Like all mysteries, it lived only in the hearts of its worshippers.

The hearts changed; the men changed.

The once loving and devoted servants went out armed with fire and iron, and conquering the fear of their own hearts became a calculating crowd of cold and exacting masters.

The sea of the past was an incomparably beautiful mistress, with inscrutable face, with cruel and promising eyes.

The sea of to-day is a used-up drudge, wrinkled and defaced by the churned-up wakes of brutal propellers, robbed of the enslaving charm of its vastness, stripped of its beauty, of its mystery and of its promise.
Tom Lingard was a master, a lover, a servant of the sea.