If there were no Sargasso Sea there would still have been a legend of
one to satisfy the demand of the mind, in a world of change and motion,
for a place where there was neither. Conscious of the flight of time,
noting the flow of rivers, the wind’s wandering, and the climbing and
falling of the waves of the ocean, the mind has created realms where
time stands still, countries of morning calm and afternoon sunshine,
and spaces where the pulse of the sea is asleep. Peace there was in
the grave, but what was sought was a paradox--something alive and
yet motionless in time and space. There were stagnant pools in the
imagination, grotesqueries, junk heaps, a sense of silences and of slow
decay that was no decay at all but the serenity of noon in a swamp. The
outward symbol of these moods men would have in the world about them.
For uncounted ages that symbol had been a fact of the mid-Atlantic.
People must have known of the Sargasso thousands of years ago, though
the memory of the voyages in which they learned of it is no more, and
the tales that seem to speak of it are not accepted as facts. Plato
had told of the thick waters that rolled over the sunken Atlantis,
preventing the passage of ships. When Columbus entered this sea and
saw tunny fish playing about his caravels, he remembered a story of
Aristotle that certain ships of the Semites, coasting beyond the
Pillars of Hercules, were driven before a gale from the east until they
reached a weedy sea, resembling sunken islands, among which were tunny
fish. On his voyage to Britain Himilco reported that he found vast
fields of floating weeds which retarded his vessels and brought them to
danger.
The ancient view of the Atlantic was that it was a region of baffling
calms and shallow water and mud and seaweed. This was based on Punic
reports, and the Carthaginians told such tales of the open seas
as would frighten other nations from them. Yet their distorted
statements had so much of truth intermixed with error that it is hard
to believe they intended altogether falsely, and were vindicated only
by coincidence when a grassy sea, greater than their dominions at their
widest, was found west of the Azores. With flagrant exaggeration,
however, they had spoken of sea grasses with needle-like tops, a sort
of marine wheat with stalks as close together as in sheaves of grain.
In B.C. 300 Theophrastus had written of wide-leaved weeds that drifted
from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. In his poetic account of
the African west coast Festus Avienus described in detail the weedy
impediments to navigation, using, so he says, the journals of Punic
ships. Scylax recited that the sea beyond Cerne on the coast of
Mauretania could not be navigated “in consequence of its shallowness,
its muddiness, and its sea grass.” With easy exuberance of fancy Lucian
had told in his _True History_ of encountering a floating forest in
the sea and of sailing right over the tops of the trees toward “that
continent which we supposed lies opposite our own”--a reference which
gains in significance from its casual character.
Though most of them have been lost, there were strange Sargasso
legends in the ancient world, based on reports of floating seaweed and
the claims of captains that this had put them in hazard. What weedy
growths could do in restless water men knew by observing their effects
in rivers, notably on the upper Nile. The envoys of Nero had been
halted there by a sea of floating vegetation; a long line of travelers
thereafter had a like experience, and a tragedy of this floating
greenery is of our own time. By the blocking of the Nile channel in
1880 Gessi was held prisoner for three months with five companies of
soldiers and a multitude of freed slaves, and most of them died before
help came.
The burden of these old fables was of a stagnant death in silent spaces
of the sea where nothing ever happened. The weedy continent was a trap
which closed in upon ships and suffered no escape, even though with
double banks of oars the rowers strove. Death claimed the crew, and
slowly the sea claimed the galleys. Marine plants crept over bow and
stern and writhed into the cabins and climbed the masts and swathed all
in a green decay; and silently, as the timbers parted below and the
weight of vegetation massed above, the vessel sank, perhaps into some
harbor of the lost Atlantis.
A prison for lost souls, the St. Brendan legend calls the grassy sea
of the west. The ferment was working in men’s imaginations. There must
be a spectral haven in the sea, a place into which vessels might come,
out of which they could not go. For a while in the waters of the east
this was the Island of Lodestone, which drew and held to itself all
craft that had iron in their timbers. In Maundeville the legend of
the Sargasso Sea is full blown, though with him it is truth--travel
truth--of a magnetic rock.
“I myself,” he said, “have seen afar off in that Sea as though it had
been a great Isle full of Trees and Bush, full of Thorns and Briars,
great Plenty. And the Shipmen told us, that all that was of Ships that
were drawn thither by the Adamants, for the Iron that was in them. And
from the Rottenness and other Things that were within the Ships, grew
such Bush, and Thorns and Briars and green Grass and such manner of
Things, and from the Masts and the Sail-yards it seemed a great Wood or
a Grove. And such Rocks be in many Places thereabouts. And therefore
dare not the Merchants pass there, but if they know well the Passages,
or else that they have good Pilots. And also they dread the long Way
more far by many dreadful Days’ journeys than Cathay.”
Thus the Port of Missing Ships came into view as the creation of
classic and mediæval legend, to which modern exploration had given a
sure place in the sea. It fulfilled a stagnant something in the souls
of men. It offered harbor to certain of their dreams. It yielded a
last resting place to derelicts that had wandered far, among them the
derelicts of fancy. It gave reply to questions that arose whenever
the argosies went out and did not come back. Against the eternal
restlessness and fated journeyings of the Flying Dutchman it summoned
up the picture of a fated and eternal calm. It added to the terrors of
the sea a horror that was half poetry. This became poetry altogether
when men had ceased to believe and yet wanted to believe, and in their
art evoked the vision of ruinous hulks of Tyrian, Roman, and Spanish
ships side by side upon a spectral main, silent witnesses of all the
maritime adventures of mankind.
The actuality behind the mask of legend, a vast expanse of sea in the
Atlantic, in many places resembling an inundated meadow, Columbus
discovered on his first voyage, when for three weeks he traversed it.
But instead of having misgivings, he rejoiced at what he conceived to
be evidence that land was not far distant. On one of the floating weed
masses he saw a white tropical bird of a kind that does not sleep upon
the sea. His journal speaks little of the apprehensions of the sailors,
but his son Fernando recites these--their fears that the weeds, which
plainly retarded the ships, would halt them altogether; that the
marine growths might conceal the lurking rocks, shoals and quicksands
of a shallowing ocean; and that, run aground or fatally entangled in
gulfweed, the ships might rot and fall apart far from any shore or any
hope of aid. Memories of the Atlantis legend raised in their minds the
menace of drowned lands and the monumental ruins of a lost continent.
To Columbus, however, the Sargasso Sea stood, not for a lost continent,
but for the boundary between the worlds. Where it began, west of the
Azores, the New World began also, and the Old World ended. This was
no theoretical meridian, he thought, but a true physical line of
demarcation drawn by nature between the hemispheres. He could sense a
difference in climatic conditions in crossing the line, and the compass
seemed to show magnetic deviations. On his return he believed that he
could determine his longitude by observing the first floating masses
of tangled seaweed. So persuasive was his imaginative force, so great
his influence in Europe, that soon after his arrival there the eastern
boundary of the weedy sea became the globe’s first, and last, political
boundary of an all-embracing kind. Title to newly discovered lands
east of it was awarded by a papal bull to Portugal. Title to newly
discovered lands west of it was awarded to Spain.
Oviedo gave this expanse the name of Sargasso Sea, from Sargaço, the
Portuguese word for seaweed. It was freely traversed by the explorers
who followed Columbus. The world-rounding expedition of Drake reports
that for five days “wee sayled through the sea of Weedes, about the
space of one hundred leagues, being under the Tropicke of Cancer.” The
size and exact location of the sea were long a matter of conjecture.
Varenius, for example, placed its northern limit opposite the
mid-Sahara and its southern opposite the Cape of Good Hope. The note
of Humboldt in his _Views of Nature_, published near the middle of
the nineteenth century, is the first scientific account of it. This
was based on rather scanty observations of English and Dutch sailing
vessels which took a course through it from the West Indies to Europe.
Humboldt thought the Sargasso Sea comprised two weed banks, the larger
one west of the Azores, the smaller between the Bermudas and Bahamas,
with a transverse band connecting them. Fuller reports, since made by
steamers, with the careful records of the German Hydrographic Office,
have enabled scientists, and particularly Doctor Krümmel, to correct
these conclusions and plot the true outlines of the sea.
The Equatorial Current sets west from the coast of Africa. The Gulf
Stream sets north and east from the Straits of Florida--still following
the direction, Donnelly ingeniously contended, that was given it by the
lost continent of Atlantis, around which it flowed. The two currents,
moving in nearly opposite directions, impart a circular motion to
the waters that lie between, so that all things adrift over an area
of millions of square miles, seaweed, driftwood, and hulks of ships
are drawn toward a common center, which may be called the floating
storehouse of the North Atlantic. Banks of weed are found as far west
as the Bermudas, and this outer grassy sea covers an expanse of about
three million square miles, or as much as continental United States.
But the true Sargasso Sea of dead waters, where gulfweed is found
thickly, covers an area of about one million two hundred thousand
square miles, or the size of the Mississippi Valley. It is an ellipse
with the Tropic of Cancer as its longer axis. The sea stretches through
fifteen degrees of latitude and more than twenty-five degrees of
longitude, the two foci of the ellipse being near 45° and 70° west.
With the shift of winds and calms the weedy sea itself shifts somewhat,
but its mean location remains unchanged. Humboldt was convinced that in
his time it was precisely where Columbus had found it three and a half
centuries before, and Maury’s study of marine observations leads to the
conclusion that there has been no change in the last fifty years. Of
all the larger aspects of nature this is perhaps the only one that is
just as it was in the time of Columbus. During thousands of years, when
the ocean was battering at the coasts of the continents, breaking down
or building up the shore; when earthquakes and volcanoes were causing
islands to appear and disappear; when the wind and rain were at their
unending tasks of bearing everything terrestrial into the deeps; and
when races of men were remodeling some small portions of the earth’s
surface with roads and ports and bridges, the Sargasso Sea may have
been the only thing immune from change. This eternal vortex might well
be called the true Navel of the World.
Even now, when many ships ply these waters, and after the records
of centuries seem to have assured that there are no reefs or shoals
under their greenery, travelers admit a sense of uneasiness as their
craft plunges into what seems a sunken meadow. Nearer view, however,
discloses that the patches of vegetation are discontinuous. The larger
single masses may be several acres in extent, or may not be more than a
hundred feet across. The weeds commonly lie in long parallel rows that
tail to the prevailing winds. By noting the rows, the mariner can tell
whether the wind has been blowing steadily, or has recently shifted,
and in which direction. The lines are sometimes so near together as to
seem one mass, or they may be as far apart as two hundred feet. In some
places the weeds in them barely touch, in others they are so crowded
that their tops are thrust a little distance above the water.
A distinctive fauna, sparse in species but unnumbered in individuals,
has been developed among these masses. The floating berries are thickly
incrusted with white polyzoa. About sixty animal species peculiar
to the area have been noted, among them small fish, shrimps, crabs,
molluscs, gastropods, and one insect. The fishes have developed a
strong protective resemblance to the shapeless weeds among which they
feed. Strangest of these is the _Antennarius marmoratus_, a little
creature not more than four inches long and indistinguishable from a
plant spray. It seems half adapted for walking; its fins, which suggest
the extremities of four-footed creatures, have real toes, and the front
fins have the form of arms with elbows and fingered hands.
The Prince of Monaco conducted a scientific expedition into these
waters in 1905, and in 1911 the United States Hydrographic Service sent
a party of scientists for a three months’ study of them; but adequate
knowledge is still wanting.
There is a Sargasso question: How does the weed get into the sea? The
old theory was that it is a true oceanic plant. To those who held to
the belief in a sunken continent the grassy domain was a sort of canopy
suspended over it, the flying banners of the lost Atlantis. There is
still good scientific opinion of which the French are the leaders, that
the weed grows in the area where it is found, reproducing itself by
fissure, the parent stem throwing off branches which multiply in turn.
The bulk of scientific opinion outside of France is that these meadows
of the sea are the spoil of the neighboring islands and continents. The
gulfweed which covers them, it is held, has been torn from the shores
of northern Brazil, of the West Indies, and of North America as far as
Cape Cod, and has drifted into this vortex--a journey that may take
almost half a year. The French contend that even without these admitted
contributions from America there would still be a weedy sea about the
Tropic of the Crab.
From time to time commercial enterprise has canvassed the possibilities
of a Sargasso adventure. It may be that a profitable fishery will
yet be established there with the Azores for its base, and that the
kelp will be converted into potash for fertilizer or for gunpowder.
Thus would the arts of war and peace draw support from the sea, that,
if legend speaks truly, sleeps over the continent which spread them
through the antediluvian world.