CHAPTER I.
SUPERHUMAN LAWS.
The snowstorm is one of the mysteries of the ocean. It is the mostobscure of things meteorological--obscure in every sense of the word. Itis a mixture of fog and storm; and even in our days we cannot wellaccount for the phenomenon. Hence many disasters.
We try to explain all things by the action of wind and wave; yet in theair there is a force which is not the wind, and in the waters a forcewhich is not the wave. That force, both in the air and in the water, iseffluvium. Air and water are two nearly identical liquid masses,entering into the composition of each other by condensation anddilatation, so that to breathe is to drink. Effluvium alone is fluid.The wind and the wave are only impulses; effluvium is a current. Thewind is visible in clouds, the wave is visible in foam; effluvium isinvisible. From time to time, however, it says, "I am here." Its "I amhere" is a clap of thunder.
The snowstorm offers a problem analogous to the dry fog. If the solutionof the _callina_ of the Spaniards and the _quobar_ of the Ethiopians bepossible, assuredly that solution will be achieved by attentiveobservation of magnetic effluvium.
Without effluvium a crowd of circumstances would remain enigmatic.Strictly speaking, the changes in the velocity of the wind, varyingfrom 3 feet per second to 220 feet, would supply a reason for thevariations of the waves rising from 3 inches in a calm sea to 36 feet ina raging one. Strictly speaking, the horizontal direction of the winds,even in a squall, enables us to understand how it is that a wave 30 feethigh can be 1,500 feet long. But why are the waves of the Pacific fourtimes higher near America than near Asia; that is to say, higher in theEast than in the West? Why is the contrary true of the Atlantic? Why,under the Equator, are they highest in the middle of the sea? Whereforethese deviations in the swell of the ocean? This is what magneticeffluvium, combined with terrestrial rotation and sidereal attraction,can alone explain.
Is not this mysterious complication needed to explain an oscillation ofthe wind veering, for instance, by the west from south-east tonorth-east, then suddenly returning in the same great curve fromnorth-east to south-east, so as to make in thirty-six hours a prodigiouscircuit of 560 degrees? Such was the preface to the snowstorm of March17, 1867.
The storm-waves of Australia reach a height of 80 feet; this fact isconnected with the vicinity of the Pole. Storms in those latitudesresult less from disorder of the winds than from submarine electricaldischarges. In the year 1866 the transatlantic cable was disturbed atregular intervals in its working for two hours in the twenty-four--fromnoon to two o'clock--by a sort of intermittent fever. Certaincompositions and decompositions of forces produce phenomena, and imposethemselves on the calculations of the seaman under pain of shipwreck.The day that navigation, now a routine, shall become a mathematic; theday we shall, for instance, seek to know why it is that in our regionshot winds come sometimes from the north, and cold winds from the south;the day we shall understand that diminutions of temperature areproportionate to oceanic depths; the day we realize that the globe is avast loadstone polarized in immensity, with two axes--an axis ofrotation and an axis of effluvium--intersecting each other at the centreof the earth, and that the magnetic poles turn round the geographicalpoles; when those who risk life will choose to risk it scientifically;when men shall navigate assured from studied uncertainty; when thecaptain shall be a meteorologist; when the pilot shall be a chemist;then will many catastrophes be avoided. The sea is magnetic as much asaquatic: an ocean of unknown forces floats in the ocean of the waves,or, one might say, on the surface. Only to behold in the sea a mass ofwater is not to see it at all: the sea is an ebb and flow of fluid, asmuch as a flux and reflux of liquid. It is, perhaps, complicated byattractions even more than by hurricanes; molecular adhesion, manifestedamong other phenomena by capillary attraction, although microscopic,takes in ocean its place in the grandeur of immensity; and the wave ofeffluvium sometimes aids, sometimes counteracts, the wave of the air andthe wave of the waters. He who is ignorant of electric law is ignorantof hydraulic law; for the one intermixes with the other. It is truethere is no study more difficult nor more obscure; it verges onempiricism, just as astronomy verges on astrology; and yet without thisstudy there is no navigation. Having said this much we will pass on.
One of the most dangerous components of the sea is the snowstorm. Thesnowstorm is above all things magnetic. The pole produces it as itproduces the aurora borealis. It is in the fog of the one as in thelight of the other; and in the flake of snow as in the streak of flameeffluvium is visible.
Storms are the nervous attacks and delirious frenzies of the sea. Thesea has its ailments. Tempests may be compared to maladies. Some aremortal, others not; some may be escaped, others not. The snowstorm issupposed to be generally mortal. Jarabija, one of the pilots ofMagellan, termed it "a cloud issuing from the devil's sore side."[2]
The old Spanish navigators called this kind of squall _la nevada_, whenit came with snow; _la helada_, when it came with hail. According tothem, bats fell from the sky, with the snow.
Snowstorms are characteristic of polar latitudes; nevertheless, at timesthey glide--one might almost say tumble--into our climates; so muchruin is mingled with the chances of the air.
The _Matutina_, as we have seen, plunged resolutely into the greathazard of the night, a hazard increased by the impending storm. She hadencountered its menace with a sort of tragic audacity; nevertheless, itmust be remembered that she had received due warning.