8 THE OCEAN RIVER 



For the moment this will indicate the reach from Europe 

 out into the uncharted waters dominated by the great Atlan- 

 tic stream. It is odd that the nature of this perpetual warm 

 current gathering in the West Indies was never evident to 

 Columbus. Had he been aware of the Stream he could have 

 mightily shortened the tedious days of his long voyages back 

 to Spain by taking a northerly route. As a matter of fact, the 

 first recorded word about the Current had nothing to do with 

 scientific inquiry, but crops up in a footnote to the voyages of 

 Sebastian Cabot that the beer stored in the hold of his vessel 

 turned bad and fermented because of unaccountable warmth 

 below decks. This was of course due to a sudden rise in the 

 temperature of the sea as he entered the Gulf Stream. 



Just as the first pre-Christian sailors, Phoenician or Greek 

 or Italian, had responded to the legends of Atlantis or the 

 Fortunate Isles beyond the Pillars of Hercules, so now at the 

 thousandth year after Christ the quest for Hi-Brazil, Saint 

 Brandon's Isle, or the new shores of Vineland teased the mind 

 of man. Shortly after this time the men of Spain and Portugal 

 and France and England took up the task of revealing their 

 own western ocean and following down the trail of the strange 

 woods and strange plants that from time to time, riding the 

 whirlpool of the Atlantic, came from the unknown west to 

 European shores. By the fourteenth century the beginning 

 was made that would end with the establishment of a new 

 civilization largely dependent on the bounty of a fruitful 

 western sea and the beneficence of a warm flood of subtropical 

 waters, making possible the successful migration of the land- 

 locked northern European to his new home on a virgin con- 

 tinent. 



Intimately associated first of all with this migration, and 

 later with the development of the Ocean River as a great trade 

 highway, has been the evolution of the sailing ship and its 

 ultimate replacement by the modern surface vessel and trans- 



