Читать книгу The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). The History of Sea Voyages, Discovery, Piracy and Maritime Warfare онлайн

118 страница из 418

The modern title applied to the sea “between the lands” is not that of the ancients, nor indeed that of some peoples now. The Greeks had no special name for it. Herodotus calls it “this sea;” and Strabo the “sea within the columns,” that is, within Calpe and Abyla—the fabled pillars of Hercules—to-day represented by Gibraltar and Ceuta. The Romans called it variously Mare Internum and Mare Nostrum, while the Arabians termed it Bahr Rüm—the Roman Sea. The modern Greeks call it Aspri Thalassa—the White Sea; it might as appropriately be called blue, that being its general colour, or green, as in the Adriatic, or purple, as at its eastern end: but they use it to distinguish it from the “Sea of Storms”—the Black Sea. The Straits—“the Gate of the Narrow Passage,” as the Arabians poetically describe it, or the Gut, as it is termed by our prosaic sailors and pilots—is the narrow portal to a great inland sea with an area of 800,000 miles, whose shores are as varied in character as are the peoples who own them. The Mediterranean is salter than the ocean, in spite of the great rivers which enter it—the Rhone, Po, Ebro, and Nile—and the innumerable smaller streams and torrents.69 It has other physical and special characteristics, to be hereafter considered.