ABSTRACT
Probably if the captain of a Pacific liner were asked about the charms of the Inland Sea, he would denounce it as the worst piece of water in his course, so winding it is, so beset with islands and rocks and shoals. But at least it is for the most part smooth and still, and few waters can well be lovelier to look upon, not even the long harbor of Bermuda, which it resembles considerably; though, instead of twenty miles, as at Hamilton harbor, it is here two hundred and thirty from Kobe to the straits of Shimonoseki— the end of the Inland Sea—and one hundred and fifty more around the west coast of Kiushiu to Nagasaki. The sea lies nearly east and west, shut in on the north by a long arm of the main island, and on the south by Shikoku, and closed at its lower end by Kiushiu, which makes, with the end of the main island, the narrow Shimonoseki straits. It is divided, moreover, into five great basins, separated by narrow, rocky channels, two of them so strewn with islets that the free passage is only a few hundred feet wide. The larger islands are very mountainous, their peaks running up 310to fifteen hundred feet; the greater part of them is not wooded, as the coast is farther north, but green, nevertheless, the year through, and all repeating emerald and opal and violet in the shining water. Tropical the sea is not, only a little warmer, a little softer than the rest of Japan, and by just so much the lovelier than even Odawara or Matsushima or Volcano bay.
