to estimate the number of lives lost through inundations since mankind began, for purposes of commercial intercourse, the development of seaports. Doubtless the total would run into the hundreds of thousands, and might reach into millions.
Geology is quite sure that the rough Norwegian coast, pierced at intervals of every few miles with the fiords or estuaries which penetrate in many instances leagues into the land, tell the story of many cataclysms such as that which has just occurred along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Science, however, taking no note of the traditions or folklore of a people, antedates all human life on the Scandinavian peninsula in setting the time when this great rising of the sea against the land took place.
Scientists are agreed on putting the formation of the Norwegian shore lines as far back as the glacial period. But in the songs of the skalds, as late as the reign of Harold Hardrada, there are allusions to the valor of olden heroes over whom the seas had swept, but whose spirits rode upon the winds which blew the Norman galleys to other shores. In the Norway of the present day there are traditions, handed down through countless generations, from the remotest antiquity, telling how, but not when, the seas came in.
OLD AND CHARMING TRADITION.
One of the oldest and prettiest traditions in the world is that which tells of a submerged city somewhere on the Scandinavian coast, the minarets and towers of which poets can see reflected in the waters at sunset, and the bells of which musicians, with ears divinely attuned to concordant sounds, can hear at vespers. Without either the poet’s eye or the musician’s ear it is still possible to conclude that traditions which have survived so many centuries, and which contradict nothing of the exact truth of science as to original causes, may be as well trusted as science when it begins to speculate, which is all it does when it seeks to prove that the Scandinavian fiords were in the country before the Scandinavian himself.
HON. JOSEPH D. SAYERS
GOVERNOR OF TEXAS
SHOWING TERRIBLE DEVASTATION ON AVENUE 1. BETWEEN TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH STREETS
THE JOHN SEALY HOSPITAL, GALVESTON
A RESIDENCE CARRIED FROM ITS FOUNDATION BY THE RUSH OF WATERS
REMOVING DEAD BODIES TO THE BARGES FOR BURIAL AT SEA
GENERAL VIEW ALONG THE GALVESTON BEACH AFTER THE FLOOD
CREMATING BODIES EXCAVATED FROM THE RUINS
MEDICAL DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS, GALVESTON, DAMAGED BY THE FLOOD
STORY OF THE LOST ATLANTIS.
The world, with the lapse of centuries, has not even been able to outgrow the tradition of the lost Atlantis. Perhaps this is the oldest of all traditions of cataclysms which have blotted out cities and continents. It may be that it is because this one comes handed down to us from the illustrous hand of Plato that we yield to it a veneration which prolongs its life. Certainly it can never be more than tradition, without a return to the ages of miracles. Our lately found expertness in deep sea soundings have given us no new light on Atlantis.
And yet we cling to the old story, and are loath to turn from the spectacle of a continent in the agonies of a watery burial, or to take down from the walls of our brain cells the pictures of a submerged world in which sea moss trails over and around great temples and monuments. More than half the world believes that there is a lost Atlantis. The Egyptians believed so, long before Plato’s day. It is in the mouth of an Egyptian priest, talking to Solon, that Plato puts the description of the vanished land. That description makes of Atlantis a land larger than the Texas of to-day.
BELIEVED THE SEA HAD CONCEALED A LAND.
The Greek philosopher located it off the shores of North Africa, a little to the southwest of Gibraltar. The Platonian description of the interior of the Atlantis of ancient times is surpassingly beautiful, but not more so than the rare imaginative power with which Plato writes of the country and its people, a most fabulous and engaging history.
All this, of course, is the work of pure fancy, and only important, beyond the fact that it is the work of Plato, as showing how deeply the conviction had taken hold upon the mind of that age that the sea had taken away a land which the ancients knew as the western shore of the Atlantic Ocean, and had left nothing but a boundless waste of waters west of Europe. Speculators have located the lost Atlantis near the Canary Islands, and these islands are, in fact, supposed to be the remnants of the lost continent. There is positively nothing tangible upon which to hang the story of the lost Atlantis.
But, like most traditions which persist in living on after the world has grown too practical to have any more use for them, it has, doubtless, a foundation in some important fact of olden time, the tragedy of which was in that sacrifice of the earth to the waters of the deep, which had become familiar even to the ancients. Byron’s apostrophe to the ocean is so singularly powerful and beautiful because it expresses that awe and fear of man for the sea which is an instinct with us, and which, if it had not been instinct with us at the first, would have become so through the many and heavy afflictions visited upon the race by Neptune, god of the sea.
TIDAL WAVES ON ENGLISH COASTS.
That the coasts of England have been visited by many and disastrous tidal waves there is abundant evidence. In fact, the ocean bar, which surrounds nearly the whole of England and Scotland, is evidence enough that the entire shore line, as it exists to-day, is itself the result of a great submersion, or series of submersions, which ages ago overflowed the old coast, rushed in shore, made new land lines, and, hollowing out between the new line and the old, a new ocean bed, leaving what had been called the coast line to be forever after called the “bar.” The bar is to be found in nearly every port of England, eloquent testimony to the tidal waves of the past. But there is comparatively little of other testimony save such as has been preserved in the records of seaport towns.
One of the greatest cataclysms ever occurring on the British coast was that on the coast of Lincolnshire in 1571. This has been commemorated in verse by Jean Ingelow in the poem entitled “High Tide Off the Coast of Lincolnshire.” The Lincolnshire coast is almost uniformly low and marshy—so low, in fact, at some places that the shore requires the defence of an embankment to save it from the encroachments of the sea.
A sea wall had been built when the great tidal wave of 1571 came, but it appears to have been absolutely useless as a defence of the