314 I N A G U A 



swarming creatures. I remembered another tide I had watched 

 in the murky green waters of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. 

 In comparison to this Inaguan tide, it was a dull slow affair, but 

 before I was through witnessing it from the windows of a steel 

 cylinder hung from a barge anchored in the mouth of the 

 Patuxent River near Solomons Island, I was completely over- 

 whelmed at the mass of life it had brought past my small sphere 

 of vision. The Chesapeake at that time was full of ctenophores, 

 wraith-like comb-jellies belonging to the genus Mneiuiopsis. 

 The range of vision from the window of the cylinder was 

 limited because of the haze to about six square feet. With a 

 companion I began counting these organisms as they swirled 

 helplessly by on the rising current. For six long hours we 

 tabulated ctenophores and found that an average of 48 went 

 by every minute or over 23,000 for the entire period. Then by 

 computing the width of the river and the square surface of the 

 tidal flow in a line across the river at its narrowest point, we 

 reached the almost astronomical figure of 1,218,816,000 cteno- 

 phores! This did not consider any of the other forms of 

 life which abounded in the water. This was only one small 

 river, so unimportant that it does not even appear on a map of 

 the Eastern United States. When we realize that every inch 

 of this tide-impelled water all over the oceans from the poles 

 to the equator is swarming with similar billions of living things 

 we can only be silent with awe. 



The Chesapeake tide, however, had none of the gigantic 

 sweep and force of this Inaguan occurrence. It was a small 

 scale flow, performed in a landlocked bay. This, of Inagua, was 

 a full-fledged deep sea current with the pressure of two im- 

 mense oceans forcing it on. While I watched, it increased in 

 intensity until even the backwaters of my quiet eddy began to 

 circle and tug at my bare flesh. The algae on the outer rocks 

 were all streamed in one direction, straining at their fastenings 



