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Updated: May 29, 2025
"Just the difference between smooth water and rough you ruffle the surface of a canal with a lazy oar, while I run the channel of Piombino in a mistral, shoot the Faro of Messina in a white squall, double Santa Maria di Leuca in a breathing Levanter, and come skimming up the Adriatic before a sirocco that is hot enough to cook my maccaroni, and which sets the whole sea boiling worse than the caldrons of Scylla."
After lying several weeks at Almeria, the ship got under way for England again. We had fresh westerly gales, and beat to and fro, between Europe and Africa, for some time, when we got a Levanter that shoved us out into the Atlantic at a furious rate. In the Straits we passed a squadron of Portuguese frigates, that was cruising against the Algerines.
So that Monsoons, Pampas, Nor-Westers, Harmattans, Trades; any wind but the Levanter and Simoon, might blow Moby Dick into the devious zig-zag world-circle of the Pequod's circumnavigating wake.
We saw Crete, enough to swear by, the white top of Mount Ida, and realized where Fair Haven and Phenice and Clauda must lie, and that we were actually in the seas where the Apostle Paul was caught in the Euroclydon. By the way what is a Euroclydon; is it a Levanter? Was there ever a voyage so vividly described, in more concentrated and pithy words?
A stiff Levanter was blowing when we started, and the trip, which should have been accomplished in three hours, took eight. I have been out in worse weather, but never in a worse vessel, and more than once in that eight hours' struggle with wind and waves my fellow-passengers and I really believed that our end had come.
It was not music that the little maiden made to her ear, but only motion to her body, and just as the deaf who are deaf alone are sometimes found to take pleasure in all forms of percussion, and to derive from them some of the sensations of sound the trembling of the air after thunder, the quivering of the earth after cannon, and the quaking of vast walls after the ringing of mighty bells so Naomi, who was blind as well and had no sense save touch, found in her fingers, which had gathered up the force of all the other senses, the power to reproduce on this instrument of music the movement of things that moved about her the patter of the leaves of the fig-tree in the patio of her home, the swirl of the great winds on the hill-top, the plash of rain on her face, and the rippling of the levanter in her hair.
Blount took an opportunity to whisper into Raleigh's ear, "This storm came like a levanter in the Mediterranean." "VARIUM ET MUTABILE," answered Raleigh, in a similar tone. "Nay, I know nought of your Latin," said Blount; "but I thank God Tressilian took not the sea during that hurricane. He could scarce have missed shipwreck, knowing as he does so little how to trim his sails to a court gale."
Yet all this while the land was full of garrisons, the embayed waters full of fleets. With the impunity of a Levanter, Paul skimmed his craft in the land-locked heart of the supreme naval power of earth; a torpedo-eel, unknowingly swallowed by Britain in a draught of old ocean, and making sad havoc with her vitals.
We were now soon in sight of the Moorish coast, Cape Spartel appearing dimly through mist and vapour on our right. A regular Levanter had now come on, and the vessel pitched and tossed to a very considerable degree.
This not being our case, we somehow or other tumbled down the Mediterranean before a strong Levanter, and then had to work back again along the coast of Spain and France. It is an ill wind, they say, that blows nobody good; and we found it so with us; for off Toulon, in company with the fleet, if we did take prizes they became of little value, because there were so many to share them.
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