The sea has its own laws,—­the common and unwritten law of the forecastle, of which Admiralty Courts take infrequent cognizance, and the law of the quarter-deck, which is to be read in acts of Parliament and statutes of Congress.  The sea has its own customs, superstitions, traditions, architecture, and government; wherefore not its own language?  We maintain that it has, and that this tongue, which is not enumerated by Adelung, which possesses no grammar and barely a lexicon of its own, and which is not numbered among the polyglot achievements of Mezzofanti or Burritt, has yet a right to its place among the world’s languages.

Like everything else which is used at sea,—­except salt-water,—­its materials came from shore.  As the ship is originally wrought from the live-oak forests of Florida and the pine mountains of Norway, the iron mines of England, the hemp and flax fields of Russia, so the language current upon her deck is the composite gift of all sea-loving peoples.  But as all these physical elements of construction suffer a sea-change on passing into the service of Poseidon, so again the landward phrases are metamorphosed by their contact with the main.  But no one set of them is allowed exclusive predominance.  For the ocean is the only true, grand, federative commonwealth which has never owned a single master.  The cloud-compelling Zeus might do as he pleased on land; but far beyond the range of outlook from the white watch-tower of Olympus rolled the immeasurable waves of the wine-purple deep, acknowledging only the Enosigaios Poseidon.  Consequently, while Zeus allotted to this and that hero and demigod Argos and Mycene and the woody Zacynthus, each to each, the ocean remained unbounded and unmeted.  Nation after nation, race after race, has tried its temporary lordship, but only at the pleasure of the sea itself.  Sometimes the ensign of sovereignty has been an eagle, sometimes a winged lion,—­now a black raven, then a broom,—­to-day St. Andrew’s Cross, to-morrow St George’s, perhaps the next a starry cluster.  There is no permanent architecture of the main by which to certify the triumphs of these past invaders.  Their ruined castles are lying “fifty fathom deep,”—­Carthaginian galley and Roman trireme, the argosy of Spain, the “White Ship” of Fitz Stephen, the “Ville de Paris,” down to the latest “non-arrival” whispered at Lloyd’s,—­all are gone out of sight into the forgotten silences of the green underworld.  Upon the land we can trace Roman and Celt, Saxon and Norman, by names and places, by minster, keep, and palace.  This one gave the battlement, that the pinnacle, the other the arch.  But the fluent surface of the sea takes no such permanent impression.  Gone are the quaint stern-galleries, gone the high top-gallant fore-castles, gone the mighty banks of oars of the olden time.  It is only in the language that we are able to trace the successive nations in their march along the mountain waves; for to that each has from time to time given its contribution, and of each it has worn the seeming stamp, till some Actium or Lepanto or Cape Trafalgar has compelled its reluctant transfer to another’s hands.