here is,
one would think, no necessity for it, as in the conversation of
Sophomores, sporting men, and reporters for the press, a dialect is
forthwith partly invented, partly suffered to grow, and the sturdy stem
of original English exhibits a new crop of parasitic weeds which often
partake of the nature of fungi and betoken the decay of the trunk
whence they spring.

Is this the case with the language of the sea? Has the sea any
language? or has each national tongue grafted into it the technology of
the maritime calling?

The sea has its own laws,--the common and unwritten law of the
forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and
the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament
and statutes of Congress. The sea has its own customs, superstitions,
traditions, architecture, and government; wherefore not its own
language? We maintain that it has, and that this tongue, which is not
enumerated by Adelung, which possesses no grammar and barely a lexicon
of its own, and which is not numbered among the polyglot achievements
of Mezzofanti or Burritt, has yet a right to its place among the
world's languages.

Like everything else which is used at sea,--except salt-water,--its
materials came from shore. As the ship is originally wrought from the
live-oak forests of Florida and the pine mountains of Norway, the iron
mines of England, the hemp and flax fields of Russia, so the language
current upon her deck is the composite gift of all sea-loving peoples.
But as all these physical elements of construction suffer a sea-change
on passing into the service of Poseidon, so again the landward phrases
are metamorphosed by their contact with the main. But no one set of
them is allowed exclusive predominance. For the ocean is the only true,
grand, federative commonwealth which has never owned a single master.
The cloud-compelling Zeus might do as he pleased on land; but far
beyond the range of outlook from the white watch-tower of Olympus
rolled the immeasurable waves of the wine-purple deep, acknowledging
only the Enosigaios Poseidon. Consequently, while Zeus allotted to this
and that hero and demigod Argos and Mycene and the woody Zacynthus,
each to each, the ocean remained unbounded and unmeted. Nation after
nation, race after race, has tried its temporary lordship, but only at
the pleasure of the sea itself. Sometimes the ensign of sovereignty has
been an eagle, sometimes a winged lion,--