Shifting Winds: A Tough Yarn

by R. M. Ballantyne

In a few places of the ocean there are pools of almost stagnant tracts, of various sizes, which are a sort of eddies caused by the conflicting currents. They are full of seaweed and other drift, which is shoved into them by the currents, and are named Sargasso seas. Some of these are hundreds of miles in extent, others are comparatively small.

They bothered the navigators of old, did those Sargasso seas, uncommonly. They are permanent spots, which shift their position so little with the very slight changes in the currents of the sea, that they may be said to be always in the same place.

Columbus got into one of these Sargassos—the great Atlantic one that lies between Africa and the West Indies,—and his men were alarmed lest this strange weedy sea should turn out to be the end of the world! Columbus was long detained in this region of stagnation and calm, and so were most of the early navigators, who styled it the “Doldrums.” Now-a-days, however, our knowledge of the currents of ocean and atmosphere enables us to avoid the Sargasso seas and sail round them, thereby preventing delay, facilitating trade, saving time, and greatly improving the condition of mankind.

Now, our bottle happened to get entangled in the weed of the Sargasso that exists in the neighbourhood of the Falkland Islands, and stuck fast there for many months. It was heaved up and down by the undulations, blown about a little by occasional breezes, embraced constantly by seaweed, and sometimes tossed by waves when the outskirts of a passing gale broke in upon the stagnant spot; but beyond this it did not move or advance a mile on its voyage.

At last a hurricane burst over the sea; its whirling edge tore up the weed and swept the waters, and set the bottle free, at the same time urging it into a north-easterly current, which flowed towards the coast of Africa. On its way it narrowly missed entanglement in another Sargasso,—a little one that lies between the two continents,—but fortunately passed it in safety, and at last made the Cape of Good Hope, and sighted the majestic Table Mountain which terminates the lofty promontory of that celebrated headland.

Here the bottle met with the wild stormy weather that induced its Portuguese discoverer, Bartholomew Diaz, to name it the “Cape of Tempests,” and which cost him his life, for, on a succeeding voyage, he perished there. King John the Second of Portugal changed its name into the Cape of Good Hope, and not inappropriately so, as it turned out; for, a few years after its discovery in 1486, Vasco de Gama doubled the Cape of Good Hope and discovered the shores of India, whence he brought the first instalment of that wealth which has flowed from east to west ever since in such copious perennial streams.

There was a perplexing conflict of currents here which seemed to indicate a dispute as to which of them should bear off the bottle. The great Mozambique current, (which, born in the huge caldron of the Indian Ocean, flows down the eastern coast of Africa, and meets and wars with the currents coming from the west), almost got the mastery, and well-nigh swept it into an extensive Sargasso sea which lies in that region; in which case the voyage might have been inconceivably delayed; but an eccentric typhoon, or some such turbulent character, struck in from the eastward, swept the bottle utterly beyond Mozambique influence, and left it in the embrace of a current which flowed northward toward the equator.

Thus the bottle narrowly missed being flung on “India’s coral strand,” and voyaged slowly northward in a line parallel with that coast where “Afric’s sunny fountains roll down their golden sands,”—where slavers, too, carried off the blacks in days happily gone by, to toil in slavery among the fields of cotton and sugar-cane, and where British cruisers did their best, (but that wasn’t much!) to prevent the brutal traffic.

The chief point of interest in this part of the voyage was touching at Saint Helena, touching so sharply on the western promontory of that dreary islet, that the bottle again nearly made ship-wreck.

Admirably well chosen was this prominent, barren, isolated rock to be the prison of “Napoleon the Great,” for he was a conspicuous, isolated specimen of humanity, barren of those qualities that constitute real greatness. Great he undoubtedly was in the art of shedding human blood and desolating myriads of hearths and hearts without any object whatever beyond personal ambition; for the First Napoleon being a Corsican, could not even urge the shallow plea of patriotism in justification of his murderous career.