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Updated: June 3, 2025
Wheezing, coughing, shaking in every plate, vomiting into the sky a trail of smoke that extended clear to the eastern horizon, the Vulcan shouldered her way at top speed across the mazy lanes of the Sargasso. The tug had come a queer crooked path across that sea, and the lay of her smoke trail down the pearly glow of dawn still marked her tortuous course.
When the men and their turmoil had disappeared, Madden remained on deck, filled with a dull, heavy feeling of lassitude and bitterness. It was one of those moments when a man's hope is swamped in present difficulties. The sun swung slowly down into the western sea, and its reflections made long blinding streaks in the Sargasso.
Hour after hour, above the glassy Sargasso Sea, the battle went on, the aeroplane ducking and diving and gliding and skimming whenever the dirigible got a good chance to send a fatal projectile into her. From time to time, also, Ben got a chance to send a bullet crashing into the dirigible's gas-bag, and from the actions of the men aboard her they were evidently badly worried by this.
"A brig with twelve hands aboard, bound from Boston to the Cape Verde Islands, was caught in a storm, and, being blown out of her course, drifted on to the northern extremities of the Sargasso. The wind then sinking, and an absolute calm taking its place, there seemed every prospect that the brig would remain where it was for an indefinite period.
Surging forth between the interstices of the Bahamas, that stretch like a weir across its mouth, it cleaves asunder the Atlantic. So distinct is its individuality, that one side of a vessel will be scoured by its warm indigo-coloured water, while the other is floating in the pale, stagnant, weed-encumbered brine of the Mar de Sargasso of the Spaniards.
There is, also, in this ocean a vast tract of floating seaweed, called by sailors the Sargasso Sea, covering a region as large as France, and this has been thought by many to mark the place of a sunken island.
But although once or twice they saw distant smoke, it always turned out to be a false alarm, and they hourly grew nearer the Sargasso without having made out a trace of the rival treasure-hunters. This fact put them all in high spirits, and each of the boys was already busy building lofty air-castles concerning what he would do with the treasure when he got it.
Just beneath them the propeller rushed with watery thunder. "Yonder she rises!" cried one of the watchers, pointing at two wireless masts that rose like the fins of a racing shark above the green surface of the Sargasso. "Yonder she rises!" repeated a voice amidship, and more faintly still came the repetition from the bridge, "Yonder she rises hard a-port!"
And what that meant for me I knew. The fair weather might continue almost indefinitely. Days and weeks, even months, might pass, and I still might live on there in bodily safety; but so far as the world was concerned I was dead already being fairly caught in the slow eddying current which was carrying my hulk steadily and hopelessly into the dense wreck-filled centre of the Sargasso Sea.
What occurred on this great trip is described in the second book of this series, called "Under the Ocean to the South Pole, or the Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder." In that is told how once more Tom and Bill, with Andy, the boys and Washington, accompanying Professor Henderson, had many thrilling experiences. They were caught in the grip of the grass of the terrible Sargasso Sea.
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