Toilers of the Sea

Book may have numerous typos, missing text, images, or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1896. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV. TURBA., TURMA. ACCORDING to the compass there are thirty-two winds. But these may be subdivided indefinitely. Classed by its direction, the wind is incalculable; classed by its kind, it is infinite. Homer himself would have shrunk from the task of enumerating them. The polar current encounters the tropical current. Heat and cold are thus combined; the equilibrium is disturbed by a shock; a wave of wind issues forth and is distended, scattered, and broken up in every direction in fierce streams. The dispersion of the gusts shakes the streaming locks of the wind upon the four corners of the horizon. All the winds that blow are there. The wind of the Gulf Stream, which disgorges the great fogs on Newfoundland; the wind of Peru, in the region of silent heavens, where no man ever heard the thunder roar; the wind of Nova Scotia, where flies the great auk (Alca impennis) with his furrowed beak; the whirlwinds of Ferro in the China seas; the wind of Mozambique, which destroys the canoes and junks; the electric wind of Japan, foretold by the gong; the African wind, which blows between Table Mountain and the Devil's Peak, where it gains its liberty; the currents of the equator, which pass over the trade winds, describing a parabola, the summit of which is always to the west; the Plutonian wind, which issues from craters and is the terrible breath of flames; the singular wind peculiar to the volcano Awa, which forms an olive-hued cloud to the northward; the Java monsoon, against which the people construct those casemates known as hurricane houses; the branching north winds called by the English "Bush winds;" the curved squalls of the Straits of Malacca, observed by Horsburgh; the powerful south-west wind, called "pampero" in Chili, and "rebojo" in Buenos Ayres, which carries the gr...