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Updated: July 6, 2025
We were remote from the sea not only by situation, but also from a complete absence of indirect association, not being a commercial nation at all, but purely agricultural. He made then the quaint reflection that it was "a long way for me to come out to begin a sea-life"; as if sea-life were not precisely a life in which one goes a long way from home.
You become, in time, even a little tired of the Jew who goes about wishing "he vas a veek older;" and the eccentric man, who looks at no one, and streaks about the cabin and on deck, without any purpose, and plays shuffle-board alone, always beating himself, and goes on the deck occasionally through the sky-light instead of by the cabin door, washes himself at the salt-water pump, and won't sleep in his state-room, saying he is n't used to sleeping in a bed, as if the hard narrow, uneasy shelf of a berth was anything like a bed! and you have heard at last pretty nearly all about the officers, and their twenty and thirty years of sea-life, and every ocean and port on the habitable globe where they have been.
It had been done, as he would himself have owned, to spite himself as well as them; for it had obliged him to leave a sea-life, to which, in comparison, all life spent on shore was worse than nothing for dulness.
We have heard the 'sailoring' portions of the finest works of Cooper and others scoffed at by seamen; and the very best book on sea-life ever written, Dana's Two Years before the Mast, is held in no sort of esteem by the very men for whose benefit the author avows he wrote it, and whose life he has so vividly, and, as we think, faithfully described.
Clearly the transport service had been the making of this examiner, who so unexpectedly had given me an insight into his existence, awakening in me the sense of the continuity of that sea-life into which I had stepped from outside; giving a touch of human intimacy to the machinery of official relations. I felt adopted. His experience was for me, too, as though he had been an ancestor.
The people of the Ness are described as good fishermen a striking trait of their original national character, for nothing could distinguish them more from their neighbours, the ordinary Highlanders being everywhere remarkable for their inaptitude to a sea-life. Tradition speaks loudly all over Scotland of the ancient doings of the Danes.
When she heard me say that I intended to assert my ideas in Denmark, and wage war against existing prejudices, she would say, in our long conversations: "I am very fond of Denmark; the people there seem to me to be happy, despite everything, and the country not to be over-populated. In any case, the population finds ample means of outlet in sea-life and emigration.
Clark Russell has attempted to give in literary form a vivid, veracious account of sea-life, and his thrice-noble books are far too little known, so that the strongest maritime nation in the whole world is ignorant of vital facts concerning the men who make her prosperity.
Darwin had not even a cabin to himself; while, in addition to the hindrances and interruptions incidental to sea-life, which can be appreciated only by those who have had experience of them, sea-sickness came on whenever the little ship was "lively"; and, considering the circumstances of the cruise, that must have been her normal state.
I have often wished that those whom I have heard speaking in a casual, airy fashion of this phase of sea-life could have the faculty of imagination put into them so that they might realize what really happened to those who had to experience the manifold sufferings and privations of being short of water and provisions in mid-ocean where there was little chance of seeing a sail for days, and when perchance a vessel was seen, the weather might be so boisterous that communication could not be effected, or they might even be short of provisions.
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