Читать книгу Legendary Islands of the Atlantic: A Study of Medieval Geography онлайн

35 страница из 41

Aristotle, as cited by Nansen, tells us in his “Meteorologica” that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was muddy and shallow and little stirred by the winds.35 In early life Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, and, though he afterward developed a widely different method and outlook, it is likely that their information as to this matter was in common, being supplied perhaps by Phoenician and other seamen.

In the passage quoted from Scylax and the first excerpt from Avienus the courses referred to are apparently too near the mainland shore to approach that prodigious accumulation of eddy-borne weeds in dead water which has long given to a great space of mid-Atlantic the name of the Sargasso Sea. But they show that huge seaweeds were very early associated with obstruction to navigation in seafaring minds and popular fancy. Perhaps they may also have suggested shallows as affording beds of nourishment for so enormous an output of vegetation. It would not readily occur to the early seagoing observers that the greatest of these entangling creations floated in masses quite free, though we now know this to be the case. In any event, it is evident that some imperfect knowledge of conditions far west of the Pillars of Hercules had made its way to Greece. Somewhere in that ocean of obscurity and mystery there was a vast dead and stagnant sea, presumably shallow, a sea to be shunned. Gigantic entrapping weeds and wallowing sea monsters freely distributed were recognized, too, as among the standing terrors of the Atlantic.