Behavior of the Atlantic : 43 



land known at St. Paul's Rocks. The Rocks lie in the narrow part of 

 the Atlantic, midway between West Africa and Brazil. On a certain 

 day a ship being near this island was in latitude 1° 44' north and lon- 

 gitude 27° 16' west. At this place and at a certain time ten bottles 

 were dropped overboard from this ship. Each bottle was carefully 

 sealed and each contained a card with an address and appropriate 

 instructions for returning a report from wherever they might be 

 discovered. Eight of these bottles were never reported. After 377 days 

 one of the bottles was reported having landed on the east coast of 

 Nicaragua in Central America. After 196 days one of the bottles was 

 reported from the coast of Sierra Leone in Central Africa! 



This is a real teaser for, in this case, the bottles were identical and 

 we cannot assume that one bottle would be acted upon by the wind 

 while the other bottle would be acted upon by the current. Note that 

 drifting objects here were not the results of an accident as in the 

 Fred Taylor case. The bottles were carefully prepared and this obvi- 

 ously suggests an experiment. However surprising the drift of the 

 bottles may seem to us they were not surprising to the men who 

 threw them overboard. They were in fact conducting an experiment 

 to establish a boundary between the Atlantic North Equatorial Cur- 

 rent which runs westward and then northwestward along the 

 northern coast of South America into the Caribbean and the so-called 

 Guinea Current which is a great eddy setting eastward into the Bight 

 of Benin. Some of the bottles were supposed to go east and some west 

 but it must have been something of a surprise to show that the cur- 

 rents going in opposite directions flowed closely beside each other. 

 Experiments either ashore or afloat do not always work out as neatly 

 as this one. 



Bottles in currents have often contributed to romance as well as to 

 science. There was, however, a recent case that didn't quite come off. 

 A lonely Texas soldier was returning home from a south European 

 port on a ship which seemed to him interminably slow. On impulse, 

 he wrote a note, stuffed it in a bottle, corked the bottle and threw 

 it overboard. He went home and after a time, I suppose, forgot about 

 the message; but the Atlantic took charge and some combination of 

 the North Equatorial Current and of the Gulf Stream in due course 

 delivered his message to a supposedly beautiful colleen who was herd- 

 ing sheep near the sea in Ireland. The boy and girl corresponded and 

 he made a trip to Ireland to see her. It was a wonderful story and of 

 course it attracted front page notice. It should have ended, "The sea 



