Magnificent Whirlpools and Maelstroms: The Nature’s Own Jacuzzis

Magnificent Whirlpools and Maelstroms: The Nature’s Own Jacuzzis

By Mr Ghaz, February 13, 2011

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Magnificent Whirlpools and Maelstroms: The Nature’s Own Jacuzzis

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Before the word whirlpool became associated with the relaxing bath that Candido Jacuzzi invented, it struck terror into the hearts of many, especially seafarers. In the 19th century, Edgar Allan Poe expressed the awe generated by ocean whirlpools in his description of the famed Maelstrom, off the coast of Norway:

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A smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water… speeding dizzily round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.

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This account by a writer whose trade was to make the flesh creep illustrates how whirlpools conjure up visions of ships being lost forever in a vortex. In olden times, mariners understandably felt vulnerable, since their vessels were small and relatively unstable. Out of their fear grew legends about how whirlpools came into existence.

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One of the first legends to be recorded was that of Charybdis, a whirlpool in the Strait of Messina between the Italian mainland and the island of Sicily. In Homer’s Odyssey, written in the eighth century B.C., Charybdis is represented as a sea monster sucking and belching forth water as it preys on passing ships.