And what a way to die!
Smashed, strangled, crushed by the fearsome arms of a devilfish, ground between its iron mandibles, this friend would never rest with his companions in the placid waters of their coral cemetery!
As for me, what had harrowed my heart in the thick of this struggle was the despairing yell given by this unfortunate man.
Forgetting his regulation language, this poor Frenchman had reverted to speaking his own mother tongue to fling out one supreme plea!
Among the Nautilus's crew, allied body and soul with Captain Nemo and likewise fleeing from human contact, I had found a fellow countryman!
Was he the only representative of France in this mysterious alliance, obviously made up of individuals from different nationalities?
This was just one more of those insoluble problems that kept welling up in my mind!
Captain Nemo reentered his stateroom, and I saw no more of him for a good while.
But how sad, despairing, and irresolute he must have felt, to judge from this ship whose soul he was, which reflected his every mood!
The Nautilus no longer kept to a fixed heading.
It drifted back and forth, riding with the waves like a corpse.
Its propeller had been disentangled but was barely put to use.
It was navigating at random.
It couldn't tear itself away from the setting of this last struggle, from this sea that had devoured one of its own!
Ten days went by in this way.
It was only on May 1 that the Nautilus openly resumed its northbound course, after raising the Bahamas at the mouth of Old Bahama Channel.
We then went with the current of the sea's greatest river, which has its own banks, fish, and temperature.
I mean the Gulf Stream.
It is indeed a river that runs independently through the middle of the Atlantic, its waters never mixing with the ocean's waters.
It's a salty river, saltier than the sea surrounding it.
Its average depth is 3,000 feet, its average width sixty miles.
In certain localities its current moves at a speed of four kilometers per hour.
The unchanging volume of its waters is greater than that of all the world's rivers combined.
As discovered by Commander Maury, the true source of the Gulf Stream, its starting point, if you prefer, is located in the Bay of Biscay.
There its waters, still weak in temperature and color, begin to form.
It goes down south, skirts equatorial Africa, warms its waves in the rays of the Torrid Zone, crosses the Atlantic, reaches Cape Sao Roque on the coast of Brazil, and forks into two branches, one going to the Caribbean Sea for further saturation with heat particles.
Then, entrusted with restoring the balance between hot and cold temperatures and with mixing tropical and northern waters, the Gulf Stream begins to play its stabilizing role.
Attaining a white heat in the Gulf of Mexico, it heads north up the American coast, advances as far as Newfoundland, swerves away under the thrust of a cold current from the Davis Strait, and resumes its ocean course by going along a great circle of the earth on a rhumb line; it then divides into two arms near the 43rd parallel; one, helped by the northeast trade winds, returns to the Bay of Biscay and the Azores; the other washes the shores of Ireland and Norway with lukewarm water, goes beyond Spitzbergen, where its temperature falls to 4° centigrade, and fashions the open sea at the pole.
It was on this oceanic river that the Nautilus was then navigating.
Leaving Old Bahama Channel, which is fourteen leagues wide by 350 meters deep, the Gulf Stream moves at the rate of eight kilometers per hour.
Its speed steadily decreases as it advances northward, and we must pray that this steadiness continues, because, as experts agree, if its speed and direction were to change, the climates of Europe would undergo disturbances whose consequences are incalculable.
Near noon I was on the platform with Conseil.
I shared with him the relevant details on the Gulf Stream.
When my explanation was over, I invited him to dip his hands into its current.
Conseil did so, and he was quite astonished to experience no sensation of either hot or cold.
"That comes," I told him, "from the water temperature of the Gulf Stream, which, as it leaves the Gulf of Mexico, is barely different from your blood temperature.
This Gulf Stream is a huge heat generator that enables the coasts of Europe to be decked in eternal greenery.
And if Commander Maury is correct, were one to harness the full warmth of this current, it would supply enough heat to keep molten a river of iron solder as big as the Amazon or the Missouri."
Just then the Gulf Stream's speed was 2.25 meters per second.
So distinct is its current from the surrounding sea, its confined waters stand out against the ocean and operate on a different level from the colder waters.
Murky as well, and very rich in saline material, their pure indigo contrasts with the green waves surrounding them.
Moreover, their line of demarcation is so clear that abreast of the Carolinas, the Nautilus's spur cut the waves of the Gulf Stream while its propeller was still churning those belonging to the ocean.
This current swept along with it a whole host of moving creatures.
Argonauts, so common in the Mediterranean, voyaged here in schools of large numbers.
Among cartilaginous fish, the most remarkable were rays whose ultra slender tails made up nearly a third of the body, which was shaped like a huge diamond twenty–five feet long; then little one–meter sharks, the head large, the snout short and rounded, the teeth sharp and arranged in several rows, the body seemingly covered with scales.
Among bony fish, I noted grizzled wrasse unique to these seas, deep–water gilthead whose iris has a fiery gleam, one–meter croakers whose large mouths bristle with small teeth and which let out thin cries, black rudderfish like those I've already discussed, blue dorados accented with gold and silver, rainbow–hued parrotfish that can rival the loveliest tropical birds in coloring, banded blennies with triangular heads, bluish flounder without scales, toadfish covered with a crosswise yellow band in the shape of a ?, swarms of little freckled gobies stippled with brown spots, lungfish with silver heads and yellow tails, various specimens of salmon, mullet with slim figures and a softly glowing radiance that Lacepede dedicated to the memory of his wife, and finally the American cavalla, a handsome fish decorated by every honorary order, bedizened with their every ribbon, frequenting the shores of this great nation where ribbons and orders are held in such low esteem.
I might add that during the night, the Gulf Stream's phosphorescent waters rivaled the electric glow of our beacon, especially in the stormy weather that frequently threatened us.
On May 8, while abreast of North Carolina, we were across from Cape Hatteras once more.
There the Gulf Stream is seventy–five miles wide and 210 meters deep.
The Nautilus continued to wander at random.