Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
came swamped with sea-water. A few million years earlier still, Cuba was united to the Yucatan Penin-
sula and the North American mainland, and Puerto Rico to a dry and continuous Lesser Antillean moun-
tain range that was a projection of Venezuela and the Guianas. But Puerto Rico was not only a terminal
point, but a road fork, for the single line of the Lesser Antilles branches here—westwards through Haiti
and Cuba to Mexico, and north-westwards over the high plateau, now sub-merged and studded by the
coral reefs of the Bahamas, to join the Florida peninsula. The surface of the earth must have tilted, for
at this remote epoch the wasp-waist of the mainland leading down to Panama was exactly what the An-
tilles are today: a series of islands. It was not over the isthmus of Panama, but through the sunny foothills
of the Antillean Andes, now split up into a loop of archipelagoes, that the obsolete fauna of those times
trotted from continent to continent: a traffic that is proved by the discovery in Guadeloupe of the bones
of a megatherium. It is at Puerto Rico, too, that the smallest distance separates the greatest depth of the
Caribbean and the Atlantic. We could see the great dark masses of water closing in on the pale coastal
shallows. The Caribbean chain sinks, just to the north of the island, to a bottom nearly eight and a half
kilometres deep; the greatest depth, in 1891, that had been discovered in the Atlantic Ocean. The height
of the mountains of Cuba from their visible summits to their roots on the floor of the Caribbean overtops
the snowy crest of Kanchenjunga.
But the valleys that separate the peaks of the Lesser Antillean chain nowhere sink deeper than a few
hundred yards except round Martinique and Sombrero: a high sea-wall shelving down to the deep sound-
ings of the Caribbean and the Atlantic. If the island sea is to be compared to the Mediterranean, these oc-
cidental Pillars of Hercules are multiplied into a colonnade through the many pillars of which the Atlantic
everlastingly propels its trillions of tons of water. For the great equatorial currents of the Atlantic, sweep-
ing from east to west, strike the Brazilian coasts and turn north-westwards, pouring through the open
gateways of the Antilles into the Caribbean cauldron; travelling, at a leisurely walking pace—eighteen to
thirty-three kilometres a day—and only breaking into a run through the tortuous funnel that lies between
Trinidad and Venezuela. In the centre of the Caribbean they slow down or, striking other currents, revolve
in maelstroms. But still travelling westwards, slowly over the submerged hurdles in the west and grow-
ing, on their long, sluggish journey, every second warmer and saltier, they move at a rush through the
exiguous rapids between Yucatan and Cuba into the smooth amphitheatre of the Gulf of Mexico. There
they slowly gyrate in three-quarters of a circle. At a point two-thirds of the way round, their smooth sur-
face is smeared, as though with a long dyed lock of hair, by the turbid waters that the Mississippi has
drained from half of the United States. It curls southwards and plaits itself into the current as it hastens
its speed through the defile of the Florida channel.
The waters are sucked foaming through these narrows, shooting northward then to rejoin the huge
volume of warm water which, ferrying northwards its meadows of Sargasso weed, had shunned the door-
ways of the Lesser Antilles and taken a short cut by following the edge of the coral plateau of the Ba-
hamas. There the united currents turn eastwards across the Atlantic in a long tropical flux, streaming and
expanding round the British Isles and carrying the warmth of the Caribbees as far as Spitzbergen and
Nova Zembla and the Arctic Circle. Its itinerary, ending in this long stroke of the pen, evolves like a sen-
tence of Arabic script; delicately unwinding among the islands and curving and repeating itself, and then
trailing airily away.
At a different angle across this great map the Trade Winds eternally blow. Running straight as a
railway-line from western Europe to the Caribbean, they flatten into a westerly course against the coasts
of the Spanish Main, and then, rebounding from the South American Sierras, fan the coast of Jamaica
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