The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-03-24
THE sTOIO OF THE SEA.

Between Scylla and Charybdis, between
the devil and the deep, deep sea, between
the upper and the neither millstones, be-
tween the eternal menace of wind and
wave, between the sharks in water and the
sharks in boarding-houses, between all
dual things that grind and crush and
pulveriZe, is the sailor.
There is extant no early account of poor
Jacks mishaps. History was yet I'M
written when he was colIiding with the
first belaying-pin or rebounding from the
impact of the third mates foot As
humanity cannot be followed deeper down
in the earth's crust than the glacial period
where the primal mariner straddled his
coniferous log and hoated through the
chartless sounds of the Stone Age, all pre-
tertiary tracks of the sailor are lost. His
earlier remains arise not from their cere-
ments of rock at the scientists call. and
his remoter existence is entombed in a
night that had no beginning. But lower
than Pal9olithic Man-millions Of epochs
under the pliocene cave deposits of organic
life, among the fossil marine plant forms
of the carboniferous hmestone-have been
found indistinct tracings which might
have restored, more resemblance to hand
spike than to any other vegetable in the
terrestrial fora of the 100, 900 600 geological
years.
This is long jump down through the
unrecorded ages but like the student who
rebuilds a mammoth from a bristle or a
planet from a pebble the bridging of the
measureless abyss between the two remote
periods is here. attempted. Mans occu-
pancy of even the very late glacial day
can be established only by the discovery
of few fragments Of secondhand stone
furniture destroyed when the ice food
evicted the cave-dwellers.
AS only contemporaneous evidence is
little short of mere conjecture the associa-
ton of the modern sailor with the prehis-
toric club may be founded on the fact that
one is the contemporary of the other in the
present period, and both are SO closely
brought together now that they could not
have been far removed in the early strata
of time.
Albeit, the man of the later sea is be-
tween the upper and neither stones
fguratiyely as he is geologically, and there
is no probability that he will escape from
the rocks until some great social upheaval
and cleavage possibly in the millennium
takes place. Perchance in other and far
away ages drawing down to the present
the twin fossils of Jack and his coexisting
Delaying pin will be found cased together
in the hard debris of dead years. And
then science will find, more indelibly
engraved in the pages of imperishable
granite, the record of their inseparable
| lives.
The i'll wind that is now supposed to
blow some, or somebody, goad may have
been blowing in the long-ago, and while
raking the past mariner fore and aft was
preparing and hardening him and the
succeeding generations of his species for
the mishaps OF later day. From this
must come his invincible stoicism, his
sturdy and perfect Indifference to
every calamity that energetically seeks
and finds him. Jack is usually pic
tured as the living embodiment
OF "growl," and this gross, unfounded
error has been scattered broadcast That
is only his peculiar way of submitting pa
tiently, joyfully, even thankfully, to any
thing that comes along. The Sunday duff,
with or without plums, and the mate S
| fist, with or without club, were estab-
! lished from the foundations of the earth.
thinks this philosopher of the sea, and
whether they were or were not in the ship
| ping articles when he made his mark he
| doesn't know nor care. The shore sharks
may take what their voracious brothers OF
the ocean don't get, and anybody may
have what escapes the deep sea.
Long life, if he desires it, and then a
snug harbor, if he approves of such lux
ury, to this true stole of the wave whose
soul is of little less density than the upper
and neither millstones that pulvcrize him,
and whose feelings are little less hard than
! those Of the sharks that deyour him.