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indulgence.  This smile of the worthy descendant of the most ancient sea-folk whose audacity and hardihood had left no trace of greatness and glory upon the waters, completed the cycle of my initiation.  There was an infinite depth of hereditary wisdom in its pitying sadness.  It made the hearty bursts of cheering sound like a childish noise of triumph.  Our crew shouted with immense confidence — honest souls!  As if anybody could ever make sure of having prevailed against the sea, which has betrayed so many ships of great “name,” so many proud men, so many towering ambitions of fame, power, wealth, greatness!
    As I brought the boat under the falls my captain, in high good-humour, leaned over, spreading his red and freckled elbows on the rail, and called down to me sarcastically, out of the depths of his cynic philosopher’s beard:
    “So you have brought the boat back after all, have you?”
    Sarcasm was “his way,” and the most that can be said for it is that it was natural.  This did not make it lovable.  But it is decorous and expedient to fall in with one’s commander’s way.  “Yes.  I brought the boat back all right, sir,” I answered.  And the good man believed me.  It was not for him to discern upon me the marks of my recent initiation.  And yet I was not exactly the same youngster who had taken the boat away — all impatience for a race against death, with the prize of nine men’s lives at the end.
    Already I looked with other eyes upon the sea.  I knew it capable of betraying the generous ardour of youth as implacably as, indifferent to evil and good, it would have betrayed the basest greed or the noblest heroism.  My conception of its magnanimous greatness was gone.  And I looked upon the true sea — the sea that plays with men till their hearts are broken, and wears stout ships to death.  Nothing can touch the brooding bitterness of its heart.  Open to all and faithful to none, it exercises its fascination for the undoing of the best.  To love it is not well.  It knows no bond of plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to long companionship, to long devotion.  The promise it holds out perpetually is very great; but the only secret of its possession is strength, strength — the jealous, sleepless strength of a man guarding a coveted treasure within his gates.
     

XXXVII.
     
     
    The cradle of oversea traffic and of the art of naval combats, the Mediterranean, apart from all the associations of adventure and glory, the common heritage of all mankind, makes a tender appeal to a seaman.  It has sheltered the infancy of his craft.  He looks upon it as a man may look at a vast nursery in an old, old mansion where innumerable generations of his own people have learned to walk.  I say his own people because, in a sense, all sailors belong to one family: all are descended from that adventurous and shaggy ancestor who, bestriding a shapeless log and paddling with a crooked branch, accomplished the first coasting-trip in a sheltered bay ringing with the admiring howls of his tribe.  It is a matter of regret that all those brothers in craft and feeling, whose generations have learned to walk a ship’s deck in that nursery, have been also more than once fiercely engaged in cutting each other’s throats there.  But life, apparently, has such exigencies.  Without human propensity to murder and other sorts of unrighteousness there would have been no historical heroism.  It is a consoling reflection.  And then, if one examines impartially the deeds of violence, they appear of but small consequence.  From Salamis to Actium, through Lepanto and the Nile to the naval massacre of Navarino, not to mention other armed encounters of lesser interest, all the blood heroically spilt into the Mediterranean has not stained with a single trail of purple the deep azure of its classic waters.
    Of course, it may be argued that battles have shaped the destiny of mankind.  The question whether they have shaped it well would remain open, however.  But it would be hardly worth discussing.  It is very probable that, had the Battle of Salamis never been fought, the face of the world would have been much as we behold it now, fashioned by the mediocre inspiration and the short-sighted labours of men.  From a long and miserable experience of suffering, injustice, disgrace and aggression the nations of the earth are mostly swayed by fear — fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory