To the worthy fishermen of those days—formerly Catholics, now Calvinists, but always bigots—it was seen as hell afloat. A local preacher took as his text, “Is it right to let water and fire, which were divided by God, work together?”97 Did not this beast of fire and iron resemble Leviathan? Were we not re-creating Chaos on a human scale? This was not the first time that the advance of progress had been called a return to chaos.
