276 APPENDIX. 



miria Bay, and anchored off the village of Roguetas. Found a 

 great number of vessels waiting for a chance to get to the west- 

 ward, and learned from them that at least a thousand sail are 

 weather-bound between this and Gibraltar. Some of them have 

 been so for six weeks, and have even got as far as Malaga, only 

 to be swept back by the current. Indeed, no vessel has been able 

 to get out into the Atlantic for three months past " 



Now, suppose this current, which baffled and beat back this fleet 

 for so many days, ran no faster than two knots the hour. Assum- 

 ing its depth to be 400 feet only, and its width seven miles, and 

 that it carried in with it the average proportion of solid matter — 

 say one thirtieth — contained in sea water ; and admitting these 

 postulates into calculation as the basis of the computation, it ap- 

 pears that salts enough to make no less than 88 cubic miles of 

 solid matter, of the density of water, were carried into the Medi- 

 terranean during these 90 days. Now, unless there were some es- 

 cape for all this solid matter, which has been running into that 

 sea, not for 90 days merely, but for ages, it is very clear that the 

 Mediterranean would, ere this, have been a vat of very strong 

 brine, or a bed of cubic crystals. 



D.— Page 139, ^ 267. 

 THE DESOLATE REGION. 



Between Humboldt's Current and the great equatorial flow 

 there is an area marked as the "desolate region," Plate IX. It 

 was observed that this part of the ocean w^as rarely visited by the 

 w^hale, either sperm or right ; why, it did not appear ; but obser- 

 vations asserted the fact. Formerly, this part of the ocean was 

 seldom whitened by the sails of a ship, or enlivened by the pres- 

 ence of man. Neither the industrial pursuits of the sea nor the 

 highways of commerce called him into it. Now and then a rov- 

 • ing cruiser or an enterprising whaleman passed that way ; but to 

 all else it was an unfrequented part of the ocean, and so remained 

 until the gold-fields of Australia and the guano islands of Peru 

 made it a thoroughfare. All vessels bound from Australia to 

 South America now pass through it, and in the journals of some 

 of them it is described as a region almost void of the signs of life 

 in both sea and air. In the South Pacific Ocean especially, where 

 there is such a wide expanse of water, sea-birds often exhibit a 

 companionship with a vessel, and will follow and keep company 

 with it through storm and calm for weeks together. Even those 

 kinds, as the albatross and Cape pigeon, that delight in the stormy 

 regions of Cape Horn and in the inhospitable climates of the An- 

 tarctic regions, not unfrequently accompany vessels into the per- 

 petual summer of the tropics. 



