26 EQUINOCTIAL CURRENT. 
by a luminous point, which in the middle of a dark 
night, appearing at intervals above the agitated 
waves, marks the shore of one’s native land !” 
They were obliged to run under courses, and 
proceeded at the rate of ten knots, although the 
vessel was not a fast sailer. At six in the morning 
she rolled so much that the fore topgallant-mast 
was carried away. On the 7th they were in the 
latitude of Cape Finisterre, the group of granitic 
rocks on which, named the Sierra de Torinona, is 
visible at sea to the distance of 59 miles. On the 
Sth, at sunset, they discovered from the mast-head 
an English convoy; and to avoid them they altered 
their course during the night. On the 9th they 
began to feel the effect of the great current which 
flows from the Azores towards the Straits of Gibral- 
tar and the Canaries. Its direction was at first east 
by south ; but nearer the inlet it became due east, 
and its force was such as, between 37° and 30° lat., 
sometimes to carry the vessel, in twenty-four hours, 
from 21 to 30 miles eastward. 
Between the tropics, especially from the coast of 
Senegal to the Caribbean Sea, there is a stream 
that always flows from east to west, and which is 
named the Equinoctial Current. Its mean rapidity 
may be estimated at ten or eleven miles in twenty- 
four hours. This movement of the waters, which is 
also observed in the Pacific Ocean, having a direction 
contrary to that of the earth’s rotation, is supposed 
to be connected with the latter only in so far as it 
changes into trade-winds those aerial currents from 
the poles, which, in the lower regions of the atmo- 
sphere, carry the cold air of the high latitudes to- 
wards the equator; and it is to the general impulse 
