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Updated: May 22, 2025
Afar loomed Mount Hood in grandeur unsurpassed, if we except Tacoma, inswathed in forests and covered with crystal crowns. The Chinook winds were blowing coolly, coming from the Kuro Siwo, or placid ocean-river from Japan; odoriferous, as though spice-laden from the flowery isles of the Yellow Sea.
In the early morning of 4th September a whale-boat manned by natives dragged us down the green lane of the anchorage and round the spouting promontory. On the shore level it was a hot, breathless, and yet crystal morning; but high overhead the hills of Atuona were all cowled in cloud, and the ocean-river of the trades streamed without pause.
Thrust away to the south by that great ocean-river, it lies in a vast eddy, or central pool of the Atlantic, between the Gulf Stream and the equatorial current, unmoved save by surface-drifts of wind, as floating weeds collect and range slowly round and round in the still corners of a tumbling-bay or salmon pool.
Two channels are thus formed by which the Mexican Gulf is entered. One neither departs from nor approaches the Cuban shore without crossing that remarkable ocean-river to which we have so often referred in these pages, the Gulf Stream, with banks and bottom of cold water, while its body and surface are warm.
Hannibal is urged to war by a dream like that of Agamemnon in the Iliad; he is equipped with a spear "fatal to many thousands" of the enemy, and a shield, like that of Aeneas, embossed with subjects from Carthaginian history, and with the river Ebro flowing round the edge as an ingenious variant of the Ocean-river on the shield of Achilles.
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