198 PHYSICAL GEOGRArnY OF THE SEA, AND ITS Mi^TEOKGLOGY. 



399. TIiG '^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 

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

 did not appear ; but observations asserted the fact. Formerly, 

 this part of the ocean was seldom whitened by the sails of a ship, 

 or enlivened by the presence of man. Keither the industrial 

 pursuits of the sea nor the highways of commerce called him 

 into it. Now and then a roving cruiser or an enterprising 

 whale-man passed that way; but to all else it was an un- 

 frequented 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 com- 

 panionship 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 Antarctic 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 chii-p of the stormy-petrel 

 ceases to be heard here, and the sea itself is said to be singularly 

 barren of life. 



400. Polynesian drift. — In the intertropical regions of the 

 Pacific, and among the heated waters of Polynesia, a warm 

 current or drift of immense volume has its genesis. It rather 

 drifts than floats 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 aiford an 

 immense surface for evaporation. No rivers empty there ; the 

 annual fall of rain there, except in the " Equatorial Doldrums," is 

 small, and the evaporation is all that both the north-east and 

 the south-east trade-winds can take up and carry ofi*. I have 

 marked on Plate IX. the direction of the supposed warm-water 

 current which conducts these over-heated and briny waters from 

 the tropics in mid-ocean to the extra-tropical regions where 



