SARGASSO SEA

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 119, 23 May 1925, Page 16

SARGASSO SEA

CENTRE OF MANY MYSTEKIOOS

TALES.

If the expedition which has recentlyJeft New York is successful, it will have shuttered the romance and destroyed the many myths surrounding tho strange Sargasso Sea. Here in the Atlantic is a sea on which no ship can sail.

The secret of the impenetrability, of this vast stretch of sea lies in the weed which grows and is carried there by currents (writes Captain Leslie Cobb in the "Weekly Telegraph"). From this weed, known among scientific men as sargassum bacciferum, the sea derives its name; it is so dense that not even the most powerful steam or motor vessel could force its way through, even if some means could be devised for protecting the propeller from the entangling tendrils, and a man falling overboard could not drown unless he struggled, for he would be gently supported on the surface.

Now and again there arose rneri who chimed to have visited the Sargasso. Sea and to have seen there wonderful sights. It is not so very long ago that a. eailorman of Bristol, one Jabez Picton, arrived in America and gave his story of experiences in the sea of mystery. He said that he had been left by accident aboard a. schooner wheij sha was abandoned in a storm by her crew, and had lain senseless for several weks. When he arose from his stupor it was to find himself drifting slowly, ever so slowly, into the weed-clogged waves of the Sargasso Sea. Gradually the schooner was earned farther and farther into the weed mass, and at last, in the centre,, Picton came upon wreck after wreck. Some of them vf.ere hundreds of years old: mingling with the rusty plates of steamers were the rotting ribs of- Spanish galleons ; aged clippers, still showing signs amidst the weed and slime which covered them, of the erace of their lines, floated mournfully side by side with whalers and trading schooners." Over all hung an air of desolation and decay; it was a sea of death. Pictoa—whose story need not, of course, be taken too seriously— explained his escape from the Sargasso Sea by stating that apparently some mystenous force discovered that there was a living human being in these realms of death. The schooner on which he lived was therefore carried out of tho Sarggsso^ Sea by the same unusual current which had brought it in. The Sargasso Sea is bounded by the South African Current, the Guinea Current, and the Equatorial Current—all well known to navigators—and therefore to a certain extent does pick up drift wood and wreckage swept towards it by these various, movements of the oceans. It is certain, too, that any derelict, so swept and once entangled in the weed, would never escape, and would moreover "die" very slowly, being kept afloat for months if not years longer than if she were borne by the waters of the Atlanic. Scientists kaow that the Sanrasso Sea is the home- of many marine creatures not found in other parts of the world, and it is probably upon this fact thai some of tho old legends with regard to the "existence of strange sea monsters in the Sargasso Sea have been based.

Marinera for years believed thai the Sargasso Sea was the home of the King of the Octopods, that there amidst the ■weed lived an octopol compared -with which those found in the South Seas were gentle, harmless creatures, and that he was surrounded by armies of similar monsters of the deep almost as fearful' as himself. It is more or less easy to see how this idea arose. The tendrils of the seaweed which grows undisturbed in the Sargarro Sea do grow to an enormous size, and when seen from afar could easily be mistaken by the credulous for the tentacles of enormous octopods or devil-fish.