But to combine and fuse all these elements was the work of England.  To that nation, with its noble inheritance of a composite language, incomparably rich in all the nomenclature of natural objects and sounds, was given especially the coast department, so to speak, of language.  Every variety of shore, from shingly beaches to craggy headlands, was theirs.  While the grand outlines and larger features are Italian, such as Cape, Island, Gulf, the minuter belong to the Northern races, who are closer observers of Nature’s nice differences, and who take more delight in a frank, fearless acquaintance and fellowship with out-door objects.  Beach, sand, headland, foreland, shelf, reef, breaker, bar, bank, ledge, shoal, spit, sound, race, reach, are words of Northern origin.  So, too, the host of local names by which every peculiar feature of shore-scenery is individualized,—­as, for instance, the Needles, the Eddystone, the Three Chimneys, the Hen and Chickens, the Bishop and Clerks.  The strange atmospheric phenomena, especially of the tropics, have been christened by the Spaniard and Portuguese, the Corposant, the Pampero, the Tornado, the Hurricane.  Then follows a host of words of which the derivation is doubtful,—­such as sea, mist, foam, scud, rack.  Their monosyllabic character may only be the result of that clipping and trimming which words get on shipboard.  Your seaman’s tongue is a true bed of Procrustes for the unhappy words that roll over it.  They are docked without mercy, or, now and then, when not properly mouth-filling, they are “spliced” with a couple of vowels.  It is impossible to tell the whys and wherefores of sea-prejudices.

We have now indicated the main sources of the ocean-language.  As new nations are received into the nautical brotherhood, and as new improvements are made, new terms come in.  The whole whaling diction is the contribution of America, or rather of Nantucket, New Bedford, and New London, aided by the islands of the Pacific and the mongrel Spanish ports of the South Seas.  Here and there an adventurous genius coins a phrase for the benefit of posterity,—­as we once heard a mate order a couple of men to “go forrard and trim the ship’s whiskers,” to the utter bewilderment of his captain, who, in thirty years’ following of the sea, had never heard the martingale chains and stays so designated.  But the source of the great body of the sea-language might be marked out on the map by a current flowing out of the Straits of Gibraltar and meeting a similar tide from the Baltic, the two encountering and blending in the North Sea and circling Great Britain, while not forgetting to wash the dykes of Holland as they go.  How to distinguish the work of each, in founding the common tongue, is not here our province.