Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 3 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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We Succeeded In Changing Our
Course And In Less Than A Quarter Of An Hour Were Out Of Danger.
While
we traversed the bank of the Vibora from south-south-east to
north-north-west I repeatedly tried to ascertain the temperature of
the water on the surface of the sea.
The cooling was less sensible on
the middle of the bank than on its edge, a circumstance which we
attributed to the currents that there mingle waters from different
latitudes. On the south of Pedro Keys the surface of the sea, at
twenty-five fathoms deep, was 26.4 and at fifteen fathoms deep 26.2
degrees. The temperature of the sea on the east of the bank had been
26.8 degrees. Some American pilots affirm that among the Bahama
Islands they often know, when seated in the cabin, that they are
passing over sand-banks; they allege that the lights are surrounded
with small coloured halos and that the air exhaled from the lungs is
visibly condensed. The latter circumstance appears very doubtful;
below 30 degrees of latitude the cooling produced by the waters of the
bank is not sufficiently considerable to cause this phenomenon. During
the time we passed on the bank of the Vibora the constitution of the
air was quite different from what it had been when we quitted it. The
rain was circumscribed by the limits of the bank of which we could
distinguish the form from afar by the mass of vapour with which it was
covered.
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