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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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. (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.
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