NATURE OF THE STREAM 121 



about the globe, and Columbus believed that in some myste- 

 rious manner the waters were drawn along with them. 



Though the speculations of the more thoughtful men of 

 Columbus' time took into account the westerly movement of 

 equatorial waters into the Caribbean and their subsequent 

 passage through the Straits of Florida, yet more than sixty 

 years later a suggestion was considered which ignored them 

 completely. Thevet in his La Cosmographie Universelle in 

 1575 put forward a suggestion that the waters entering the 

 Gulf Stream at the Straits of Florida came from the Missis- 

 sippi and other rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. This 

 was an attractive theory because men could see and were 

 impressed by the majestic flood of the Mississippi; but they 

 failed to realize that this continuing inflow of water, were it 

 large enough to be the source of the Gulf Stream, would have 

 to be accounted for in the ocean. Later, as we know, it was 

 found that the river volume amounted to a mere one-thou- 

 sandth part of the flood of the Gulf Stream, and was clearly 

 insufficient to account for the flow of its current. Moreover, it 

 left unaccounted for the great flood of equatorial water into 

 the Caribbean. 



To illustrate how long-lived were the myth-making habits of 

 thought of the Dark Ages, here is a quotation from Merula, a 

 contemporary of Thevet: 'The water flows together near the 

 Pole, but at the Pole itself is a great Black Rock, 33 leagues in 

 circumference. Ships which once enter one of these channels 

 never return, not even with the most favorable winds, and next 

 to the Black Rock all the water is engulfed into the bowels of 

 the earth, whence it flows through springs and river sources 

 once again into the light of day." Yet the same idea in a dif- 

 ferent guise had been rejected over half a century earlier by 

 Peter Martyr, who wrote: '\ . . which waters I suppose to be 

 driven about the globe by the incessant moving and impulsion 

 of the heavens, and not to be swallowed up and cast out again 



