ole Atlantic
current system, as it obtains its motion directly from the ever-acting
push of the tradewinds. At Cape St. Roque this broad current splits
into two parts, one turning north, the other south. The northern part
contracts, increases its speed, and, passing up the northern coast of
South America as the Guiana Current, enters through the Caribbean Sea
into the Gulf of Mexico, where it circles around to the northward;
then, colored a deep blue from the fine river silt of the Mississippi,
and heated from its long surface exposure under a tropical sun to an
average temperature of eighty degrees, it emerges into the Florida
Channel as the Gulf Stream.

From here it travels northeast, following the trend of the coast line,
until, off Cape Hatteras, it splits into three divisions, one of which,
the westernmost, keeps on to lose its warmth and life in Baffin's Bay.
Another impinges on the Hebrides, and is no more recognizable as a
current; and the third, the eastern and largest part of the divided
stream, makes a wide sweep to the east and south, enclosing the Azores
and the deadwater called the Sargasso Sea, then, as the African
Current, runs down the coast until, just below the Canary Isles, it
merges into the Lesser Equatorial Current, which, parallel to the
parent stream, and separated from it by a narrow band of backwater,
travels west and filters through the West Indies, making puzzling
combinations with the tides, and finally bearing so heavily on the
young Gulf Stream as to give to it the sharp turn to the northward
through the Florida Channel.

In the South Atlantic, the portion of the Main Equatorial Current split
off by Cape St. Roque and directed south leaves the coast at Cape Frio,
and at the latitude of the River Plate assumes a due easterly
direction, crossing the ocean as the Southern Connecting Current. At
the Cape of Good Hope it meets the cold, northeasterly Cape Horn
Current, and with it passes up the coast of Africa to join the
Equatorial Current at the starting-point in the Gulf of Guinea, the
whole constituting a circulatory system of ocean rivers, of speed value
varying from eighteen to ninety miles a day.

On a bright morning in November, 1894, a curious-looking craft floated
into the branch current which, skirting Cuba, flows westward through
the Bahama Channel. A man standing on the highest of two points
enclosing a small bay near Cape Maisi, after a critical examination
through a tel