Beloved of the poet and the painter, appealing by the inimitable grace of their curves and of their motion to all mankind, the waves of the sea take easily their high place with the stars and the mountains as some of the chief glories attendant upon the round world. Only an artist, perhaps, could do justice to the multiplicity of lovely lines into which the surface of the ocean enwreathes itself under the pressure of the storm. Yet any one with an eye for the beautiful will find it hard to leave a sight so fair, will watch unweariedly for hours the , curling masses as they rise, in of law, and rise again and yet again.  
Sailors often speak of an “ugly” sea, but the adjective has quite another meaning to that usually attached to it. They do not mean that it is ugly in appearance, for they well know that the beauty of a wave is as much a part of it as is the water—it cannot be otherwise than beautiful, as it cannot cease to be wet. What they mean is a dangerous sea. And by “sea” they always mean wave. A sailor never speaks of a “high wave,” “cross waves,” “heavy waves”; in fact, on board ship, except when passengers are getting information from officers, you will not hear the word “wave” mentioned at all.[192] It is necessary to mention this detail to save constant explanation and digression. To return, then, to the sailor’s “ugly” sea. Its ugliness may be due to many different causes, but in the result the waves do not run truly with the wind; they rise unexpectedly and confusedly, changing the natural motion of the ship into a bewildered stagger, such as one will sometimes see in a horse when a , foolish driver is beating him over the head and first at one and then the other without knowing himself what he wants the poor to do. It is very pitiful, too, to watch a ship being pressed through an ugly, untrue sea—such, for instance, as may be met with in the North Atlantic with a south-west blowing, and the in the midst of the Stream. The conflict between wind and current, all the more terrible for its invisibility, is deep-reaching, so deep that every excuse must be found for those who have spoken of seas running mountains high. As the steady, implacable thrust of the storm booms , the black breadths of water rise ; they would fain flow in the face of the wind, but that cannot be. So they rise, rise, peak-like, against their , until his might compels them forward against the stream beneath, and their shattered crags and tumble in ruinous heaps around.
 
Even this, however, is less dangerous than that time—to be spoken of by those who have seen it, and live, with bated breath—when, rotating like some wheel of the gods, the tropical whirls across the Indian seas. Round and round blow the incredibly furious winds, having a centrifugal direction withal, and yet the whole mighty system progresses in some given direction, until towards its centre there is a indeed—a space where the wind hath left, as it were, a of calm in the world-tumult. And there the waves hold high . Heap upon heap the waters rise, without direction, without shape, save that of fortuitous blocks skyward and falling again in ruin. The fountains of the great deep appear to be broken up, and to man’s handiwork found straying there in that black hour.
 
All those who have ever “run the Easting down” will remember, but not all pleasurably, the great true sea of the roaring “forties” or “fifties.” How, unhindered in its world-encircling sweep, the wind of all comes , unwaveringly, for many a day without a pause, while the good ship flies before it with every wing bearing its utmost strain. In keeping with the wind, the wave—the long, true wave of the Southern Seas, spreading to on either hand, a gorgeous concave of blue, with its direction as straightly at right angles to the ship’s track as if laid by line, and its all like a wreath of new-fallen snow under silver moon or golden sun. It pursues, it overtakes, rises astern with sound as of all the war-chariots of ; then, easily passing beneath the buoyant keel, it is gone on ahead, has joined its fellows in their stately progress to the East. Adown its far-spreading shoulders stream pennons of white; in the[194] broad valley between it and the next wave the same bright creams and until wherever the eye can rest is no longer blue but white—a of snow just bepatched with .
 
The strong, ship may rejoice in such a scene as this, but it is far otherwise with the weakling. Caught up in this march of wind and wave, she feels that her place is otherwhere; it is not hers to strive with giants, but to by the stuff. Then do the hapless in charge watch carefully for a time when they may lay her to, watch the waves’ sequence, knowing that every third wave is greater, and leaves a broader valley of smooth behind it than its fellows; while some say that with the third sequence of three—the ninth wave—these differences are at their maximum. Why? Who knows? Certain it is that some wa............