sober unpoetical truth the sea-salt never gets
much further than the seaman's skin, which in certain latitudes it takes
the opportunity to encrust very thoroughly. That and nothing more. And
then, what is this sea, the subject of so many apostrophes in verse and
prose addressed to its greatness and its mystery by men who had never
penetrated either the one or the other? The sea is uncertain, arbitrary,
featureless, and violent. Except when helped by the varied majesty of
the sky, there is something inane in its serenity and something stupid in
its wrath, which is endless, boundless, persistent, and futile--a grey,
hoary thing raging like an old ogre uncertain of its prey. Its very
immensity is wearisome. At any time within the navigating centuries
mankind might have addressed it with the words: "What are you, after all?
Oh, yes, we know. The greatest scene of potential terror, a devouring
enigma of space. Yes. But our lives have been nothing if not a
continuous defiance of what you can do and what you may hold; a spiritual
and material defiance carried on in our plucky cockleshells on and on
beyond the successive provocations of your unreadable horizons."

Ah, but the charm of the sea! Oh, yes, charm enough. Or rather a sort
of unholy fascination as of an elusive nymph whose embrace is death, and
a Medusa's head whose stare is terror. That sort of charm is calculated
to keep men morally in order. But as to sea-salt, with its particular
bitterness like nothing else on earth, that, I am safe to say, penetrates
no further than the seamen's lips. With them the inner soundness is
caused by another kind of preservative of which (nobody will be surprised
to hear) the main ingredient is a certain kind of love that has nothing
to do with the futile smiles and the futile passions of the sea.

Being love this feeling is naturally naive and imaginative. It has also
in it that strain of fantasy that is so often, nay almost invariably, to
be found in the temperament of a true seaman. But I repeat that I claim
no particular morality for seamen. I will admit without difficulty that
I have found amongst them the usual defects of mankind, characters not
quite straight, uncertain tempers, vacillating wills, capriciousness,
small meannesses; all this coming out mostly on the contact with the
shore; and all rather naive, peculiar, a little fantastic. I have even
had a downright thief in my experience. One.

This is indee