Matthew Fontaine Maury, Lieutenant, U.S.N.

“ Patches of the weed are always to be seen floating along the Gulf Stream. Now, 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 centre 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 centre of the whirl. ”

“ Moreover, while the Gulf Stream is running to the north from its supposed elevated level at the south, there is a cold current coming down from the north; meeting the warm waters of the Gulf midway the ocean, it divides itself, and runs by the side of them right back into those very reservoirs at the south, to which theory gives an elevation sufficient to send out entirely across the Atlantic a jet of warm water said to be more than three thousand times greater in volume than the Mississippi River. ”

“ This current from Baffin’s Bay has not only no trade-winds to give it a head, but the prevailing winds are unfavorable to it, and for a great part of the way it is below the surface, and far beyond the propelling of any wind. And there is every reason to believe that this polar current is quite equal in volume to the Gulf Stream. Are they not the effects of like causes? If so, what have the trade winds to do with the one more than the other?
12. It is a custom often practiced by seafaring people to throw a bottle overboard, with a paper, stating the time and place at which it is done. ”

“ As far as they go, the pressure of the trade-winds may assist to give the Gulf Stream its initial velocity, but is it of itself adequate to such an effect? To my mind, the laws of Hydrostatics, as at present expounded, appear by no means to warrant the conclusion that it is, unless the aid of other agents also be brought to bear. ”

“ One part of it under-runs the Gulf Stream, as is shown by the icebergs which are carried in a direction tending across its course. The probability is, that this “fork” continues on toward the south, and runs into the Caribbean Sea, for the temperature of the water at a little depth there has been found far below the mean temperature of the earth, and quite as cold as at a corresponding depth off the Arctic shores of Spitzbergen.
15. More water can not run from the equator or the pole than to it. If we make the trade-winds cause the former, some other wind must produce the latter ”

“ In the absence of other information as to currents, that afforded by these mute little navigators is of great value. They leave no tracks behind them, it is true, and their routes can not be ascertained. ”

“ In the absence of positive information on the subject, the circumstantial evidence that the latter performed the tour of the Gulf is all but conclusive. Another bottle, thrown over off Cape Horn by an American master in 1837, has been recently picked up on the coast of Ireland. ”