Land Ahoy! The Floating Islands of The Sargasso Sea – Intriguing Phenomenon

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Land Ahoy! The Floating Islands of the Sargasso Sea – Intriguing Phenomenon

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The first time Christopher Columbus crossed the uncharted Atlantic, not knowing precisely where he was going nor when he would land, his apprehensive crew was comforted to see a quantity of drifting weeds. To them it was a sign that land was near. The men were vastly relieved when they saw crabs among the weeds, for such creatures were unheard of in mid-ocean.

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Day after day the ships sailed on waters that were unusually warm and deeply blue, often cutting through weeds so thick and matted that it was similar to navigating a meadow. However, it would be weeks before the sailors saw land. In reality, they have thousands of miles from the nearest coast.

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This was man’s first reported contact with the Sargasso Sea, a unique, weed-covered, oval-shaped area in the North Atlantic. It was so named by Portuguese sailors, who thought the weeds looked like the grapes they called salgazo. The phenomenon of a sea covered by weeds was so strange that it soon gave birth to legends of hidden monsters that preyed on ships and of weeds so dangerous that ships passing through them would be dragged to a watery grave many fathoms below.

Delving Into the Deep

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These stories so fascinated William Beebe of the New York Zoological Society that in 1925 he decided to investigate the sea for himself.

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At first he was disappointed. Far from the “golden-yellow undulating meadows” he had expected, he found patches of weeds rarely bigger than a man’s head, an average of one every 100 yards. It did not take him long to realize that this was autumn in the Sargasso Sea; in spring and summer these small floating islands would join together to form the fields that had astounded and puzzled early sailors.