CHARTING THE RIVER 109 



the southern route by way of the West Indies, to take full 

 advantage of the equatorial drift and the trade winds. In this 

 way the Ocean River continued to influence the practice of 

 navigation to the extent of justifying a course to New York, 

 which was nearly 1,800 miles south of the route taken to the 

 northern colonies only 100 miles away. 



Toward the end of the seventeenth century the growing 

 spirit of scientific inquiry began to be felt, and a number of 

 theoretical treatises on ocean currents began to appear. One 

 of these, written by Isaac Vossius in 1663, is worth our men- 

 tion if only because he showed the true circulatory nature 

 of the Atlantic River and so drew together the separate and 

 unorganized observations of the 150 years that had gone by 

 since Ponce de Leon discovered the Florida Current and the 

 650 years since Leif Ericson sighted North America. He 

 describes it with admirable simplicity: 



''With the general equatorial current, the waters run toward 

 Brazil, along Guyana, and enter the Gulf of Mexico. From 

 there, turning obliquely, they pass rapidly through the Straits 

 of Bahama. On the one side they bathe the coasts of Florida 

 and Virginia and the entire shore of North America, and on 

 the other side they run directly east until they reach the oppo- 

 site shores of Europe and Africa; from thence they run again 

 to the south and join the first movement to the west, per- 

 petually turning in this manner circuitously.'' 



About this time, too, Athanasius Kircher and Happelius 

 published the first known charts of the Gulf Stream. They 

 were not simple factual records of the known ocean currents, 

 but included a number of greatly exaggerated and half -legend- 

 ary features like the Maelstrom, the great whirlpool oflf the 

 Lofoten Islands. Nor were they designed for the practical in- 

 terests of navigators, but rather to illustrate the real or imag- 

 inary scientific questions of the day. But the time was not too 

 distant when the Atlantic currents were to be mapped in care- 



