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

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It is one of the topics that tempt and have always tempted exaggeration and misunderstandings. The effect on a bright mind of current nautical yarns concerning it is shown by Janvier’s “In the Sargasso Sea,” a narrative almost as extravagant as Plato’s tale of Atlantis, in its own quite different way. One of the more moderate preliminary passages may be cited:

And to that same place, he added, the stream carried all that was caught in its current—like the spar and plank floating near us, so that the sea was covered with a thick tangle of the weed in which were held fast fragments of wreckage and stuff washed overboard and logs adrift from far southern shores, until in its central part the mass was so dense that no ship could sail through it nor could a steamer traverse it because of the fouling of her screws.39

He admits this theory of formation was inaccurate but later refers to “the dense wreck-filled center of the Sargasso Sea” and makes his castaway hero declare:

What I looked at was the host of wrecked ships, the dross of wave and tempest which through four centuries has been gathering slowly and still more slowly wasting in the central fastnesses of the Sargasso Sea.40