The day was cloudy and a little cool, and not unpleasant; but there existed all day a ground-swell which is full of all nastiness, and a short sea which aggravated the ground-swell; and although we sailed by the Lebanon mountains and along an historic coast, bristling with suggestions, and with little but suggestions, of an heroic past, by Akka and Tyre and Sidon, we were mostly indifferent to it all. The Mediterranean, on occasion, takes away one's appetite even for ruins and ancient history.
We can distinguish, as we sail by it, the mean modern town which wears still the royal purple name of Tyre, and the peninsula, formerly the island, upon which the old town stood and which gave it its name. The Arabs still call it Tsur or Sur, “the rock,” and the ancients fancied that this island of rock had the form of a ship and was typical of the maritime pursuits of its people. Some have thought it more like the cradle of commerce which Tyre is sometimes, though erroneously, said to be; for she was only the daughter of Sidon, and did but inherit from her mother the secret of the mastery of the seas. There were two cities of Tyre,—the one on the island, and another on the shore. Tyre is not an old city in the Eastern reckoning, the date of its foundation as a great power only rising to about 1200 b. c., about the time of the Trojan war, and after the fall of Sidon, although there was a city there a couple of centuries earlier, when Joshua and his followers conquered the hill-countries of Palestine; it could never in its days of greatness have been large, probably containing not more than 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants, but its reputation was disproportionate to its magnitude; Joshua calls it the “strong city Tyre,” and it had the entire respect of Jerusalem in the most haughty days of the latter. Tyre seems to have been included in the “inheritance” allotted to Asher, but that luxurious son of Jacob yielded to the Phoenicians and not they to him; indeed, the parcelling of territory to the Israelitish tribes, on condition that they would conquer it, recalls the liberal dying bequest made by a tender Virginian to his son, of one hundred thousand dollars if he could make it. The sea-coast portion of the Canaanites, or the Phoenicians, was never subdued by the Jews; it preserved a fortunate independence, in order that, under the Providence that protected the Phoenicians, after having given the world “letters” and the first impulse of all the permanent civilization that written language implies, they could still bless it by teaching it commerce, and that wide exchange of products which is a practical brotherhood of man. The world was spared the calamity of the descent of the tribes of Israel upon the Phoenician cities of the coast, and art was permitted to grow with industry; unfortunately the tribes who formed the kingdom of Israel were capable of imitating only the idolatrous worship and the sensuality of their more polished neighbors. Such an ascendency did Tyre obtain in Jewish affairs through the princess Jezebel and the reception of the priests of Baal, that for many years both Samaria and Jerusalem might almost be called dependencies of the city of the god, “the lord Melkarth, Baal of Tyre.”