The Great Sargasso Sea

1896

Sailors have always been superstitious fellows. No wonder, then, that the ignorant sailors of Columbus, anxious for some excuse to turn back to Spain, believed the "sargasso sea" — that tangled mass of seaweeds in mid-Atlantic — was a trap set by Providence to catch them. Science to-day analyzes and explains all such natural phenomena once deemed supernatural. What is it that causes that mysterious sargasso sea?

Simple enough. The rotation of the earth, the rush of the tides, the steady winds unite to cause a vast surface current in tropical waters, moving at about ten miles an hour from east to west, known as the equatorial current. This, in the Atlantic Ocean, feeds the Gulf Stream, which then is shifted by the contour of the North American continent out across the Atlantic to warm the outlying shores of Northern Europe and only spend itself away on the frozen borders of Franz Josef Land. What results? An eddy. Put a few bits of wood in a basin of water and stir the water till it acquires a circular motion. The bits of wood will all collect in the center of the whirling mass.

So the Atlantic Ocean is one great eddy, and the sargasso sea is only the center of it. A "marine meadow," the Spaniards first called this stagnant water. Later it came to be called the sargasso or sargassoa sea, from the Spanish word sargazo, meaning seaweed. Here the seaweed detached from the bottom of the ocean collects, buoyed up by peculiar little air-cells.

Woe to the ship that wanders into the meshes of this great net, six times as big as all France. The same conditions that produce the great sargasso sea of the Atlantic make similar eddy-spots in various regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, though much smaller. The Chinese, always ready to utilize whatever is at hand, use the sargasum weed as a food, and as such it is both palatable and nutritious. — Pathfinder.