THE “ SEVEN SEAS ”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3823, 19 October 1936, Page 7

THE “ SEVEN SEAS ”

WORLD HAS FIFTY-FIVE OCEANS AND SEAS.

Mindful of having resorted to subterfuge in discussion as to the accepted meaning of the term “Seven Seas,” of particular interest to me was the recent correspondence in “The Times” on this subject. It all arose bn account of reference being made to the Navy’s chief duty being the protection of the country’s sea communications “ throughout the seven seas.” A day or two later a correspondent enquired: “Are not the following in fact the seven seas which are known as such to the Mercantile Marine and to which reference was made in the writings of the late Mr Rudyard Kipling ?: The Yellow Sea, Sea of Japan, Java Sea, Banda Sea, Flores Sea, Sea of Celebes, and Molucca Sea.” .

Another correspondent believed that Mr Kipling referred to four of these but substituted Arafura Sea, 'Sulu Sea and Timor Sea for the first two and last one above mentioned. Exception was taken by Canon T. E. Swanzy, All Saints, Lincoln, who wrote: “Though the Mercantile Marine may have its technical use of the name ‘the Seven Seas,’ I am sure that was not the use in the mind of Mr Kipling. Take, for example, such a poem as ‘The Flowers’ :

Far and Far our homes are set round the Seven Seas; Wtoe for us if we forget, we who hold

by these! ■ Unto each his mother-beach, bloom

and bird and land— Masters of the Seven Seas, oh, love

and understand. Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, these are the lands where the ‘English posies’ grow; these must be the lands washed by the Seven Seas.”

A subsequent contributor to the discussion maintained that Kipling himself explained what he meant. In “Ship Ahoy” Leiutenant-Conunander J. G. P. Bisset states that he made out an alphabetical list of every ocean and sea in the world and sent it to Kipling, asking him to pick out the seven seas. Kipling replied, thanking the writer for the list and saying: “The expression ‘Seven Seas’ is a very old one, and means, of course, all the seas in the world. But the seven which I think about as the seven seas are the North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and the Arctic and Antarctic seas.” The list referred to gives 55 oceans and seas of the world.

The Oxford English Dictionary definition coincides with what Mr Kipling had in mind. Mr Taylor Darbyshire, another correspondent, writes: —.“For myself, as with many other Kiplingites, I prefer to think that Kipling used the word in its mystical sense as the perfect nupiber, denoting completeness, especially in its echo of the jßible, from which he drew so many of his titles and references.” — A writer in the “P.L.A. Monthly,” London.