Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo — Read

A steamboat was a prodigious novelty in the waters of the Channel in 182. The whole coast of Normandy was long strangely excited by it. Nowadays, ten or a dozen steam vessels, crossing and recrossing within the bounds of the horizon, scarcely attract a glance from loiterers on the shore. At the most, some persons, whose interest or business it is to note such things, will observe the indications in their smoke of whether they burn Welsh or Newcastle coal. They pass, and that is all. "Welcome," if coming home; "a pleasant passage," if outward bound.

Folks were less calm on the subject of these wonderful inventions in the first quarter of the present century; and the new and strange machines, and their long lines of smoke regarded with no goodwill by the Channel Islanders. In that Puritanical Archipelago, where the Queen of England has been censured for violating the Scriptures2 by using chloroform during her accouchments, the first steam-vessel which made its appearance received the name of the "Devil Boat. " In the eyes of these worthy fishermen, once Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots, it seemed to be a portion of the infernal regions which had been somehow set afloat. A local preacher selected for his discourse the question of "Whether man has the right to make fire and water work together when God had divided them.3 This beast, composed of iron and fire, did it not resemble Leviathan? Was it not an attempt to bring chaos again into the universe? This is not the only occasion on which the progress of civilisation has been stigmatised as a return to chaos.