es of history, as the mollusks
fastened to the rocks endure the tempests. For him the only important
thing was not to lose sight of his blue sea. The Spaniard used to pull
an oar on the Liburnian felucca, the Christian would join the crews of
the Saracen ships of the Middle Ages; the subjects of Charles V would
pass through the fortunes of war from the galleys of the Cross to those
of the Crescent, and would end by becoming rulers of Algiers, rich
captains of the sea, or by making their names famous as renegades.

In the eighth century the inhabitants of the Valencian coast united
with the Andalusian Moors to carry the war to the ends of the
Mediterranean and to the island of Crete, taking possession of it and
giving it the name of Candia. This nest of pirates was the terror of
Byzantium, taking Salonica by assault and selling as slaves the
patricians and most important ladies of the realm. Years afterwards,
when dislodged from Candia, the Valencian adventurers returned to their
native shores and there established a town in a fertile valley, giving
it the name of the distant island which was changed to Gandia.

Every type of human vigor had sprung from the Mediterranean
race,--fine, sharp and dry as flint, doing good and evil on a large
scale with the exaggeration of an ardent character that discounts
halfway measures and leaps from duplicity to the greatest extremes of
generosity. Ulysses was the father of them all, a discreet and prudent
hero, yet at the same time complex and malicious. So was old Cadmus
with his Phoenician miter and curled beard, a great old sea-wolf,
scattering by means of his various adventures the art of writing and
the first notions of commerce.

In one of the Mediterranean islands Hannibal was born, and twenty
centuries after, in another of them, the son of a lawyer without briefs
embarked for France, with no other outfit than his cadet's uniform, in
order to make famous his name of Napoleon.

Over the Mediterranean waves had sailed Roger de Lauria, knight-errant
of vast tracts of sea, who wished to clothe even the fishes with the
colors of Aragon. A visionary of obscure origin named Columbus had
recognized as his country the republic of Genoa. A smuggler from the
coasts of Laguria came to be Messina, the marshal beloved by Victory,
and the last personage of this stock of Mediterranean heroes associated
with the heroes of fabulous times was a sailor from Nice, simple and
romantic, a warrior