“Sinuous or straight, now rapid and now slow.”
Cowper.
“As winds that coerce the sea.”
C. G. Rossetti.
ACTUAL Rivers in the Ocean; distinct streams of water, flowing over a bed of water, with banks of water. Not merely one or two such rivers, but scores of them, hundreds of them, great and small, in all parts of the world.
Chief perhaps in importance is the Gulf Stream, that vast flood which pours out of the Gulf of Mexico, and acts as a winter heating apparatus for the west of Europe. Though by no means the largest of ocean streams, it is one of the most useful to man.
After quitting the Gulf, it hurries at speed through the Straits of Florida; then spreads out into a river, about fifty miles wide and over two thousand feet deep, journeying at a rate of some sixty miles in twelve hours.
For a while it hugs the American coast; but, happily for Europe, it forsakes this friend of its youth, and wanders to the north-eastward across the Atlantic.
To call it a “river” is no mere fiction of speech. Near Halifax the separation between warm and cold water is so sharp, that those on board a ship may know what latitude they have reached, on entering or leaving the stream, by simply dipping a bucket in the water and taking the temperature. Literally the Gulf Stream is a warm river, flowing over a bed of cold water, with cold-water banks.
So far as Cape Hatteras the stream clings to its early friend; and after that the American coast knows it no more, being left to the mercies of a very different acquaintance. An icy stream flows southward from the far north, clinging to the coast of North America, while we in western Europe benefit by the presence of the warm current which travels over to us. This stream has been described as forming a “cold wall” to the mild Gulf Stream.