coasts from Aden clear to the mouth of the Ganges, and reports also on Indo-China and China itself. There were pirate-haunted archipelagoes and islands tenanted by the monsters of Oriental fancy. But these were Eastern waters and it behooved men to know something about them and to take a chance upon them, for a great traffic moved across them-silken fabrics, spices, pepper, gold and silver and precious stones from the hidden storehouses of Asia. Wherefore men faced the seas of sunrise with no such fears as invaded them when they looked out upon the empty and spectral Atlantic.

Another race beside the Phoenician was unafraid of the western sea. This was the Northmen, of whom it was said that they never slept under a smoke-blackened roof, nor ate and drank at any hearth. Their tradition looked outward, where that of the Mediterranean races looked inward. The ocean was the whale path of their skalds, and their hearts sang along it. Its waters carried the challenge and promise of the present, not the glooms or pallors of the hereafter. When their long boats drove through the Straits of Gibraltar into the old Roman world to pillage and rule there, it was the return visit of the men of the outer spaces, ferocious and blithe sea-rovers who thus requited the trafficking and timid excursions of Phoenician and Roman into the seas that washed the continent.

The very names of Viking chieftains-Sigurd Snake-eye, Thord the Yeller, Ottar the Swart, Harold Blue-tooth, Eric Blood-ax, Thorfinn Skull-cleaver, Sweyn Split-beard-sketched a hardihood that made light of supernatural terrors upon the sea and knew none other. These men of the viks or fjords rid the coasts of Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries of every fear except of themselves. Then they went westward to America.

There is a bolder note in their geographical tradition than in aught that had been before. One catches the swing of the Atlantic surges and the pulses of people at home there in the chapter, "On the Situation of Countries," which begins the chronicle of the Heimskringla: "It is said that the earth circle which the human race inhabits is much cut asunder with bights and bays, and that great seas run into the land from the outer ocean. Of a certainty, it is known that a sea goes in at the Norva Sound (Gibraltar) right up to the land of Jerusalem; and from that

sea, again, a long bay, which is called the Black Sea, goes off to the northeast, and it divides the two World-Ridings, that is to say, Asia on the east from Europe on the west. To the north of the Black Sea lies Sweden the Great, or the Cold (Russia); and this is reckoned by some as not less in size than the Great Saracen Land, or even the Great Land of the Bluemen (the Moors). And the northern parts of this Sweden are unpeopled, by reason of the frost and the cold, just as the southern parts of Blue-Land are waste because of the sun's burning. Mighty lordships are there in this Sweden, and people of manifold kind and speech; there are giants and there are dwarfs―aye, and Bluemen, and folk of many kinds and marvellous, and wild beasts, and dragons wondrous great.

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When the pagan Northmen became Christians their ferocity was moderated, and their spirit of enterprise, as it seemed, almost extinguished. Their old contempt of the sea did not pass into the veins of the peoples over whom for a time they had dominion. Rather the confused and credulous views of the churchmen became their own, henceforth occupying the entire field of European thought. Adam of Bremen, eleventh-century churchman, pictures the sea as his time conceived it-the old forbidding canvas of classic legend framed with the icicles of Gothic discovery.

Terra Firma, says Adam, is entirely surrounded by the infinite and terrible ocean. The northern spaces of the deep are covered with ice and darkness and this expanse is called the frozen, glutinous, or darkling sea. It is stiff with salt and covered with black ice, formed long before and so dry that it will burn like peat.

The German bishop even borrows a tale from the Northmen to engender terrors to which they had been stranger. Their king, Harald Hardrada, the most daring of men, had reports from Frisian mariners which caused him to set sail for the limits of the earth. In the darkness he arrived at the North Pole-a profound vortex into which the ebb tides were sucked and out of which the flood tides were disgorged. His ship plunged down into the boiling chaos, but the sea which took could also give, and the outward heave of its vast bosom flung the vessel back again beyond the clutch of the whirlpool.

As late as 1406 a chronicler tells of English ships, bound for Bordeaux, which penetrated an unfrequented sea where four vessels from Lynn were swallowed up in a whirlpool, which thrice a day drew in and cast out the flood. When fishermen of that time went a few miles from land they used only haafwords—a sea speech in which persons, animals, and things had other names than what they bore ashore; so might they avoid offense to whatever was astir in the deep.

It is refreshing to turn from the gloomy imaginings of the West to Indian and Chinese legends of the Seven Seas. In the quainter fancy that animates them, at least the note of fear is missing. From the Puranas, Gerini has made these identifications: The Sea of Salt Water surrounds India. The Sea of Sugar Cane Juice surrounds Burma. The Sea of Wine surrounds the Malay Peninsula. The Sea of Clarified Butter surrounds the Sunda Archipelago. The Sea of Milk surrounds Siam and Cambodia. The Sea of Curds or Whey surrounds South China. The Sea of Fresh Water surrounds North China and Mongolia.

Fear of the ocean, and above all of the Atlantic, is, however, the distinctive note in medieval Arab geography. This was perhaps a native growth of the desert, and its spirit is in the Koran passage which speaks of "black night upon the deep, which wave on wave doth cover, cloud upon cloud, gloom upon gloom." Arab merchants and pilgrims ranged to the ends of the Moslem world. Save Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta was the earth's greatest and most curious traveler. To the Arab port of Bassorah, sailors from the Nile, the Mediterranean, and even the China Sea brought the gossip of mankind. Yet a dread of the deep sounds through the works of Arab geographers, as through the saga of Sindbad, with the effect of a refrain.

Around the fair meadows of the world swung the terrible ocean, the Sea of Darkness as the Arabs called it. To Massoudy the Atlantic was the Green Sea of Gloom. None dwelt there, none could sail there, none knew to what infinite distances it reached. Ibn Khaldun described it as the boundless, impenetrable limit of the west. Other lights of Islam spoke of the whirlpools into which vessels were drawn, and argued that even if sailors knew the direction of the winds they did not know