96 THREE CRUISES OF THE " BLAKE." 



slopes very gradually seaward, forming a broad, slightly inclined 

 submarine plateau. Tlie 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 edg-e 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 hundi-ed-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 Canaveral to Sombrero Island, and 

 along the greater part of the east face of the plateau of the 

 Windward West India Islands. 



North of Cape Canaveral 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 ease Lieutenant-Commander Brown- 



