OCEANIC CURRENTS.
[From Reclus's Amérique Boréale.]
Traces of a western land in drift.
There was another class of evidence which, as the Historie informs us, served some purpose in bringing conviction to the mind of Columbus. Such were the phenomenal washing ashore on European coasts of unknown pines and other trees, sculptured logs, huge bamboos, whose joints could be made into vessels to hold nine bottles of wine, and dead bodies with strange, broad faces. Even canoes, with living men in them of wonderful aspects, had at times been reported as thrown upon the Atlantic islands. Such events had not been unnoticed ever since the Canaries and the Azores had been inhabited by a continental race, and conjectures had been rife long before the time of Columbus that westerly winds had brought these estrays from a distant land,—a belief more comprehensible at that time than any dependence upon the unsuspected fact that it was the oceanic currents, rather, which impelled these migratory objects.
Gulf Stream.
It required the experiences of later Spanish navigators along the Bahama Channel, and those of the French and English farther north upon the Banks of Newfoundland, before it became clear that the currents of the Atlantic, grazing the Cape of Good Hope and whirling in the Gulf of Mexico, sprayed in a curling fringe in the North Atlantic. This in a measure became patent to Sir Humphrey Gilbert sixty or seventy years after the death of Columbus.
If science had then been equal to the microscopic tasks which at this day it imposes on itself, the question of western lands might have been studied with an interest beyond what attached to the trunks of trees, carved timbers, edible nuts, and seeds of alien plants, which the Gulf Stream is still bringing to the shores of Europe. It might have found in the dust settling upon the throngs of men in the Old World, the shells of animalcules, differing from those known to the observing eye in Europe, which, indeed, had been carried in the upper currents of air from the banks of the Orinoco.
Influence of Portuguese discoveries upon Columbus.