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Updated: June 9, 2025
These are of various nationalities, including English, French, and Dutch, thus completing the entire region familiarly known to us as the West Indies. In approaching the coast from the Windward isles, the observant traveler will notice the fields of what is called gulf-weed, which floats upon the surface of the sea.
From time to time the boat would meet floating prairies, great fields of seaweed dislodged from the Sargasso Sea. Enormous tortoises drowsed in the midst of these clumps of gulf-weed, serving as islands of repose to the seagulls perched on their shells.
From his journal the word "gold" suddenly disappears; the Viceroy and Governor-General steps off the stage; and in his place appears the sea captain, watching the frigate birds and pelicans, noting the golden gulf-weed in the sea, and smelling the breezes that are once more as sweet as the breezes of Seville in May.
If we take up a handful of the floating gulf-weed, we find within the pale yellow leaves and berries, tiny pipe-fish, seahorses, and specimens of the little nest-building fishes. Thus this curious weed forms a home for parasites, crabs, and shell-fishes, being itself a sort of mistletoe of the ocean.
All this time the brig was bowling along down the trades; and on the third morning after I had the captain's offer we being then close upon the thirty-fifth parallel of north latitude Bowers called my attention to the gulf-weed floating about us, and told me that we were fairly on the outer edge of the Sargasso Sea.
Columbus, when sailing sadly through unknown seas in search of the New World of which he had dreamed so long, came upon water so covered with long green weeds that it seemed like a floating meadow, while his vessels could hardly make their way through the grassy tangles of what is now known as the Gulf-weed.
Meanwhile, it must be remembered that this gulf-weed has not, as some of the uninitiated fancy from its name, anything to do with the Gulf Stream, along the southern edge of which we were steaming.
Our return on board was a long affair, for there was a stiff breeze, almost in our teeth; and our unwieldy craft was obliged to make tack after tack before we could reach the steamer. Great Portuguese men-of-war were floating about, waiting for prey; and we passed through patches of stringy gulf-weed, trailing out into long ropes.
A shoal of flying-fish got up out of the warm, shining water and ran away over the ripples like so many silver rats; yellow tangles of Gulf-weed swam in close squadron on the emerald sea; and on the western horizon screw-pile lighthouses stood up out of the water, marking the nearness of the low-lying Floridan beaches, and reminding one of mysterious Everglades beyond.
And here, as a matter of course, the greater part of the gulf-weed and other floating materials, which are carried round by the current, is eventually deposited. This is the "Sargasso Sea" of the ancients. Columbus crossed this "weedy sea" on his quest after a western passage to India.
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