the Mediterranean navies in the sixteenth
century. They had to go to the recently discovered Indies, and the
Catalan or the Genoese ships would remain here in the strait weeks and
weeks, struggling with the wind and the contrary current while the
Galicians, the Basques, the French and the English who had left their
ports at the same time were already nearing America.... Fortunately,
navigation by steam has now equalized all that."

Toni was silently admiring his captain. What he must have learned in
those books that filled the stateroom!...

It was in the Mediterranean that men had first entrusted themselves to
the waves. Civilization emanated from India, but the Asiatic peoples
were not able to master the art of navigation in their few seas whose
coasts were very far apart and where the monsoons of the Indian Ocean
blew six months together in one direction and six months in another.

Not until he reached the Mediterranean by overland emigration did the
white man wish to become a sailor. This sea that, compared with others,
is a simple lake sown with archipelagoes, offered a good school. To
whatever wind he might set his sails, he would be sure to reach some
hospitable shore. The fresh and irregular breezes revolved with the sun
at certain times of the year. The hurricane whirled across its bowl,
but never stopped. There were no tides. Its harbors and water-ways were
never dry. Its coasts and islands were often so close together that you
could see from one to the other; its lands, beloved of heaven, were
recipients of the sun's sweetest smiles.

Ferragut recalled the men who had plowed this sea in centuries so
remote that history makes no mention of them. The only traces of their
existence now extant were the _nuraghs_ of Sardinia and the _talayots_
of the Balearic Islands,--gigantic tables formed with blocks, barbaric
altars of enormous rocks which recalled the Celtic obelisks and
sepulchral monuments of the Breton coast. These obscure people had
passed from isle to isle, from the extreme of the Mediterranean to the
strait which is its door.

The captain could imagine their rude craft made from trunks of trees
roughly planed, propelled by one oar, or rather by the stroke of a
stick, with no other aid than a single rudimentary sail spread to the
fresh breeze. The navy of the first Europeans had been like that of the
savages of the oceanic islands whose flotillas of tree trunks are still
actually going from archipe