The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism. Volume 1Whymper, Frederick
History
The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism. Volume 1
Whymper, Frederick
Adventure and adventurers; Arctic regions; Ocean; Voyages around the world
Jack who is fortunate enough to be on the West India and North American
Stations must be congratulated. “The country roads,” says the clever
writer above quoted, “curve and wind hither and thither in the
delightfulest way, unfolding pretty surprises at every turn; billowy
masses of oleander that seem to float out from behind distant projections,
like the pink cloud-banks of sunset; sudden plunges among cottages and
gardens, life and activity, followed by as sudden plunges into the sombre
twilight and stillness of the woods; glittering visions of white
fortresses and beacon towers pictured against the sky on remote hill-tops;
glimpses of shining green sea caught for a moment through opening
headlands, then lost again; more woods and solitude; and by-and-by another
turn lays bare, without warning, the full sweep of the inland ocean,
enriched with its bars of soft colour, and graced with its wandering
sails.
“Take any road you please, you may depend upon it you will not stay in it
half a mile. Your road is everything that a road ought to be; it is
bordered with trees, and with strange plants and flowers; it is shady and
pleasant, or sunny and still pleasant; it carries you by the prettiest and
peacefulest and most home-like of homes, and through stretches of forest
that lie in a deep hush sometimes, and sometimes are alive with the music
of birds; it curves always, which is a continual promise, whereas straight
roads reveal everything at a glance and kill interest. * * * There is
enough of variety. Sometimes you are in the level open, with marshes,
thick grown with flag-lances that are ten feet high, on the one hand, and
potato and onion orchards on the other; next you are on a hill-top, with
the ocean and the islands spread around you; presently the road winds
through a deep cut, shut in by perpendicular walls thirty or forty feet
high, marked with the oddest and abruptest stratum lines, suggestive of
sudden and eccentric old upheavals, and garnished with, here and there, a
clinging adventurous flower, and here and there a dangling vine; and
by-and-by, your way is along the sea edge, and you may look down a fathom
or two through the transparent water and watch the diamond-like flash and
play of the light upon the rocks and sands on the bottom until you are
tired of it—if you are so constituted as to be able to get tired of it.”
But as there are spots in the sun, and the brightest lights throw the
deepest shadows everywhere; so on the Bermuda coasts there are, in its
rare storms, dangers of no small kind among its numerous reefs and rocks.
The North Rock, in particular, is the monument which marks the grave of
many a poor sailor in by-gone days. At the present time, however,
tug-boats, and the use of steam generally, have reduced the perils of
navigation among the hundreds of islands which constitute the Bermuda
group to a minimum.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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