CHAPTER I. OCEAN LORE Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale or storm, Dark heaving-boundless, endless and sublime. BYRON (Childe Harold). PACIFIC OCEAN. N 1513, three hundred and seventy-one years ago, Balboa was dragging the timbers of his ship across the Isthmus of Darien, from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore. Rebuilding his vessel there, he was the first, in our modern day, to sail on the great ocean waters. If gifted with supernatural vision, he would have seen the Pacific Ocean, spread out over an area of eighty million square miles, covering nearly all of the western hemisphere. Its mighty waves, laving the eastern shores of Asia on the one hand, and the western coasts of the two great American continents. on the other. Reaching almost to the birth-places of the ice-bergs of either pole, embracing the heat of the Torrid Zones, it includes all the climates of the world in its vast limits. He would have seen, north of the equator, the Kuro Shiwo, the Japanese Black 9 |