By the time we had been a month at sea, having applied myself assiduously to work, I picked up a little knowledge of seamanship. I took my turn of watch with the rest; I learned to go aloft and to lay out upon a yard in a stiff topgallant breeze. I acquired all the mysteries of knotting and splicing, of serving a rope with spun-yarn, and to know the technical difference between the rope itself and a line. I could heave the log, box the compass, and take my "trick" at the helm with the best man on board, and thus gained the golden opinions of those among whom a rough turn of the wheel of fortune had so strangely and so suddenly cast me.
Some days after leaving the Canaries, we found ourselves passing through what seemed to be immense meadows of green stuff adrift. By moonlight the branches, leaves, and fibres of this uprooted marine forest,—for such it was, being wrack and seaweeds of wondrous length springing from the lowest depths of the ocean—sparkled, flashed, and whirled in the foaming eddies astern of the brig as she cleft or brushed down the yielding masses with her rushing keel.
I was never weary of surveying this scene, which was so marvellous in its beauty, when the moon was shining on the sea.
These vast broad leaves and long snaky tendrils that danced upon the surface of the sea were the Florida gulf-weed.
"The tropical grape of the sailors," said Hislop, as we leaned over the lee-quarter one evening. "These plants grow upon the two great banks of the Atlantic, and were known to the Phoenicians, who named them the Weedy Sea."
"I remember," said I; "and that the seamen of Columbus thought they were sent by heaven to stay their course."
"You are right," replied the mate, with an approving smile. "It is pleasant to meet one like you, Rodney, who has read that which is worth reading and remembers it."
"The Gulf Stream," said Weston, joining in the conversation, "is a great current about sixty miles broad, caused by the trade winds, which always blow from east to west. It issues from the Gulf between Cape Florida and Cuba, and runs at the rate of three knots an hour along the shores of South and North America, till the Newfoundland bank turns it to the south-east; so everywhere its track is known by that gulf-weed which you now see floating past."
It is by this mysterious current—this mighty river that traverses the ocean—that the timber logs of the St. Lawrence, the wrecks of the old plate argosies, and the carved idols of older Mexico and the Caribbean Isles, all covered with the weeds and barnacles of long immersion, have been cast upon the western shores of Scotland and the Hebrides.
Every morning the weather became warmer—the sea and sky more clear—the atmosphere more rarefied. The wind was so steady that scarcely a sheet or tack were altered. Thus for several days we bore on with both sheets aft, as the phrase is, when running right before the wind.