EQUINOCTIAL CURRENT. 



23 



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 8th, at sun- 

 set, 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 

 effects of the great current which flows from the 

 Azores towards the Straits of Gibraltar 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 

 which these winds give to the surface of the ocean 

 that the phenomenon in question is to be attributed. 



This current carries the waters of the Atlantic 

 towards the Mosquito and Honduras coasts, from 

 which they move northwards, and passing into the 

 Gulf of Mexico follow the bendings of the shore 

 from Vera Cruz to the mouth of the Rio del Norte, 

 and from thence to the mouths of the Mississippi 

 and the shoals at the southern extremity of Florida. 

 After performing this circuit, it again directs itself 

 northward, rushing with great impetuosity through 

 the Straits of Bahama. At the end of these nar- 

 rows, in the parallel of Cape Canaveral, the flow, 



