to think, should his thoughts turn in that direction at all, that all is unmitigated confusion; that the winds, which blew west yesterday and blow east to-day,--shifting, it may be, with gusty squalls, now here, now there, in chaotic fury,--are actuated by no laws, governed by no directing power.

Yet no thought could be more unphilosophical than this. Apart altogether from divine revelation, by which we are informed that "all deeps, fire, and hail, snow, and vapour, and stormy wind," are "fulfilling God's word" , we now know, to a great extent from practical experience and scientific investigation, that the winds blow and the waters of the ocean flow in grand, regular, uninterrupted currents. Amongst these there are numberless eddies, which, perhaps, have tended to fill our minds with the idea of irregularity and confusion; but which, nevertheless, as well as the grand currents themselves, are subject to law, and are utterly devoid of caprice.

In regard to these matters there is much about which we are still in ignorance. But the investigations of late years--especially those conducted under the superintendence of Captain Maury of the American Navy, and Doctors Carpenter and Thompson of England--have shown that our atmosphere and our ocean act in accordance with a systematic arrangement, many facts regarding which have been discovered, and turned, in some cases, to practical account. See Note 1.

A very interesting instance of the practical use to which scientific inquiry can be turned, even in its beginnings, is given by Maury. After telling us of the existence and nature of a current in the ocean called the Gulf Stream, he gives the following account of the manner in which upon one occasion be made use of his theoretical knowledge.

The day after this disaster she was seen by one vessel, and again, the next day, December 26th, by another; but neither of them could render her any assistance.

When these two vessels arrived in the United States and reported what they had seen, the most painful apprehensions were entertained by friends for the safety of those on board the steamer. Vessels were sent out to search for and relieve her. But where should these vessels go? Where should they look?

An appeal was made to know what light the system of researches carried on at the National Observatory concerning winds and currents could throw upon the subject.

The materials they had been discussing were examined, and a chart was prepared to show the course of the Gulf Stream at that season of the year. Two revenue cutters were then appointed to proceed to sea in search of the steamer, and Maury was requested to "furnish them with instructions."

It will be observed here that the gentleman thus appealed to was at the time engaged in his study at Washington, utterly ignorant of all that had occurred within the previous few weeks on the stormy Atlantic, except through the reports brought thence by ships. These reports furnished him with meagre data to proceed upon--simply that a crippled steamer had been seen in a certain latitude and longitude on a particular day.

But this information was sufficient for the practical man of science. Proceeding upon the supposition that the steamer had been completely disabled, he drew two lines on the chart to define the limits of her drift. This his previous knowledge of the flow of the Gulf Stream at all seasons of the year enabled him to do. Between these two lines, he said, the steamer, if she could neither steam nor sail after the gale, had drifted. And that she could neither steam nor sail he had good reason to suppose from the account of her brought in by the vessels above mentioned. A certain point was marked on the chart as being the spot where the searching vessels might expect to fall in with the wreck.

While these preparations were being made, two ships fell in with the wreck and relieved the crew. This, however, was not known at the time by the anxious friends on shore. The cutters sailed on their mission, and reached the indicated spot in the sea, where, of course, their assistance was now unnecessary. But when the vessels that had relieved the crew of the wreck arrived in harbour and reported where the wreck had been last seen, it was found to be within a few miles of the spot indicated by Maury!

Thus, upon very slight data, a man of science and observation was enabled, while seated in his study, to follow the drift of a wrecked vessel over the pathless deep, and to indicate to a rescue party, not only the exact course they ought to steer, but the precise spot where the wreck should be found.

The waves of the ocean are by no means so high as people imagine. Their appearance in the Atlantic or Pacific, when raised by a violent storm, is indeed very awful, and men have come to speak of them as being "mountains of water." But their sublime aspect and their tumultuous state of agitation have contributed much to deceive superficial observers as to their real height. Scientific men have measured the height of the waves.

Waves travel at a rate which increases in proportion to their size and the depth of water in which they are formed. Every one knows that on most lakes they are comparatively small and harmless. In some lakes, however, such as Lake Superior in North America, which is upwards of three hundred miles long, the waves are so formidable as to resemble those of the ocean, and they are capable of producing tremendous effects. But the waves of the sea, when roused to their greatest height, and travelling at their greatest speed, are terrible to behold. Their force is absolutely irresistible. Sometimes waves of more than usually gigantic proportions arise, and, after careering over the broad sea in unimpeded majesty, fall with crushing violence on some doomed shore. They rush onward, pass the usual barriers of the sea-beach, and do not retire until horrible devastation has been carried far into the land.

Maury gives the following anecdote from the notes of a Russian officer, which shows the awful power of such waves.

Monster waves of this kind occur at regular intervals, among the islands of the Pacific, once and sometimes twice in the year; and this without any additional influence of an earthquake, at least in the immediate neighbourhood of the islands, though it is quite possible that earthquakes in some remote part of the world may have something to do with these waves.

One such wave is described as breaking on one of these islands with tremendous violence. It appeared at first like a dark line, or low cloud, or fog-bank, on the sea-ward horizon. The day was fine though cloudy, and a gentle breeze was blowing; but the sea was not rougher, or the breaker on the coral reef that encircled the island higher, than usual. It was supposed to be an approaching thunder-storm; but the line gradually drew nearer without spreading upon the sky, as would have been the case had it been a thunder-cloud. Still nearer it came, and soon those on shore observed that it was moving swiftly towards the island; but there was no sound until it reached the smaller islands out at sea. As it passed these, a cloud of white foam encircled each and burst high into the air. This appearance was soon followed by a loud roar, and it became evident that the object was an enormous wave. When it approached the outer reef, its awful magnitude became more evident. It burst completely over the reef at all points, with a deep, continuous roar; yet, although part of its force was thus broken, on it came, as if with renewed might, and finally fell upon the beach with a crash that seemed to shake the solid earth; then, rushing impetuously up into the woods, it levelled the smaller trees and bushes in its headlong course; and, on retiring, left a scene of wreck and desolation that is quite indescribable.

"Storm-waves," as those unusually gigantic billows are called, are said to be the result of the removal of atmospheric pressure in certain parts of the ocean over which a storm is raging. This removal of pressure allows the portion thus relieved to be forced up high above the ordinary sea-level by those other parts that are not so relieved.

The devastating effects of these storm-waves is still further illustrated by the total destruction of Coringa, on the Coromandel Coast, in 1789. During a hurricane, in December of that year, at the moment when a high tide was at its highest point, and the north-west wind was blowing with fury, accumulating the waters at the head of the bay, three monstrous waves came rolling in from the sea upon the devoted town, following each other at a short distance. The horror-stricken inhabitants had scarcely time to note the fact of their approach, when the first wave, sweeping everything in its passage, carried several feet of water into the town. The second swept still further in its destructive course, inundating all the low country. The third, rushing onward in irresistible fury, overwhelmed everything, submerging the town and twenty thousand of its inhabitants. Vessels at anchor at the mouth of the river were carried inland; and the sea on retiring left heaps of sand and mud, which rendered it a hopeless task either to search for the dead or for buried property.

The value of the tides is unspeakable. They sweep from our shores pollution of every kind, purify our rivers and estuaries, and are productive of freshness and health all round the world.

The gentlemen here referred to are agreed as to the fact of systematic arrangement of currents, though they differ in regard to some of the causes thereof and other matters.

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