194 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 



the ocean was rarely visited by the whale, either sperm or right ; 

 why, it did not appear ; but observations asserted the fact. For- 

 merly, this part of the ocean was seldom whitened by the sails of 

 a ship, or enlivened by the presence of man. Neither the indus- 

 trial pursuits of the sea nor the highways of commerce called him 

 into it. ISTow and then a roving cruiser or an enterprising whale- 

 man 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 ves- 

 sels bound from Australia to South America now pass through it, 

 and in the journals of some of them it is described as a region al- 

 most 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 the 

 inhospitable climates of the Antartic regions, not unfrequently 

 accompany vessels into the perpetual summer of the tropics. The 

 sea-birds that join the ship as she clears Australia will, it is said, 

 follow her to this region, and then disappear. Even the. chirp of 

 the stormy -petrel ceases to be heard here, and the sea itself is said 

 to be singularly barren of life. 



400. In the intertropical regions of the Pacific, and among the 

 Polynesian drift, hcatcd watcrs of Polyucsia, a warm current or drift 

 of immense volume has its genesis. It rather drifts than flows to 

 the south, laving, as it goes, the eastern shore of Australia and 

 both shores of New Zealand. These are the waters in which the 

 little corallines delight to build their atolls and their reefs. The 

 intertropical seas of the Pacific afford an immense surface for evap- 

 oration. No rivers empty there ; the annual fall of rain there, ex- 

 cept in the "Equatorial Doldrums," is small, and the evaporation is 

 all that both the northeast and the southeast trade- winds can take 

 up and carry off. I have marked on Plate IX. the direction of the 

 supposed warm-water current which conducts these overheated 

 and briny waters from the tropics in mid ocean to the extra-trop- 

 ical regions where precipitation is in excess. Here, being cooled, 

 and agitated, and mixed up with waters that are less salt, these 

 overheated and over-salted waters from the tropics are replen- 



