The Ocean Milestones

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · May 14, 1867

The Ocean Milestones.

A Few Geographical Facts not Generally Known.

The Psalmist says, “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in the great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.” Ps. cvii, 23, 24. The following sketch from a correspondent of the Cincinnati Gazette, gives us new ideas of the wonders and vastness of the great waste of waters.

“Now the great mystery of the sea is beheld in our vast ignorance of it. Boundless as the vastness of its waters, and as day succeeds day, ushered in by no sail, crossed by none, and none appearing at night to reach its white hand above the horizon, we feel the mysterious power of our compass, in whose veering pulse we trust, and the uses of the stars and sun that steady our quadrant, and stoop down to lead us. But of the ocean’s boundaries and islets and shallows we do not know till we see the captain’s chart, of which there is no copy in our school atlas. Hereon are places denoted of which we never knew. Solitary rocks struck once by a lone vessel, and their longitude and latitude carefully marked, yet in the great void of waters swallowed up again. So that with much cruising our imperfect calculations never find them. The names of the Flemish Cap, of Whales Hole, of Bœuf’s Bank, of Bazarietyhy’s Rock, of Woodall’s Rock, of Virgin Rocks, we do not hear, yet in the North Atlantic they have their places well attested; but captains have sailed this ocean where they lie a hundred voyages, and never proved them real. So broad and trackless is the deep, that two steamers, quitting New York together, sailing the same course and at the same rate of speed, rarely see each other after the first night out. Their compasses differ a hair’s point, and they float a hundred miles apart. Here on the chart is marked, ‘Perseus Shoal’—(Breakers,) signifying that in mid Atlantic there is a spot so shallow that the surf breaks upon it as upon Rockaway Bar or Sandy Hook. Men are gray with sailing on the route of Perseus Shoal, who never heard the surges nor saw them flash; but in the great deep is an awful sentence. The coming of a sail to those who drift, is like finding the true catch to Dodd’s combination lock, with its billion changes. With all the vessels of steam or sail, that ply between America and England, it is rare to espy more than three between the opposite coasts, while you are crossing the sea. Some vaguely understood matters of the earth’s rotundity, not new save to our landmen’s ignorance, become palpable when we see upon the chart the ocean’s skeleton, water and meridians only, like an empty hoop skirt. For example, we see that the Straits of Gibraltar, instead of facing Cuba due westward, are nearly upon the latitude of Cincinnati; that London does not lie opposite New York, but opposite Labrador; that when one is nearly half way to Europe, he is due south of Greenland, and still west of the mouths of the Amazon; that if you are shipwrecked in mid sea, your nearest land will be the Azore Islands, from which, indeed, you are but 500 miles on the route between New York and Southampton. The route that carries you to England quickest is not a straight line upon the map, but a curved one. You sail on the ‘arc of a great circle,’ and so reduce your voyage from 4,000 miles to 3,000.”

This is the simple proposition in navigation, that a crooked line between two points is shorter than a straight one. To avoid icebergs, which drift to as low a latitude as Nantucket, you sometimes bear due eastward, or even southeastward, and then bend acutely north by east. The Gulf Stream, the Banks, and the Roaring Forties, are the great belts that you must cross: the one is the zodiac of the ocean, spangled with wrecks, sea-weed, and icebergs; the second is the broad geysers of the Atlantic, smoking eternally—the veil between the New World and the Old—nature’s last intimation to the sailor seeking the Western Hemisphere. In the Roaring Forties you sail where all the winds do blow, sheltered by no coasts, subject to the fierce and mutable humors of the great waters and their skies. In every long swell that swims toward you, there are a thousand tons of brine. In every gull that flashes like a pearl in your wake, comes an admonition of the silences. Night descends with no friendly sail in its embrace. The gales cap every wave with white foam, till the sea to the horizon looks like a shoal of sharks with quivering fins. Morning arises upon the same dreary waste, save that the clouds are stranger and more imperious; no bright tints in them, as at home, but gray and sounding, like the complexion of the ocean, and filled with its restless spirit.”