Читать книгу The Evacuation of England: The Twist in the Gulf Stream онлайн

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“Rubbish,” retorted the doctor; “this prating is the madness or the envy of croakers and cranks. Do you think that a connexion between the oceans that will shorten the route from one to the other by nearly 6,000 miles, and bring our eastern seaboard, with all its tremendous agencies of production within reach of a continent that is slowly becoming itself occidentalized, and demanding every day the equipment of the west, is a mercantile delusion? We are all gainers. It is a scheme of mutualization on a world-wide scale, but America distributes the profits and holds the surplus.”

The two friends by this time had reached the entrance of the Museum, and passing through its symbolic portals, turned to the left, and found themselves in a dull room, portentously charged with an exhaustive exhibit of the commerce of all nations. Here, on tables and shelves, was displayed a wonderful assortment of primitive and modern ships, primeval dugouts, Philippine catamarans, Mediterranean pirogues, sloops, schooners, brigs, brigantines, barques, barkentines, luggers, lighters, caravals, Dutch monstrosities, models of those extraordinary ships which Motley has described as “built up like a tower, both at stem and stern, and presenting in their broad, bulbous prows their width of beam in proportion to their length, their depression amidships, and in other sins against symmetry, as much opposition to progress over the waves as could well be imagined,” the Latin trireme and the Greek trireme, the ironclads of France used in 1855, the monitors of the Civil War, the recent wonders in battleships, torpedo boats, and destroyers, with naphtha launches, submarine wonders, the old time American cutters, and models of the stately packets that once made the trip from New York to Portsmouth in fourteen days, with a various and diversified exhibit of yachts and pleasure boats, all burnished, japanned and varnished, and now dimly lustrous in the futile illumination of the room. Above them on the walls was a prolix illustration of the hydrography of the world; charts of currents, pelagic streams, areas of calms, submarine basins, maps of rainfalls, prevalent winds, storm regions, precipitation, barometric maxima and minima, and then still higher up on the walls, that dispensed knowledge over each square inch of their dusty and dusky surfaces, Leacraft descried the tabulations of tonnage of the merchant marine of the nations of the earth, with fabulous figures of imports and exports, and the staple products of this prolific and motherly old earth, caressed into fructification by the tireless arms of her scrambling broods of children.