WHIRLPOOLS 



various ways as the ones we have already considered. 

 Stories far more fantastic than any created by Poe in his 

 Tales of Mystery and Imagination are being enacted, 

 moment by moment, in all parts of the ocean. Ceaselessly, 

 day and night through the centuries, the tragedies and 

 comedies of the deep have been played, usually in utter 

 darkness, by billions of creatures, struggling against each 

 other, feeding upon each other, yet also co-operating 

 with each other in significant demonstrations of the 

 power of interdependence as a means of survival. 



But such tragedies and comedies are not confined to 

 the ocean's surfaces and depths : they are matched by the 

 life-cycles of many other animals which throng the sea's 

 fringes and coastlines. 



One movement of the world's waters is gargantuan 

 compared with all other movements of the sea: the 

 enormous, slowly-spinning "whirlpool" in the North 

 Atlantic which men have named (from the peculiar Gulf 

 weed, Sargassum bacciferum) the Sargasso Sea. 



It is probable that more myths and legends have 

 radiated from it into the hterature and folklore of the 

 world than from any other area of land or sea. Its weed- 

 entangled stretches have spawned innumerable accounts 

 of wrecks, of web-footed tribes living in its mysterious, 

 impenetrable hinterland, and of weird and monstrous 

 creatures lurking in its floating islands. Even its area is a 

 mystery. Some writers give it a diameter of a thousand 

 miles, and an area of a million square miles, while others 

 declare that it is as large as Europe, which, by the most 

 conservative calculation, has an area of 3f million square 

 miles. The truth is that the Sargasso Sea is probably 

 larger than Greenland (839,782 square miles) yet con- 

 siderably less than the size of Europe. 



This makes the Sargasso Sea the largest island in the 

 world — if it can be called an island, or even a floating 

 one. 



It was discovered by Columbus on his first voyage, 



97 



