80 deg. Fahrenheit. Its current, of a uniform speed of four to five
miles per hour, expends immense power in its course, and moves a body
of water in the latitude of the Carolina coast fully two hundred miles
wide. This aqueous body exceeds in quantity the rivers of the
Mississippi and the Amazon multiplied one thousand times. Its
temperature diminishes very gradually, while it moves thousands of
leagues, until one branch loses itself in Arctic regions, and the
other breaks on the coast of Europe. It is well known to navigators
that one branch of the Gulf Stream finds its outlet northward from the
Caribbean Sea through the Windward Passage, and that here the current
extends to the depth of eight hundred fathoms; the width, however, in
this section is not over ten miles. It will be nothing new to tell the
reader that the sea, especially in its proximity to the continents,
has a similar topographical conformation beneath its surface. The
bottom consists of hills, mountains, and valleys, like the surface of
the earth upon which we live. A practical illustration of the fact is
afforded in the soundings taken by the officers of our Coast Survey in
the Caribbean Sea, where a valley was found giving a water depth of
three thousand fathoms, twenty-five miles south of Cuba. The Cayman
islands, in that neighborhood, are the summit of mountains bordering
this deep valley at the bottom of the sea. It is known to extend over
seven hundred miles, from between Cuba and Jamaica nearly to the head
of the bay of Honduras, with an average breadth of eighty miles. How
suggestive the subject of these submarine Alps! Thus the island of
Grand Cayman, scarcely twenty feet above sea level, is the top of a
mountain twenty thousand five hundred and sixty-eight feet above the
bottom of the submarine valley beside which it rises,--an altitude
exceeding that of any mountain on the North American continent. A
little more than five miles, or say twenty-seven thousand feet, is the
greatest depth yet sounded at sea.

With an extensive coast-line particularly well adapted for the
purpose, smuggling is at all times successfully carried on in Cuba,
stimulated by an almost prohibitory tariff. It is well understood that
many of the most prosperous merchants in Havana are secretly engaged
in this business. The blindness of minor officials is easily
purchased. The eastern department of the island is most notorious for
this class of illegal trade. It was throu