Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) Part 5

CHAPTER III

PATER OCEa.n.u.s

When Don Esteban died very suddenly, his eighteen-year-old son was still studying in the university.

In his latter days the notary had begun to suspect that Ulysses was not going to be the celebrated jurist that he had dreamed. He had a way of cutting cla.s.ses in order to pa.s.s the morning in the harbor, exercising with the oars. If he entered the university, the beadles were on their guard fearing his long-reaching hands: for he already fancied himself a sailor and liked to imitate the men of the sea who, accustomed to contend with the elements, considered a quarrel with a man as a very slight affair. Alternating violently between study and laziness, he was laboriously approaching the end of his course when neuralgia of the heart carried off the notary.

Upon coming out from the stupefaction of her grief, Dona Cristina looked around her with aversion. Why should she linger on in Valencia?

Since she could no longer be with the man who had brought her to this country, she wanted to return to her own people. The poet Labarta would look after her properties that were not so valuable nor numerous as the income of the notary had led them to suppose. Don Esteban had suffered great losses in extravagant business speculations good-naturedly accepted, but there was still left a fortune sufficient to enable his wife to live as an independent widow among her relatives in Barcelona.

In arranging her new existence, the poor lady encountered no opposition except the rebelliousness of Ulysses. He refused to continue his college course and he wished to go to sea, saying that for that reason he had studied to become a pilot. In vain Dona Cristina entreated the aid of relatives and friends, excluding the _Triton_, whose response she could easily guess. The rich brother from Barcelona was brief and affirmative, "But wouldn't that bring him in the money?"... The Blanes of the coast showed a gloomy fatalism. It would be useless to oppose the lad if he felt that to be his vocation. The sea had a tight clutch upon those who followed it, and there was no power on earth that could dissuade him. On that account they who were already old were not listening to their sons who were trying to tempt them with the convenience of life in the capital. They needed to live near the coast in agreeable contact with the dark and ponderous monster which had rocked them so maternally when it might just as easily have dashed them to pieces.

The only one who protested was Labarta. A sailor?... that might be a very good thing, but a warlike sailor, an official of the Royal Armada.

And in his mind's eye the poet could see his G.o.dson clad in all the splendors of naval elegance,--a blue jacket with gold b.u.t.tons for every day, and for holiday attire a coat trimmed with galloon and red trappings, a pointed hat, a sword....

Ulysses shrugged his shoulders before such grandeur. He was too old now to enter the naval school. Besides he wanted to sail over all oceans, and the officers of the navy only had occasion to cruise from one port to another like the people of the coast trade, or even pa.s.sed years seated in the cabinet of the naval executive. If he had to grow old in an office, he would rather take up his father's profession of notary.

After seeing Dona Cristina well established in Barcelona, surrounded with a cortege of nephews fawning upon the rich aunt from Valencia, her son embarked as apprentice on a transatlantic boat which was making regular trips to Cuba and the United States. Thus began the seafaring life of Ulysses Ferragut, which terminated only with his death.

The pride of the family placed him on a luxurious steamer, a mail-packet full of pa.s.sengers, a floating hotel on which the officials were something like the managers of the Palace Hotel, while the real responsibility devolved upon the engineers, who were always going below, and upon returning to the light, invariably remained modestly in a second place, according to a hieratical law anterior to the progress of mechanics.

He crossed the ocean several times, as do those making a land journey at the full speed of an express train. The august calm of the sea was lost in the throb of the screws and in the deafening roar of the machinery. However blue the sky might be, it was always darkened by the floating crepe band from the smokestacks. He envied the leisurely sailboats that the liner was always leaving behind. They were like reflective wayfarers who saturate themselves with the country atmosphere and commune deeply with its soul. The people of the steamer lived like terrestrial travelers who sleepily survey from the car-windows a succession of indefinite and dizzying views streaked by telegraph wires.

When his novitiate was ended he became second mate on a sailing vessel bound for Argentina for a cargo of wheat. The slow day's run with little wind and the long equatorial calms permitted him to penetrate a little into the mysteries of the oceanic immensity, severe and dark, that for ancient peoples had been "the night of the abyss," "the sea of utter darkness," "the blue dragon that daily swallows the sun."

He no longer regarded Father Ocean as the capricious and tyrannical G.o.d of the poets. Everything in his depths was working with a vital regularity, subject to the general laws of existence. Even the tempests roared within prescribed and charted quadrangles.

The fresh trade-winds pushed the bark toward the Southeast, maintaining a heavenly serenity in sky and sea. Before the prow hissed the silken wings of flying fish, spreading out in swarms, like little squadrons of diminutive aeroplanes.

Over the masts and yards covered with canvas, the albatross, eagles of the Atlantic desert, traced their long, sweeping circles, flas.h.i.+ng across the purest blue their great, sail-like wings. From time to time the boat would meet floating prairies, great fields of seaweed dislodged from the Sarga.s.so Sea. Enormous tortoises drowsed in the midst of these clumps of gulf-weed, serving as islands of repose to the seagulls perched on their sh.e.l.ls. Some of the seaweeds were green, nourished by the luminous water of the surface; others had the reddish color of the deep where enters only the deadly chill of the last rays of the sun. Like fruits of the oceanic prairies, there floated past close bunches of dark grapes, leathery capsules filled with brackish water.

As they approached the equator, the breeze kept falling and falling, and the atmosphere became suffocating in the extreme. It was the zone of calms, the ocean of dark, oily waters, in which boats remained for entire weeks with sails limp, without the slightest breath rippling the atmosphere.

Clouds the color of pit coal reflected the s.h.i.+p's slow progress over the sea; showers of rain like whipcord occasionally lashed the deck, followed by a flaming sun that was soon blotted out by a new downpour.

These clouds, pregnant with cataracts, this night descending upon the full daylight of the Atlantic, had been the terror of the ancients, and yet, thanks to just such phenomena, the sailors could pa.s.s from one hemisphere to another without the light wounding them to death, or the sea scorching them like a burning gla.s.s. The heat of the equator, raising up the water in steam, had formed a band of shade around the earth. From other worlds it must appear like a girdle of clouds almost similar to the sidereal rings.

In this gloomy, hot sea was the heart of the ocean, the center of the circulatory life of the planet. The sky was a regulator that, absorbing and returning, restored the evaporation to equilibrium. From this place were sent forth the rains and dews to all the rest of the earth, modifying its temperatures favorably for the development of animal and vegetable life. There were exchanged the exhalations of the two worlds; and, converted into clouds, the water of the southern hemisphere--the hemisphere of the great seas with no other points of relief than the triangular extremities of Africa and America, and the humps of the oceanic archipelagoes--was always reinforcing the rills and rivers of the northern hemisphere with its inhabited lands.

From this equatorial zone, the heart of the globe, come forth two rivers of tepid water that heat the coasts of the north. They are the two currents that issue from the Gulf of Mexico and the Java Sea. Their enormous liquid ma.s.ses, fleeing ceaselessly from the equator, govern a vast a.s.semblage of water from the poles that comes to occupy their s.p.a.ce, and these chilled and fresher currents are constantly precipitating themselves on the electric hearth of the equator that warms and salts them anew, renewing with its systole and diastole the life of the world. The ocean struggles vainly to condense these two warm currents without ever succeeding in mingling itself with them.

They are torrents of a deep blue, almost black, that flow across the cold and green waters.

The Atlantic current, upon reaching Newfoundland, divides its arms, sending one of them to the North Pole. With the other, weak and exhausted by its long journey, it modifies the temperature of the British Isles, tempering refres.h.i.+ngly the coasts of Norway. The Indian current that the j.a.panese call, because of its color, "the black river," circulates between the islands, maintaining for a longer time than the other its prodigious powers of creation and agitation which enable it to trail over the planet an enormous tail of life.

Its center is the apogee of terrestrial energy in the vegetable and animal creations, in monsters and in fish. One of its arms, escaping toward the south, goes on forming the mysterious world of the coral sea. In a s.p.a.ce as large as four continents, the polyps, strengthened by the lukewarm water, are building up thousands of atolls, ring-shaped islands, reefs and submarine pillars that, when united together by the work of a thousand years, are going to create a new land, an exchange continent in case the human species should lose its present base in some cataclysm of Nature.

The pulse of the blue G.o.d is the tides. The earth turns towards the moon and the stars with a sympathetic rotation like that of the flowers that turn towards the sun. Its most movable part--the fluid ma.s.s of the atmosphere--dilates twice daily, swelling its cavities; and this atmospheric suction, the work of universal attraction, is reflected in the tidal waters. Closed seas, like the Mediterranean, scarcely feel its effects, the tides stopping at their door. But on the oceanic coast the marine pulsation vexes the army of the waves, hurrying them daily to their a.s.sault of the steep cliffs, making them roar with fury among the islands, promontories and straits, and impelling them to swallow up extensive lands which they return hours afterward.

This salty sea, like our body, that has a heart, a pulse and a circulation of two different bloods incessantly renewed and transformed, becomes as furious as an organic creature when the horizontal currents of its interior come to unite themselves with the vertical currents descending from the atmosphere. The violent pa.s.sage of the winds, the crises of evaporation, and the obscure electrical forces produce the tempests.

These are no more than cutaneous shudderings. The storms, so deadly for mankind, merely contract the marine epidermis while the profound ma.s.s of its waters remains in murky calm, fulfilling its great function of nouris.h.i.+ng and renewing life. Father Ocean completely ignores the existence of the human insects that dare to slip across his surface in microscopic c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.ls. 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 phosph.o.r.escence. 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 s.h.i.+p remained immovable with drooping sail, the stars pa.s.sing 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 j.a.panese 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 s.h.i.+p,--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 refres.h.i.+ng himself with a study of Maury's charts--the sailors'

Bible--the patient work of an obscure genius who first s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 anch.o.r.ed 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-ap.r.o.ned 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 sp.a.w.ning 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 pa.s.sages 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.

Men and carnivorous fish fall upon them, opening great furrows of destruction in their midst: but the breaches are closed instantly and the living bank continues on its way, growing denser every moment, as though defying death. The more their enemies destroy them, the more numerous they become. The thick and close columns ceaselessly reproduce themselves _en route_. At sunrise the waves are greasy and viscous,--replete with life that is fermenting rapidly. For a s.p.a.ce of hundreds of leagues the salt ocean around them is like milk.

The fecundity of these fishy ma.s.ses was placing the world in danger.

Each individual could produce up to seventy thousand eggs. In a few generations there would be enough to fill the ocean, to make it solid, to make it rot, extinguis.h.i.+ng other beings, depopulating the globe....

But death was charged with saving universal life. The cetaceans bore down upon this living density and with their insatiable mouths devoured the nourishment by ton loads. Infinitely little fish seconded the efforts of the marine giants, stuffing themselves with the eggs of the herring. The most gluttonous fish, the cod and the hake, pursued these prairies of meat, pus.h.i.+ng them, toward the coasts and finally dispersing them.

The cod increases its species most prodigiously, surfeiting itself upon hake, until the world is again menaced. The ocean might be converted into a ma.s.s of cod, for each one can produce as many as nine million eggs.... Mankind might be overwhelmed under the onslaught of the more fertile fishes, and the cod might maintain immense fleets, creating, besides, colonies and cities. Human generations might become exhausted without succeeding in conquering this monstrous reproduction. The great marine devourers, therefore, are those that reestablish equilibrium and order. The sturgeon, insatiable stomach, intervenes in the oceanic banquet, relis.h.i.+ng in the cod the concentrated substance of armies of herring. But this oviparous devourer of such great reproductive power would, in turn, continue the world danger were it not that another monster as avid in appet.i.te as it is weak in procreation, intervenes and cuts down with one blow the ever-increasing fecundity of the ocean.

The superior glutton is the shark,--that mouth with fins, that natatory intestine which swallows with equal indifference the dead and the living, flesh and wood, cleanses the waters of life and leaves a desert behind its wriggling tail; but this destroyer brings forth only one shark that is born armed and ferocious ready from the very first moment to continue the paternal exploits, like a feudal heir.

Ferragut's wandering life as a pilot abounded in dramatic adventures,--a few always standing out clearly from his many confused recollections of exotic lands and interminable seas.

In Glasgow he embarked as second mate on an old sailing tramp that was bound for Chile, to unload coal in Valparaiso and take on saltpeter in Iquique. The crossing of the Atlantic was good, but upon leaving the Malvina Islands the boat had to go out in the teeth of a torrid, furious blast that closed the pa.s.sage to the Pacific. The Straits of Magellan are for s.h.i.+ps that are able to avail themselves at will of a propelling force. The sailboat needs a wide sea and a favorable wind in order to double Cape Horn,--the utmost point of the earth, the place of interminable and gigantic tempests.

While summer was burning in the other hemisphere, the terrible southern winter came to meet the navigators. The boat had to turn its course to the west, just as the winds were blowing from the west, barring its route.

Eight weeks pa.s.sed and it was still contending with sea and tempest.

The wind carried off a complete set of sails. The wooden s.h.i.+p, somewhat strained by this interminable struggle, commenced to leak, and the crew had to work the hand-pumps night and day. n.o.body was able to sleep for many hours running. All were sick from exhaustion. The rough voice and the oaths of the captain could hardly maintain discipline. Some of the seamen lay down wis.h.i.+ng to die, and had to be roused by blows.

Ulysses knew for the first time what waves really were. He saw mountains of water, literally mountains, pouring over the hull of the boat, their very immensity making them form great slopes on both sides of it. When the crest of one broke upon the vessel Ferragut was able to realize the monstrous weight of salt water. Neither stone nor iron had the brutal blow of this liquid force that, upon breaking, fled in torrents or dashed up in spray. They had to make openings in the bulwarks in order to provide a vent for the crus.h.i.+ng ma.s.s.

The southern day was a livid and foggy eclipse, repeating itself for weeks and weeks without the slightest streak of clearing, as though the sun had departed from the earth forever. Not a glimmer of white existed in this tempestuous outline; always gray,--the sky, the foam, the seagulls, the snows.... From time to time the leaden veils of the tempest were torn asunder, leaving visible a terrifying apparition.

Once it was black mountains with glacial winding sheets from the Straits of Beagle. And the boat tacked, fleeing away from this narrow aquatic pa.s.sageway full of perilous ledges. Another time the peaks of Diego Ramirez, the most extreme point of the cape, loomed up before the prow, and the bark again tacked, fleeing from this cemetery of s.h.i.+ps.

The wind s.h.i.+fting, then brought their first icebergs into view and at the same time forced them to turn back on their course in order not to be lost in the deserts of the South Pole.