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Updated: June 16, 2025
While Batavia, owing to the silting of the river already mentioned, is now some miles from the sea, Singapore possesses two commodious harbours, and has far outstripped the older town in commercial importance.
In the first place, it is necessary to exclude the sea from the area, which can only be accomplished by considerable engineering work; in the second place, the exclusion of the tide inevitably results in the silting up of the passage by which the water found its way to the sea. As these openings are often used for harbours, the effect arising from their destruction is often rather serious.
It appears to me highly probable that the systematic destruction of the frankincense and myrrh trees through countless generations has done much to alter the character of this Akaba, and has contributed to the gradual silting up of the Hadhramout and its collateral valleys, to which fact I shall again have occasion to refer.
Everybody who has looked down upon the wide Lombard plain from the pinnacled roof of Milan Cathedral, or who has passed by rail through that monotonous level of poplars and vines between Verona and Venice, knows well what a mud flat due to inundation and gradual silting up of a valley looks like.
Still, the Wantsum was all this while gradually silting up, a grain at a time, and the Isle of Ruim was slowly becoming joined to the opposite mainland. When Leland visited it, in Henry VIII.'s reign, the change was almost complete.
At the mouths the mud pours out into the sea and forms fresh deposits constantly on the bottom, which are gradually silting up still newer lands to seaward.
In this particular May there could be no spot more desolate than the wells of Obak. The sun blazed upon it from six in the morning with an intolerable heat, and all night the wind blew across it piercingly cold, and played with the sand as it would, building pyramids house-high and levelling them, tunnelling valleys, silting up long slopes, so that the face of the country was continually changed.
These works were necessary, it is said, not only for the maritime commerce of the city, which one may think was scarcely large enough to have excused them, but for the preservation of Ravenna from inundation consequent upon the silting up of the rivers. But the earliest work done in Ravenna after the close of the Middle Age was that undertaken by the Venetians.
The coast has greatly changed, the shallow bays beyond the old shore-line, which is still visible, being raised into green meadows. In this way the water-course that made Thanet an island has been closed. This silting up began at a remote era, closing one port after another, and Sandwich rose upon their decline.
The Pennystone, off the Lancashire coast by Blackpool, tells of a submerged village and manor, about which cluster romantic legends. Such is the sad record of the sea's destruction, for which the industrious reclamation of land, the compensations wrought by the accumulation of shingle and sand dunes and the silting of estuaries can scarcely compensate us. How does the sea work this?
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