In the Sargasso Sea | Page 9

his foot
on the first round of the ladder--struck up a friendship that kept us
talking away together by the hour at a time: and very frankly, except
that he was shy of saying anything about the brig and her doings, and
whenever I tried to draw him on that course got flurried a little and held
off. But in all other matters he was open; and especially delighted in
running on about ships and seafaring--for the man was a born sailor and
loved his profession with all his heart.
It was in one of these talks with Bowers that I got my first knowledge
of the Sargasso Sea--about which I shortly was to know a great deal
more than he did: that old sea-wonder which puzzled and scared
Columbus when he coasted it on his way to discover America; and
which continued to puzzle all mariners until modern nautical science
revealed its cause--yet still left it a good deal of a mystery--almost in
our own times.
The subject came up one day while we were crossing the Gulf Stream,
and the sea all around us was pretty well covered with patches of
yellow weed--having much the look of mustard-plasters--amidst which

a bit of a barnacled spar bobbed along slowly near us, and not far off a
new pine plank. The yellow stuff, Bowers said, was gulf-weed, brought
up from the Gulf of Mexico where the Stream had its beginning; and
that, thick though it was around us, this was nothing to the thickness of
it in the part of the ocean where the Stream (so he put it, not knowing
any better) had its end. And to that same place, he added, the Stream
carried all that was caught in its current--like the spar and the plank
floating near us--so that the sea was covered with a thick tangle of the
weed in which was held fast fragments of wreckage, and stuff washed
overboard, and logs adrift from far-off 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 screw. And this
sort of floating island--which lay in a general way between the
Bermudas and the Canaries--covered an area of ocean, he said, half as
big as the area of the United States; and to clear it ships had to make a
wide detour--for even in its thin outward edges a vessel's way was a
good deal retarded and a steamer's wheel would foul sometimes, and
there was danger always of collision with derelicts drifting in from the
open sea to become a part of the central mass. Our own course, he
further said, would be changed because of it; but we would be for a
while upon what might be called its coast, and so I would have a
chance to see for myself something of its look as we sailed along.
As I know now, Bowers over-estimated the size of this strange island
of sea-waifs and sea-weed by nearly one-half; and he was partly wrong
as to the making of it: for the Sargasso Sea is not where any current
ends, but lies in that currentless region of the ocean that is found to the
east of the main Gulf Stream and to the south of the branch which
sweeps across the North Atlantic to the Azores; and its floating stuff is
matter cast off from the Gulf Stream's edge into the bordering still
water--as a river eddies into its pools twigs and dead leaves and
such-like small flotsam--and there is compacted by capillary attraction
and by the slow strong pressure of the winds.
On the whole, though, Bowers was not very much off in his
description--which somehow took a queer deep hold upon me, and
especially set me to wondering what strange old waifs and strays of the

ocean might not be found in the thick of that tangle if only there were
some way of pushing into it and reaching the hidden depths that no
man ever yet had seen. But when I put this view of the matter to him I
did not get much sympathy. He was a practical young man, without a
stitch of romance in his whole make-up, and he only laughed at my
suggestion and said that anybody who tried to push into that mess just
for the sake of seeing some barnacle-covered logs, or perhaps a rotting
hulk or two, would be a good deal of a fool. And so I did not press my
fancy on him, and our talks went on about more commonplace things.
It was with Captain Luke that I had most to do, and before long I got to
have a very friendly feeling for