EACES, WHIELPOOLS, AND EDDIES. 119 



midable current of Blanchard Race, lost so many of his ships, how many- 

 vessels have been wrecked, how many crews have perished, in these 

 terrible straits, which Victor Hugo has chosen as the theatre for his 

 gloomy drama of The Toilers of the Sea. 



The marine defiles which separate the British Isles from the con- 

 tinent, and especially those of the Hebrides, the Orkney, the Shetland, 

 Faroe, and Lofoten Islands (whose rocks and shelving-banks con- 

 fusedly stud a very uneven sea-bed, full of abysses), are also traversed 

 by alternate tidal currents all the more rapid and tumultuous, because 

 of the difference of level between the two sheets of water, which 

 meet in the strait. The most formidable of these passages is perhaps 

 the Great Gulf, or " Coirebhreacain,"* between the islands of Jura 

 and Scarba, on the western coast of Scotland. At each change in the 

 tide a current, flowing alternately towards the mainland and towards 

 the open sea, is produced. The English Admiralty chart estimates its 

 speed at nearly 11 miles per hour, but sailors affirm that it is at least 

 nearly 12J miles, that is to say, more rapid than the stream of any 

 continental river. No vessel can venture, in strong tides, into such 

 a terrible race ; especially when the wind blows in the contrary 

 direction to the tide, for the Coirebhreacain is then in its entire 

 extent a foaming ^' cauldron '' without any visible limits.f 



Other tidal conflicts are hardly less terrible ; such for example is 

 that observed in the straits of the Pentland Firth, between Scotland 

 and the Orkneys, and which ends in the formation of currents esti- 

 mated at more than 10 miles per hour. But the most celebrated of 

 all these encounters between two tides of difierent levels is the Moskoe- 

 strom, towards the southerly extremity of the archipelago of the Lofo- 

 ten Islands, called also by seamen the Maelstrom. The sombre imagin- 

 ation of northern peoples, always tending to the creation of monsters, 

 saw in the strait of the Moskoe-strom a polype with arms several 

 hundred yards in length, which caused the waters to whirl in an im- 

 mense eddy, in order to draw ships into it and engulf them. From 

 this ancient legend there has even remained with many the idea 

 that this current is a sort of abyss in the form of a funnel, which 

 floating objects approach by degrees, forming narrower and narrower 

 circles, till they finally plunge for ever into this revolving well. But 

 it is nothing of the sort. The only eddies are small lateral ones, pro- 

 duced by the meeting of the currents, and hardly 2 or 3 yards deep. 

 The principal phenomenon consists, as in the Coirebhreacain and 



* Gaelic, " Cauldron of the spotted seas." 

 t Athenceum, Aug. 26, 1864 ; Mittheilungen von Fetermann, t. ix. 1864. 



