Or rather, we may say, the language of the sea comes and makes a part, as it were, of the speech of many different nations, as the sailor abides for a season in Naples, Smyrna, Valparaiso, Canton, and New York,—­and from each it borrows, as the sailor does, from this a silk handkerchief, from that a cap, here a brooch, and there a scrap of tattooing, but still remains inhabitant of all and citizen of none,—­the language of the seas.

What do we mean by this?  It is that curious nomenclature which from truck to keelson clothes the ship with strange but fitting phrases,—­which has its proverbs, idioms, and forms of expression that are of the sea, salt, and never of the land, earthy.  Wherever tidewater flows, goes also some portion of this speech.  It is “understanded of the people” among all truly nautical races.  It dominates over their own languages, so that the Fin and Mowree, (Maori,) the Lascar and the Armorican, meeting on the same deck, find a common tongue whereby to carry on the ship’s work,—­the language in which to “hand, reef, and steer.”

Whence did it come?  From all nautical peoples.  Not from the Hebrew race.  To them the possession of the soil was a fixed idea.  The sea itself had nothing wherewith to tempt them; they were not adventurers or colonizers; they had none of that accommodating temper as to creed, customs, and diet, which is the necessary characteristic of the sailor.  But the nations they expelled from Canaan, the worshippers of the fish-tailed Dagon, who fled westward to build Tartessus (Tarshish) on the Gaditanian peninsula, or who clung with precarious footing to the sea-shore of Philistia and the rocky steeps of Tyre and Sidon,—­these were seafarers.  From them their Greek off-shoots, the Ionian islanders, inherited something of the maritime faculty.  There are traces in the “Odyssey” of a nautical language, of a technology exclusively belonging to the world “off soundings,” and an exceeding delight in the rush and spray-flinging of a vessel’s motion,—­

  “The purple wave hissed from the bow of the
  bark in its going.”

Hence the Greek is somewhat of a sailor to this day, and in many a Mediterranean port lie sharp and smartly-rigged brigantines with classic names of old Heathendom gilt in pure Greek type upon their sterns.

But the Greek and Carthaginian elements of the ocean language must now lie buried very deep in it, and it is hard to recognize their original image and superscription in those smooth-worn current coins which form the basis of the sea-speech.  It is not within the limits of a cursory paper like this to enter into too deep an investigation, or to trace perhaps a fanciful lineage for such principal words as “mast,” and “sail,” and “rope.”  In one word, “anchor,” the Greek plainly survives,—­and doubtless many others might be made out by a skilful philologist.