THE IMPENETRABLE SEA 



when his ship was held in it for about a fortnight. There 

 are numerous stories of ships being imprisoned in the 

 Sargasso Sea — embedded in the floating weed and un- 

 able to escape — but such stories have been largely dis- 

 counted since the expedition of the Michael Sars in 1 9 1 o, 

 under the direction of Sir John Murray and the Nor- 

 wegian government, which found the surface covered 

 with patches of weed, with clear spaces through which 

 ships might navigate. It is now evident that the Sargasso 

 is neither a sea nor an island, but a spinning archipelago : 

 a group of many islands of seaweed revolving in a vast 

 whirlpool. These islands may mass together or separate, 

 so that their relative sizes vary continually. It may be 

 that some of the stories of ships being imprisoned in the 

 Sargasso are true, despite the findings of the Michael Sars 

 expedition, if (as seems quite probable) numbers of the 

 islands have packed together at various times in the past, 

 imprisoning vessels within the larger masses. 



Despite the fact that many of the old legends and 

 descriptions of the Sargasso Sea can be safely dismissed, 

 any conception of it as an enormous mass of floating 

 weed (however distributed) and no more, would be 

 utterly inadequate. Very little is known about it, even 

 today ; and strange, inexplicable facts (legions of them) 

 are probably concealed beneath the surface of our accu- 

 mulated knowledge, even as multitudes of living creatures 

 definitely exist beneath the apparently lifeless surface of 

 the weed itself. 



At one time it was thought that the peculiar Gulf weed 

 from which the Sargasso gets its name originally grew on 

 the Bahama and Florida shores, and that it was torn off 

 from the shores long ago by the powerful current of the 

 Gulf Stream. But this explanation of the source of the 

 weed has proved to be one of those apparently satis- 

 factory explanations of some of Nature's mysteries which, 

 in the light of later knowledge, are shown to be mere 

 guesses. 



98 



