SARGASSO SEA AS ATLANTIS 29 Aristotle, as cited by Nansen, tells us in his "Meteorologica" that the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules was muddy and shal- low and little stirred by the winds. 24 In early life Aristotle was a pupil of Plato, and, though he afterward developed a widely different method and outlook, it is likely that their information as to this matter was in common, being supplied perhaps by Phoe- nician and other seamen. In the passage quoted from Scylax and the first excerpt from Avienus the courses referred to are apparently too near the main- land shore to approach that prodigious accumulation of eddy- borne weeds in dead water which has long given to a great space of mid-Atlantic the name of the Sargasso Sea. But they show that huge seaweeds were very early associated with obstruction to navigation in seafaring minds and popular fancy. Perhaps they may also have suggested shallows as affording beds of nourish- ment for so enormous an output of vegetation. It would not readily occur to the early seagoing observers that the greatest of these entangling creations floated in masses quite free, though we now know this to be the case. In any event, it is evident that some imperfect knowledge of conditions far west of the Pillars of Hercules had made its way to Greece. Somewhere in that ocean of obscurity and mystery there was a vast dead and stagnant sea, presumably shallow, a sea to be shunned. Gigantic entrap- ping weeds and wallowing sea monsters freely distributed were recognized, too, as among the standing terrors of the Atlantic. THE SARGASSO SEA As THE ANCIENT ATLANTIS It would be idle and wearying to follow such utterances through the rather numerous centuries that have elapsed since those early times. When the Magrurin or deluded explorers of Lisbon, at some undefined time between the early eighth century and the middle of the twelfth attempted, according to Edrisi, to cross the great westward Sea of Darkness they encountered an impassable tract of ocean and had to change their course, apparently reach-
- Nansen, In Northern Mists, p. 41.
