284 COSMOS. 



ally on the subject on his third voyage, saying, " the waters 

 move with the heavens (con los cielos) from east to west." 

 Even the direction of separate floating masses of sea weed 

 confirmed this view.* A small pan of tinned iron, which he 

 found in the hands of the natives of the island of Guadaloupe, 

 confirmed Columbus in the idea that it might be of European 

 origin and obtained from the remains of a shipwrecked vessel, 

 borne by the equatorial current from Spain to the coasts of 

 America. In his geognostic fancies, he regarded the exist- 

 ence of the series of the smaller Antilles and the peculiar con- 

 figuration of the larger islands, or, in other words, the corre- 

 spondence in the direction of their coasts with that of their 

 parallels of latitude, as the long-continued action of the move- 

 ment of the sea between the tropics from east to west. 



When the admiral, on his fourth and last voyage, discov- 

 ered the inclination from north to south of the coasts of the 

 continent from Cape Gracias a Dios to the Laguna de Chiri- 

 qui, he felt the action of the violent current which runs N. 

 and N.N.W., and is induced by the contact of the equatorial 

 current with the opposite dike-like projecting coast-line. An- 



* The great attention paid by the early navigators to natural phe 

 nomena may be seen in the oldest Spanish accounts. Diego de Lepe, 

 tor instance, found, in 1499 (as we learn from a witness in the lawsuit 

 against the heirs of Columbus), by means of a vessel having valves, 

 which did not open until it had reached the bottom, that at a distance 

 from the mouth of the Orinoco, a stratum of fresh water of six fathoms 

 depth flowed above the salt water (Navarrete, Viages y Descubrim., t.- 

 iii., p. 549). Columbus drew milk-white sea water (" white as if meal 

 had been mixed with it") on the south coast of Cuba, and carried it 

 to Spain in bottles ( Vida del Almirante, p. 56). I have myself been at 

 the same spots for the purpose of determining longitudes, and it surpris- 

 ed me to think that the milk-white color of sea water, so common on 

 shoals, should have been regarded by the expei'ienced admiral as a new 

 and unexpected phenomenon. With reference to the Gulf Stream it- 

 self, which must be regarded as an important cosmical phenomenon, 

 many effects had been observed long before the discovery of America, 

 produced by the sea washing on shore at the Canaries and the Azores 

 stems of bamboos, trunks of pines, corpses of strange aspect from the 

 Antilles, and even living men in canoes "which could never sink." 

 These effects were, however, then attributed solely to the strength of 

 the westerly gales ( Vida del Almirante, cap. 8 ; Herrera, Dec. i., lib. 

 i., cap. 2; lib. ix., cap. 12), while the movement of the waters, which 

 is wholly independent of the direction of the winds — the returning 

 stream of the oceanic current, which brings eveiy year tropical fruits 

 from the West Indian Islands to the coasts of Ireland and Norway, was 

 not accurately recognized. Compare the memoir of Sir Humphrey 

 Gilbert, On the Possibility of a Northwest Passage to Cathay, in Hak- 

 luyt, Navigations and Voyages, vol. iii., p. 14 ; Hei'rera, Dec. i., lib. ix., 

 cap. 12 ; and Examen Crit., t. ii., p. 247-257 ; t. iii., p. 99-108 



