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There is an old story about a Christian father, who, having been torturing himself with theological speculations about the nature of the Trinity, fell asleep and dreamed that he was emptying the ocean with a thimble! Well, you cannot empty it with a thimble, but you can go to it with one, and, if you have only a thimble in your hand, you will only bring away a thimbleful.
I saw a considerable tract of the ocean thus covered on the coast of Brazil; the seamen attributed it to the putrefying carcase of some whale, which probably was floating at no great distance.
Clem was now doing duty as a midshipman, and I was in the same watch with him. The weather had hitherto been generally fine; but one night as the sun went down, I thought I saw indications of a gale. Still the wind didn't come, and the ship went gliding smoothly over the ocean. I was in the middle watch, and had just come on deck.
These are, his having dispelled the illusion of a Terra Australis Incognita; his demonstration of the impracticability of a northern passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean; and his having established a sure method of preserving the health of seamen in the longest voyages, and through every variety of latitude and climate.
If I turn south I shall get no bed nor food all night, and be picked up in the mornin' fur a kidnapper. I can't go back. The big river or the ocean, I reckon, is before me. What would Jimmy Phoebus do?" He held the animal in as he asked this question, and paused at the crossing of the great State road.
Another opinion might have been added, that some throe of nature has forced up parts which had been the bed of the ocean. But have we any better proof of such an effort of nature, than of her shooting a lapidific juice into the form of a shell?
Every day she watched this crowd hurrying, hurrying away into the twilight and among all its hundreds of thousands not an eye was ever lifted to hers not one man or woman among them cared whether she lived or died. It was horrible, this loneliness of the desert in an ocean of humanity!
On the whole, though, Bowers was not very much off in his description which somehow took a queer deep hold upon me, and especially set me to wondering what strange old waifs and strays of the ocean might not be found in the thick of that tangle if only there were some way of pushing into it and reaching the hidden depths that no man ever yet had seen.
To attack a vessel armed with cannon, and manned by a crew very much larger than their little party, seemed almost like throwing themselves upon certain death. But still, there was a chance that in some way they might get the better of the Spaniards; whereas, if they rowed away again into the solitudes of the ocean, they would give up all chance of saving themselves from death by starvation.
He and his six companions were sailing back over the thirty miles between Manihiki and Rakahanga, two of the many little lonely ocean islands that stud the Pacific like stars. They sailed a strange craft, for it cannot be called raft or canoe or hut. It was all these and yet was neither. Two canoes, forty-eight feet long, sailed side by side.
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