CURRENTS OF THE ATLANTIC 75 



north-east, or from latitudes north of 10° N. within the zone of the 

 North Equatorial Current. It may be, therefore, truly said that on 

 the beaches of Trinidad we find sampled all the seed-drift that reaches 

 the West Indian region, and, in fact, the New World. 



The Transport of Amazon Drift to the West Indian and 

 Florida Regions and Probably also to Europe. — The transport 

 of Amazon drift to the West Indian Islands has long been surmised, 

 and in this connection we may quote the remark of Sir D. Morris 

 that the general characters of the drift on the south coast of Jamaica 

 point to a source in the Orinoco and the Amazon (Nature, January 31, 

 1889). The vegetable drift brought down in such quantities by the 

 Amazon soon gets into the rapid stream of the Main Equatorial 

 Current and is distributed over the West Indian region. " The 

 waters of the Amazon," writes Laughton in his Physical Geography 

 (1873, p. 188), " at first set to the north-east, but they soon incline 

 to the northward, and falling into the strength of the current are 

 swept away to the north-west." Bates observed Amazon drift, 

 more particularly the fruits of Manicaria saccifera, which are so 

 characteristic of West Indian beach-drift, about 400 miles to the 

 north of the mouth of the estuary (The Naturalist on the River Amazons, 

 1864, p. 461). The American and German bottle-drift charts clearly 

 indicate the mode of distribution of such floating fruits and seeds 

 and the tracks that would usually be followed. I here give the 

 places of recovery of sixteen bottles thrown into the sea between 

 200 and 400 miles north and east of the Amazon estuary, the data 

 being mainly supplied by the American charts. Three were cast 

 up on the coasts of the Guianas, five on Trinidad, one on the adjacent 

 island of Tobago, one on the neighbouring Venezuelan shores, three 

 on the Lesser Antilles (between Grenada and the Virgin Islands), 

 one on the shores of the Gulf of Honduras, and two on the east 

 coast of Florida after passing through the Florida Straits. One of 

 the records relating to the Florida coast should be specially men- 

 tioned here, since my authority is an old newspaper cutting dating 

 back, perhaps, to the closing years of last century. A bottle thrown 

 over from the Prince Eugene on March 11, about 300 miles north-east 

 of the Amazon estuary, was picked up 279 days afterwards on the 

 east coast of Florida, in lat. 27° 30' N. The captain was informed 

 by letter from the Hydrographic Office in Washington that it had 

 performed a passage of 3320 miles. 



In establishing this link by bottle-drift between the estuary of 

 the Amazon and the Florida seas we indicate the probability of fruits 

 and seeds of the Amazon drift being transported to the shores of 

 Western Europe. It is in the neighbourhood of the Florida Straits 

 that West Indian drift gathers before starting northward on its 

 rapid journey through the straits towards Cape Hatteras and thence 

 across the Atlantic. The data enable us to place the period needed 

 for this long passage from the Amazon to Europe at about twenty 

 months, allowing six months for the first stage ending with the 

 Florida Straits, and fourteen months for the Atlantic traverse. It is 

 on the same grounds — namely, that drift from the Main Equatorial 

 Current reaches the Florida coasts and that drift from the Florida 



