 the great hunting
countries of India, the stranger at a distance will sometimes pass on the plains
recumbent elephants without knowing them to be such, taking them for bare,
blackened elevations of the soil; even so, often, with him who for the first
time beholds this species of the leviathans of the sea. And even when recognised
at last, their immense magnitude renders it very hard really to believe that
such bulky masses of overgrowth can possibly be instinct, in all parts, with the
same sort of life that lives in a dog or a horse.
    Indeed, in other respects, you can hardly regard any creatures of the deep
with the same feelings that you do those of the shore. For though some old
naturalists have maintained that all creatures of the land are of their kind in
the sea; and though taking a broad general view of the thing, this may very well
be; yet coming to specialities, where, for example, does the ocean furnish any
fish that in disposition answers to the sagacious kindness of the dog? The
accursed shark alone can in any generic respect be said to bear comparative
analogy to him.
    But though, to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have
ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling; though we
know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over
numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one; though,
by vast odds, the most terrific of all mortal disasters have immemorially and
indiscriminately befallen tens and hundreds of thousands of those who have gone
upon the waters; though but a moment's consideration will teach, that however
baby man may brag of his science and skill, and however much, in a flattering
future, that science and skill may augment; yet forever and forever, to the
crack of doom, the sea will insult and murder him, and pulverise the stateliest,
stiffest frigate he can make; nevertheless, by the continual repetition of these
very impressions, man has lost that sense of the full awfulness of the sea which
aboriginally belongs to it.
    The first boat we read of, floated on an ocean, that with Portuguese
vengeance had whelmed a whole world without leaving so much as a widow. That
same ocean rolls now; that same ocean destroyed the wrecked ships of last year.
Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two-thirds of the fair
world it yet covers.
    Wherein differ the sea and the land, that a miracle upon one is not a
miracle upon the other? Preternatural terrors rested upon the Hebrews, when
