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Updated: June 6, 2025
The gale gradually blew itself out, leaving behind only a long and very heavy swell to denote the deep-reaching disturbance that the ocean had endured. And now we were within the range of the Sargasso Weed, that mysterious FUCUS that makes the ocean look. like some vast hayfield, and keeps the sea from rising, no matter how high the wind.
The last irruption of salt water happened in 1824, when the North Sea entered, killing all the fresh-water shells, fish, and plants; and from that time to the present, the sea-weed Fucus vesiculosus, together with oysters and other marine mollusca, have succeeded the Cyclas, Lymnaea, Paludina, and Charae.
The Fucus giganteus of Solander. The stem of this remarkable seaweed, though but the thickness of a man's thumb, is often over one hundred and thirty yards in length, perhaps the longest of any known plant. It grows on every rock in Fuegian waters, from low-water mark to a depth of fifty or sixty fathoms, and among the most violent breakers.
There is another remarkable peculiarity in this island: its shores to a very considerable extent out to sea are surrounded with the plant called Fucus maximus, mentioned by Captain Cook; it grows to the depth of sixty fathoms, or one hundred and eighty feet, and reaches in one long stem to the surface, when it continues to run along to the enormous length of three or four hundred feet, with short alternate branches at every foot of its length.
Clearly, this curious Australian cousin of the Mediterranean sea-horses has acquired so marvellous a resemblance to a bit of fucus in order to deceive the eyes of its ever-watchful enemies, and to become indistinguishable from the uneatable weed whose colour and form it so surprisingly imitates.
We ascended wrinkled hills of black stone, and descended into worn and dismal dells of the same; into some of which, where the tide got entrance, it came pouring and roaring in raging whiteness, and churning the loose fragments of whinstone into round pebbles, and piling them up in deep crevices with seaweeds, like great round ropes and heaps of fucus.
It's as soft as pepper, he replied. They laboured along the shore, beside the black, sinuous line of shrivelled fucus. The base of the cliff was piled with chalk debris. On the other side was the level plain of the sea. Hand in hand, alone and overshadowed by huge cliffs, they toiled on. The waves staggered in, and fell, overcome at the end of the race.
Because, just as 40,000 near-invisible buds have been counted in one five-square-millimeter space, so also have fucus plants been gathered that were over 500 meters long! We had been gone from the Nautilus for about an hour and a half. It was almost noon. I spotted this fact in the perpendicularity of the sun's rays, which were no longer refracted.
Hence, in many places, various kinds of pipe-fish exhibit an extraordinary amount of imitative likeness to the sargasso or seaweed to whose tags they cling; and in the three most highly developed Australian species the likeness becomes so ridiculously close that it is with difficulty one can persuade oneself one is really and truly looking at a fish, and not at a piece of strangely animated and locomotive fucus.
I wonder how we should have felt if Shriny had really appeared to us, as Coomara appeared to Jack Dogherty, and taken us down below the waves, or kept us among the stakes of her palace till the tide flooded them, and perhaps filled it with wonderful creatures and beautiful things, and floated out the dank, dripping fucus into a veil of lace above our heads; as our mother used to float out little dirty lumps of seaweed into beautiful web-like pictures when she was preserving them for her collection.
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