The name Sargasso comes from the Spanish word sargazo, meaning gulfweed.
This gulfweed, the swimming gulfweed or berry carrier, is the chief substance making up this immense shoal.
And here's why these water plants collect in this placid Atlantic basin, according to the expert on the subject, Commander Maury, author of The Physical Geography of the Sea.
The explanation he gives seems to entail a set of conditions that everybody knows:
"Now," Maury says, "if bits of cork or chaff, or any floating substance, be put into a basin, and a circular motion be given to the water, all the light substances will be found crowding together near the center of the pool, where there is the least motion.
Just such a basin is the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf Stream, and the Sargasso Sea is the center of the whirl."
I share Maury's view, and I was able to study the phenomenon in this exclusive setting where ships rarely go.
Above us, huddled among the brown weeds, there floated objects originating from all over: tree trunks ripped from the Rocky Mountains or the Andes and sent floating down the Amazon or the Mississippi, numerous pieces of wreckage, remnants of keels or undersides, bulwarks staved in and so weighed down with seashells and barnacles, they couldn't rise to the surface of the ocean.
And the passing years will someday bear out Maury's other view that by collecting in this way over the centuries, these substances will be turned to stone by the action of the waters and will then form inexhaustible coalfields.
Valuable reserves prepared by farseeing nature for that time when man will have exhausted his mines on the continents.
In the midst of this hopelessly tangled fabric of weeds and fucus plants, I noted some delightful pink–colored, star–shaped alcyon coral, sea anemone trailing the long tresses of their tentacles, some green, red, and blue jellyfish, and especially those big rhizostome jellyfish that Cuvier described, whose bluish parasols are trimmed with violet festoons.
We spent the whole day of February 22 in the Sargasso Sea, where fish that dote on marine plants and crustaceans find plenty to eat.
The next day the ocean resumed its usual appearance.
From this moment on, for nineteen days from February 23 to March 12, the Nautilus stayed in the middle of the Atlantic, hustling us along at a constant speed of 100 leagues every twenty–four hours.
It was obvious that Captain Nemo wanted to carry out his underwater program, and I had no doubt that he intended, after doubling Cape Horn, to return to the Pacific South Seas.
So Ned Land had good reason to worry.
In these wide seas empty of islands, it was no longer feasible to jump ship.
Nor did we have any way to counter Captain Nemo's whims.
We had no choice but to acquiesce; but if we couldn't attain our end through force or cunning, I liked to think we might achieve it through persuasion.
Once this voyage was over, might not Captain Nemo consent to set us free in return for our promise never to reveal his existence?
Our word of honor, which we sincerely would have kept.
However, this delicate question would have to be negotiated with the captain.
But how would he receive our demands for freedom?
At the very outset and in no uncertain terms, hadn't he declared that the secret of his life required that we be permanently imprisoned on board the Nautilus?
Wouldn't he see my four–month silence as a tacit acceptance of this situation?
Would my returning to this subject arouse suspicions that could jeopardize our escape plans, if we had promising circumstances for trying again later on?
I weighed all these considerations, turned them over in my mind, submitted them to Conseil, but he was as baffled as I was.
In short, although I'm not easily discouraged, I realized that my chances of ever seeing my fellow men again were shrinking by the day, especially at a time when Captain Nemo was recklessly racing toward the south Atlantic!
During those nineteen days just mentioned, no unique incidents distinguished our voyage.
I saw little of the captain.
He was at work.
In the library I often found books he had left open, especially books on natural history.
He had thumbed through my work on the great ocean depths, and the margins were covered with his notes, which sometimes contradicted my theories and formulations.
But the captain remained content with this method of refining my work, and he rarely discussed it with me.
Sometimes I heard melancholy sounds reverberating from the organ, which he played very expressively, but only at night in the midst of the most secretive darkness, while the Nautilus slumbered in the wilderness of the ocean.
During this part of our voyage, we navigated on the surface of the waves for entire days.
The sea was nearly deserted.
A few sailing ships, laden for the East Indies, were heading toward the Cape of Good Hope.
One day we were chased by the longboats of a whaling vessel, which undoubtedly viewed us as some enormous baleen whale of great value.
But Captain Nemo didn't want these gallant gentlemen wasting their time and energy, so he ended the hunt by diving beneath the waters.
This incident seemed to fascinate Ned Land intensely.
I'm sure the Canadian was sorry that these fishermen couldn't harpoon our sheet–iron cetacean and mortally wound it.
During this period the fish Conseil and I observed differed little from those we had already studied in other latitudes.
Chief among them were specimens of that dreadful cartilaginous genus that's divided into three subgenera numbering at least thirty–two species: striped sharks five meters long, the head squat and wider than the body, the caudal fin curved, the back with seven big, black, parallel lines running lengthwise; then perlon sharks, ash gray, pierced with seven gill openings, furnished with a single dorsal fin placed almost exactly in the middle of the body.
Some big dogfish also passed by, a voracious species of shark if there ever was one.
With some justice, fishermen's yarns aren't to be trusted, but here's what a few of them relate.
Inside the corpse of one of these animals there were found a buffalo head and a whole calf; in another, two tuna and a sailor in uniform; in yet another, a soldier with his saber; in another, finally, a horse with its rider.
In candor, none of these sounds like divinely inspired truth.
But the fact remains that not a single dogfish let itself get caught in the Nautilus's nets, so I can't vouch for their voracity.
Schools of elegant, playful dolphin swam alongside for entire days.