Chapter 15

----"I' the name of truth,
Are ye fantastical, or that indeed
Which outwardly ye show?"--_Macbeth._

The division of employment that is found in Europe, and which brings, in
its train, a peculiar and corresponding limitation of ideas, has never yet
existed in our country. If our artisans have, in consequence been less
perfect in their several handicrafts, they have ever been remarkable for
intelligence of a more general character. Superstition is however, a
quality that seems indigenous to the ocean. Few common mariners are exempt
from its influence, in a greater or less degree; though it is found to
exist, among the seamen of different people, in forms that are tempered by
their respective national habits and peculiar opinions. The sailor of the
Baltic has his secret rites, and his manner of propitiating the gods of
the wind; the Mediterranean mariner tears his hair, and kneels before the
shrine of some impotent saint, when his own hand might better do the
service he implores; while the more skilful Englishman sees the spirits of
the dead in the storm, and hears the cries of a lost messmate in the gusts
that sweep the waste he navigates. Even the better instructed and still
more reasoning American has not been able to shake entirely off the secret
influence of a sentiment that seems the concomitant of his condition.

There is a majesty, in the might of the great deep that has a tendency to
keep open the avenues of that dependant credulity which more or less
besets the mind of every man, however he may have fortified his intellect
by thought. With the firmament above him, and wandering on an interminable
waste of water, the less gifted seaman is tempted, at every step of his
pilgrimage, to seek the relief of some propitious omen. The few which are
supported by scientific causes give support to the many that have their
origin only in his own excited and doubting temperament. The gambols of
the dolphin, the earnest and busy passage of the porpoise, the ponderous
sporting of the unwieldy whale, and the screams of the marine birds, have
all, like the signs of the ancient soothsayers, their attendant
consequences of good or evil. The confusion between things which are
explicable, and things which are not, gradually brings the mind of the
mariner to a state in which any exciting and unnatural sentiment is
welcome, if it be or no other reason than that, like the vast element on
which he passes his life, it bears the impression of what is thought a
supernatural, because it is an incomprehensible, power.

The crew of the "Royal Caroline" had not even the advantage of being
natives of a land where necessity and habit have united to bring every
man's faculties into exercise, to a certain extent