Men and carnivorous fish fall upon them, opening great furrows of destruction in their midst:  but the breaches are closed instantly and the living bank continues on its way, growing denser every moment, as though defying death.  The more their enemies destroy them, the more numerous they become.  The thick and close columns ceaselessly reproduce themselves en route.  At sunrise the waves are greasy and viscous,—­replete with life that is fermenting rapidly.  For a space of hundreds of leagues the salt ocean around them is like milk.

The fecundity of these fishy masses was placing the world in danger.  Each individual could produce up to seventy thousand eggs.  In a few generations there would be enough to fill the ocean, to make it solid, to make it rot, extinguishing other beings, depopulating the globe....  But death was charged with saving universal life.  The cetaceans bore down upon this living density and with their insatiable mouths devoured the nourishment by ton loads.  Infinitely little fish seconded the efforts of the marine giants, stuffing themselves with the eggs of the herring.  The most gluttonous fish, the cod and the hake, pursued these prairies of meat, pushing them, toward the coasts and finally dispersing them.

The cod increases its species most prodigiously, surfeiting itself upon hake, until the world is again menaced.  The ocean might be converted into a mass of cod, for each one can produce as many as nine million eggs....  Mankind might be overwhelmed under the onslaught of the more fertile fishes, and the cod might maintain immense fleets, creating, besides, colonies and cities.  Human generations might become exhausted without succeeding in conquering this monstrous reproduction.  The great marine devourers, therefore, are those that reestablish equilibrium and order.  The sturgeon, insatiable stomach, intervenes in the oceanic banquet, relishing in the cod the concentrated substance of armies of herring.  But this oviparous devourer of such great reproductive power would, in turn, continue the world danger were it not that another monster as avid in appetite as it is weak in procreation, intervenes and cuts down with one blow the ever-increasing fecundity of the ocean.

The superior glutton is the shark,—­that mouth with fins, that natatory intestine which swallows with equal indifference the dead and the living, flesh and wood, cleanses the waters of life and leaves a desert behind its wriggling tail; but this destroyer brings forth only one shark that is born armed and ferocious ready from the very first moment to continue the paternal exploits, like a feudal heir.

Ferragut’s wandering life as a pilot abounded in dramatic adventures,—­a few always standing out clearly from his many confused recollections of exotic lands and interminable seas.