Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In The Old System, The
Disadvantage Of Making A Longer Passage Is Compensated By The
Certainty Of Catching The Trade-Winds In A Shorter Space Of Time,
And Keeping Them The Greater Part Of The Passage.
At the time of my
abode in the Spanish colonies, I witnessed the arrival of several
merchant-ships, which from the fear of privateers had chosen the
oblique course, and had had a very short passage.
Nothing can equal the beauty and mildness of the climate of the
equinoctial region on the ocean. While the trade wind blew
strongly, the thermometer kept at 23 or 24 degrees in the day, and
at 22 or 22.5 degrees during the night. The charm of the lovely
climates bordering on the equator, can be fully enjoyed only by
those who have undertaken the voyage from Acapulco or the coasts of
Chile to Europe in a very rough season. What a contrast between the
tempestuous seas of the northern latitudes and the regions where
the tranquillity of nature is never disturbed! If the return from
Mexico or South America to the coasts of Spain were as expeditious
and as agreeable as the passage from the old to the new continent,
the number of Europeans settled in the colonies would be much less
considerable than it is at present. To the sea which surrounds the
Azores and the Bermuda Islands, and which is traversed in returning
to Europe by the high latitudes, the Spaniards have given the
singular name of Golfo de las Yeguas (the Mares' Gulf). Colonists
who are not accustomed to the sea, and who have led solitary lives
in the forests of Guiana, the savannahs of the Caracas, or the
Cordilleras of Peru, dread the vicinity of the Bermudas more than
the inhabitants of Lima fear at present the passage round Cape
horn.
To the north of the Cape Verd Islands we met with great masses of
floating seaweeds. They were the tropic grape, (Fucus natans),
which grows on submarine rocks, only from the equator to the
fortieth degree of north and south latitude. These weeds seem to
indicate the existence of currents in this place, as well as to
south-west of the banks of Newfoundland. We must not confound the
latitudes abounding in scattered weeds with those banks of marine
plants, which Columbus compares to extensive meadows, the sight of
which dismayed the crew of the Santa Maria in the forty-second
degree of longitude. I am convinced, from the comparison of a great
number of journals, that in the basin of the Northern Atlantic
there exist two banks of weeds very different from each other. The
most extensive is a little west of the meridian of Fayal, one of
the Azores, between the twenty-fifth and thirty-sixth degrees of
latitude.* (* It would appear that Phoenician vessels came "in
thirty days' sail, with an easterly wind," to the weedy sea, which
the Portuguese and Spaniards call mar de zargasso. I have shown, in
another place (Views of Nature Bohn's edition page 46), that the
passage of Aristotle, De Mirabil.
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