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It is fascinating to observe how it was the needs of the merchants and seafarers of Asia Minor and Greece that provided the stimulus for the growth of the classic sciences, and how on the contrary the growth of Chinese science was stifled because the gentry were so strongly hostile to commerce and navigation, though both had always existed.
The Wreckers had some method of attracting ships to crack up on their reefs. Some method of attraction.... And that force which had pulled the Terrans through the time gate; could there be a connection? However, there remained the Wreckers on the cliff. And their prey, the seafarers of the ocean, with an understandably deep enmity between them.
Races and the honour and glory of one's school and team can stir the group-soul to incredible heights of enthusiasm and effort. There is the instinctive unity of seafarers. Who has not, when crossing the ocean, felt that he was part of a small world independent and isolated from others, but bound together by special ties of adventure?
This alone, moreover, explains how Etruscan corsairs could render the Adriatic unsafe till far into the fifth century, and why not only Dionysius of Syracuse covered its coasts with colonies, but even Athens, as a remarkable document recently discovered informs us, resolved about 429 to establish a colony in the Adriatic for the protection of seafarers against the Tyrrhene pirates.
The children were noisy in the playground, the boys playing at port-the-helm, a foolish pastime borrowed in its parlance and its rule from the seafarers who frequented the harbour, and the girls more sedately played peeveral-al and I dree I dree! dropped it, their voices in a sweat unison chanting, yet with a sorrow in the cadence.
But it was obvious when he returned, rich with the spoils of oriental study during thirteen years of life, that the results of his researches were worthy of a wider circulation than that which he had originally contemplated. His work was given to the public in the year 1596, and was studied with avidity not only by men of science but by merchants and seafarers.
But in those days competition was nothing like so keen as it is to-day, especially among seafarers, where men of education were comparatively rare.
In the quaint words of the Cornish Hals, this contempt shown by the Fowey men, "by the better enabled seafarers reckoned intolerable, caused the Ripiers to make out with might and maine against them; howbeit with a more hardy onset than happy issue; for the Foy men gave them so rough entertainment as their welcome, that they were glad to depart without bidding farewell the merit of which exploit afterwards entitled them Gallants of Fowey."
The name of the Ionian Sea, which was retained by the waters intervening between Epirus and Sicily, and that of the Ionian gulf, the term by which the Greeks in earlier times designated the Adriatic Sea, are memorials of the fact that the southern and eastern coasts of Italy were once discovered by seafarers from Ionia.
For the men of Farlingford, like nearly all seafarers, are timorous of bad weather on shore and sit indoors during its passage, while they treat storm and rain with a calm contempt at sea.
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