326 Dwellers of the Sea and Shore 



Virgin Isles. It consists largely of great drifting fields 

 of the fucoid seaweed Sargassum, commonly called tiie 

 gulfweed. It is the same plant which composes similar 

 "seas" in the Pacific and Indian oceans. Although its 

 quantities are enormous, and although it has never been 

 found otherwise than while floating, there is reason to 

 think that this seaweed grows originally on the bottom 

 of comparatively shallow parts of the sea. Its presence 

 in the north Atlantic is regarded by voyagers as a cer- 

 tain indication of the Gulf Stream, by which it is car- 

 ried northward and eastward. 



Of all the great oceanic rivers, the Gulf Stream is the 

 most important and the most widely known. Starting 

 in the Gulf of Mexico, from which it derives its name, 

 it flows between the coast of Florida on one side, and 

 Cuba and the Bahamas on the other, and passes north- 

 east along the American coast until it reaches the 

 island and Banks of Newfoundland, when it veers 

 across the Atlantic and divides into two divergent parts, 

 one of which swings east toward the Azores and the 

 coast of Morocco, while the other washes the shores 

 of the British Isles and Norway, and continues in its 

 onward course past the southern coasts of Iceland and 

 Spitzbergen, finally losing itself in the Barents Sea 

 and the Arctic Ocean. As it leaves the Florida Straits, 

 which is its narrowest portion, it is fifty miles wide; 

 here with a velocity of three and one-third miles an 

 hour it sweeps along majestically like an immense tor- 

 rent. As it proceeds its speed diminishes and its cur- 

 rent gradually grows wider. By the time it has passed 

 the Newfoundland Banks its width has expanded for 

 hundreds of miles. 



