CHARTING THE RIVER 107 



flow around the north of America into the South Sea or it 

 must needs strike over upon the coasts of Iceland, Norway 

 and Finmark/' His desire to prove the existence of the North- 

 west Passage prejudiced him in favor of the first alternative. 

 Even so he was a careful enough observer to note that, in 50° 

 N. latitude a current carried ice to the southward — the Lab- 

 rador Current. 



Frobisher discovered the northeasterly pull of the Nor- 

 wegian Current and also saw clearly that there had to be some 

 kind of return path for the currents, a kind of circulating 

 ocean river; but his little knowledge led him to a false con- 

 clusion when he wrote: ''Sayling toward the northwest parts 

 of Ireland we mette with a great current from out of the 

 southwest, which carried us (by our reckoning) one point 

 toward the northeastward of our said course, which current 

 seemed to us to continue itself toward Norway and other of 

 the northeast parts of the world, whereby we may be induced 

 to believe that this is the same which the Portuguese mette 

 at Capo de Buong Speranza, where, stricking over from 

 thence to the Straits of Magellan and finding no passage there 

 for the narrowness of the sayde Straits, runneth alongue to 

 the great Bay of Mexico, where also haveing a lot of land it 

 is forced to strike back again toward the northeast, as we 

 not only have but in another place also further northward by 

 goode experience this year have found.'' Though he saw the 

 logical necessity of linking currents into a continuous system, 

 he was unaware that the main Atlantic stream runs southward 

 when it approaches Europe and that the Norway current is 

 only a small branch. And so he produced the fanciful theory 

 of a current that rounded the north of Norway and thence 

 by some unexplained route reached the eastern coast of 

 Africa. By what strange paths it could have reached the Capo 

 de Buong Speranza, or Cape of Good Hope, and so back into 

 the Atlantic he does not say. 



As new communities of the Ocean River began to appear in 



