We forget that
man can rise to be master of his destiny, fighting, unmaking,
re-creating, not only his own environment, but the environment of
multitudinous lesser men. There is something titanic in such lives.
They are the hero myths of every nation's legends. We {4} somehow feel
that the man who flings off the handicaps of birth and station lifts
the whole human race to a higher plane and has a bit of the God in him,
though the hero may have feet of clay and body of beast. Such were the
old Vikings of the North, who spent their lives in elemental warfare,
and rode out to meet death in tempest, lashed to the spar of their
craft. And such, too, were the New World Vikings of the Pacific, who
coasted the seas of two continents in cockle-shell ships,--planks
lashed with deer thongs, calked with moss,--rapacious in their deep-sea
plunderings as beasts of prey, fearless as the very spirit of the storm
itself. The adventures of the North Pacific Vikings read more like
some old legend of the sea than sober truth; and the wild strain had
its fountain-head in the most tempestuous hero and beastlike man that
ever ascended the throne of the Russias.
Pages:
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27