Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 1 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
- Page 117 of 407 - First - Home
(Ed. Duval Page 1157), Can
Scarcely Be Applied To The Coasts Of Africa, Like An Analogous
Passage Of The Periplus Of Scylax.
Supposing that this sea, full of
weeds, which impeded the course of the Phoenician vessels, was the
mar de
Zargasso, we need not admit that the ancients navigated the
Atlantic beyond thirty degrees of west longitude from the meridian
of Paris.) The temperature of the Atlantic in those latitudes is
from sixteen to twenty degrees, and the north winds, which
sometimes rage there very tempestuously, drive floating isles of
seaweed into the low latitudes as far as the parallels of
twenty-four and even twenty degrees. Vessels returning to Europe,
either from Monte Video or the Cape of Good Hope, cross these banks
of Fucus, which the Spanish pilots consider as at an equal distance
from the Antilles and Canaries; and they serve the less instructed
mariner to rectify his longitude. The second bank of Fucus is but
little known; it occupies a much smaller space, in the
twenty-second and twenty-sixth degrees of latitude, eighty leagues
west of the meridian of the Bahama Islands. It is found on the
passage from the Caiques to the Bermudas.
Though a species of seaweed* (* The baudreux of the Falkland
Islands; Fucus giganteus, Forster; Laminaria pyrifera, Lamour.) has
been seen with stems eight hundred feet long, the growth of these
marine cryptogamia being extremely rapid, it is nevertheless
certain, that in the latitudes we have just described, the Fuci,
far from being fixed to the bottom, float in separate masses on the
surface of the water. In this state, the vegetation can scarcely
last longer than it would in the branch of a tree torn from its
trunk; and in order to explain how moving masses are found for ages
in the same position, we must admit that they owe their origin to
submarine rocks, which, lying at forty or sixty fathoms' depth,
continually supply what has been carried away by the equinoctial
currents. This current bears the tropic grape into the high
latitudes, toward the coasts of Norway and France; and it is not
the Gulf-stream, as some mariners think, which accumulates the
Fucus to the south of the Azores.
The causes that unroot these weeds at depths where it is generally
thought the sea is but slightly agitated, are not sufficiently
known. We learn only, from the observations of M. Lamouroux, that
if the fucus adhere to the rocks with the greatest firmness before
its fructification, it separates with great facility after that
period, or during the season which suspends its vegetation like
that of the terrestrial plants. The fish and mollusca which gnaw
the stems of the seaweeds no doubt contribute also to detach them
from their roots.
From the twenty-second degree of latitude, we found the surface of
the sea covered with flying-fish,* (* Exocoetus volitans.) which
threw themselves up into the air, twelve, fifteen, or eighteen
feet, and fell down on the deck.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 117 of 407
Words from 60486 to 60985
of 211363