96 THREE CRUISES OF THE “ BLAKE." 
slopes very gradually seaward, forming a broad, slightly inclined 
submarine plateau. The edge of the plateau beyond the hun- 
dred-fathom line falls rapidly to the thousand-fathom line, form- 
ing a steep slope, the Gulf Stream Slope, so named by the 
Fish Commission, because it extends under the inner edge of 
the Gulf Stream along our coast, from Cape Hatteras to Nova 
Scotia. 
South of Hatteras the hundred-fathom line runs parallel to 
the coast at a distance of about sixty miles till off Jacksonville. 
From this point it gradually closes up towards the Florida shore, 
and is not more than ten miles distant from Jupiter Inlet. It 
then makes a gigantic sweep and runs parallel to the general 
trend of the Florida reefs, until it turns abruptly northward 
about a hundred miles to the westward of the Tortugas. South 
of Hatteras the thousand- fathom line does not follow the line 
of the hundred-fathom curve; it extends almost in a straight 
line from the Cape to the northern extremity of the Bahamas, 
and is connected with the sloping Carolina-Florida plateau 
(the “Blake Plateau”) by a sharp slope, reaching, however, 
only about to the six-hundred-fathom line, which in some parts 
of the plateau off Florida and Georgia is over two hundred 
miles from the coast line. The two-thousand-fathom line is 
about ten miles distant from the thousand-fathom line all the 
way from north of Cape Cafiaveral to Sombrero Island, and 
along the greater part of the east face of the plateau of the 
Windward West India Islands. 
North of Cape Cafiaveral as far as Cape Hatteras, the two- 
thousand-fathom line is from twenty to sixty miles distant from 
the thousand-fathom line, which forms as it were the bottom of 
the steep slope of the continental shelf. From this line to the 
deepest water between the Bermudas and the Atlantic States 
the slope is hardly perceptible, —a general fall of say twelve 
thousand feet in a distance of over two hundred and fifty miles, 
or a slope of about fifty feet to the mile. 
The eastern slope of the great Bahama Bank is very much 
steeper than that of the Atlantic Coast of the United States. 
In no case is the two-thousand-fathom line more than fourteen 
miles from land, and in one case Lieutenant-Commander Brown- 
