WHIRLPOOLS 



It now seems very doubtful that the Bahama and 

 Florida shores were the original habitat of the weed, 

 which now propagates freely while floating on the ocean 

 surface^ although it is the natural habit of the larger 

 algae to grow from a base of attachment. Such a base — 

 although it normally provides such algae with no more 

 than an anchorage for its roots — seems absolutely neces- 

 sary to the existence of such weeds in normal circum- 

 stances, so that it is difRcult to understand how Sargassum 

 bacciferum could have adapted itself to a freely-floating 

 existence, and this existence far from its natural habitat. 

 Torn from its natural home the weed would not survive, 

 much less travel a great distance and establish itself 

 again under conditions so dissimilar from those it had 

 known. 



It is not found in the main current outside the Sargasso. 

 It grows only over the Yucatan and Musquito Banks, and 

 is swept from them to the Sargasso Sea by the Gulf 

 Stream — from the beginning to the end of its journey a 

 floating plant. Naturalists have estimated that no less 

 than twenty million tons of weed float upon the surface 

 of the Sargasso Sea, while at least another fifty-six 

 million tons lie below the surface. 



Oviedo y Valdes, the Spanish chronicler, appointed 

 historiographer to the New World by Charles V, 

 described the Sargasso as ''the seaweed meadows", and 

 the name is as appropriate as any. Humboldt was 

 among those who believed that actual land existed in 

 the Sargasso region, or at least a 'Tucus-bank", but 

 although chroniclers and naturalists of earlier times had 

 often written of the Sargasso as an area peopled with 

 mermaids and strange monsters, including sea-serpents, 

 science has grown more sceptical in recent years. 



H. H. Johnston, in the first part of his work Wonders 

 of Land and Sea (19 13), says that ''the Michael Sars ex- 

 pedition disposed of the credibility of these legends" — 

 of strange creatures in the Sargasso — he adds, "or at 



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