Such Are The Effects Of The Slow But Regular Motion Which Agitates The Waters Of The Atlantic.

Those of the river Amazon take nearly forty-five days to flow from Tomependa to Grand Para.

A short time before my arrival at Teneriffe, the sea had left in the road of Santa Cruz the trunk of a cedrela odorata covered with the bark. This American tree vegetates within the tropics, or in the neighbouring regions. It had no doubt been torn up on the coast of the continent, or of that of Honduras. The nature of the wood, and the lichens which covered its bark, bore evidence that this trunk had not belonged to these submarine forests which ancient revolutions of the globe have deposited in the polar regions. If the cedrela, instead of having been cast on the strand of Teneriffe, had been carried farther south, It would probably have made the whole tour of the Atlantic, and returned to its native soil with the general current of the tropics. This conjecture is supported by a fact of more ancient date, recorded in the history of the Canaries by the abbe Viera. In 1770, a small vessel laden with corn, and bound from the island of Lancerota, to Santa Cruz, in Teneriffe, was driven out to sea, while none of the crew were on board. The motion of the waters from east to west, carried it to America, where it went on shore at La Guayra, near Caracas.

Whilst the art of navigation was yet in its infancy, the Gulf-stream suggested to the mind of Christopher Columbus certain indications of the existence of western regions. Two corpses, the features of which indicated a race of unknown men, were cast ashore on the Azores, towards the end of the 15th century. Nearly at the same period, the brother-in-law of Columbus, Peter Correa, governor of Porto Santo, found on the strand of that island pieces of bamboo of extraordinary size, brought thither by the western currents. The dead bodies and the bamboos attracted the attention of the Genoese navigator, who conjectured that both came from a continent situate towards the west. We now know that in the torrid zone the trade-winds and the current of the tropics are in opposition to every motion of the waves in the direction of the earth's rotation. The productions of the new world cannot reach the old but by the very high latitudes, and in following the direction of the current of Florida. The fruits of several trees of the Antilles are often washed ashore on the coasts of the islands of Ferro and Gomera. Before the discovery of America, the Canarians considered these fruits as coming from the enchanted isle of St. Borondon, which according to the reveries of pilots, and certain legends, was situated towards the west in an unknown part of the ocean, buried, as was supposed, in eternal mists.

My chief view in tracing a sketch of the currents of the Atlantic is to prove that the motion of the waters towards the south-east, from Cape St. Vincent to the Canary Islands, is the effect of the general motion to which the surface of the ocean is subjected at its western extremity.

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