Читать книгу Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography - William Henry Babcock - Страница 28

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It would be idle and wearying to follow such utterances through the rather numerous centuries that have elapsed since those early times. When the Magrurin or deluded explorers of Lisbon, at some undefined time between the early eighth century and the middle of the twelfth attempted, according to Edrisi, to cross the great westward Sea of Darkness they encountered an impassable tract of ocean and had to change their course, apparently reaching one of the Canary Islands. Later the map of the Pizigani brothers of 136736 (Fig.2) contains in words and a saintly figure of warning a solemn protest against attempting to sail the unnavigable ocean tract beyond the Azores. As will be seen by a modern map (Fig.1), this area includes the vast realm of the Sargasso—a waste of weed, shifting its borders with the seasons but constant in its characteristics in some parts and always to be found by little seeking—one of the permanent conspicuous features of earth’s surface.37 It is described by a writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as nearly equal to Europe in area, a statement hardly warranted unless by including all outlying tatters and fringes of Gulf weed floating free.38

It is one of the topics that tempt and have always tempted exaggeration and misunderstandings. The effect on a bright mind of current nautical yarns concerning it is shown by Janvier’s “In the Sargasso Sea,” a narrative almost as extravagant as Plato’s tale of Atlantis, in its own quite different way. One of the more moderate preliminary passages may be cited:

And to that same place, he added, the stream carried all that was caught in its current—like the spar and plank floating near us, so that the sea was covered with a thick tangle of the weed in which were held fast fragments of wreckage and stuff washed overboard and logs adrift from far southern shores, until in its central part the mass was so dense that no ship could sail through it nor could a steamer traverse it because of the fouling of her screws.39

He admits this theory of formation was inaccurate but later refers to “the dense wreck-filled center of the Sargasso Sea” and makes his castaway hero declare:

What I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest which through four centuries has been gathering slowly and still more slowly wasting in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.40

Sir John Murray naturally gives a more moderate and scientific account, explaining:

The famous Gulf Weed characteristic of the Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic belongs to the brown algae. It is named Sargassum bacciferum, and is easily recognized by its small berry-like bladders.... It is supposed that the older patches gradually lose their power of floating, and perish by sinking in deep water.... The floating masses of Gulf Weed are believed to be continually replenished by additional supplies torn from the coasts by waves and carried by currents until they accumulate in the great Atlantic whirl which surrounds the Sargasso Sea. They become covered with white patches of polyzoa and serpulae, and quite a large number of other animals (small fishes, crabs, prawns, molluscs, etc.) live on these masses of weed in the Sargasso Sea, all exhibiting remarkable adaptive coloring, although none of them belong properly to the open ocean.41

Finally we have from the Hydrographic Office the official naval and scientific statement of the case. In the little treatise already referred to, Lieutenant Soley tells us that the southeast branch of the Gulf Stream “runs in the direction of the Azores, where it is deflected by the cold upwelling stream from the north and runs into the center of the Atlantic Basin, where it is lost in the dead water of the Sargasso Sea.”42 As to just what this is the office answers: