Moving the Waters - Ocean Worlds: The Story of Seas on Earth and Other Planets - page 109

Aeaea seems, alas, to have been a place as lacking in reality as it is
in consonants. But Scylla and Charybdis had more reality, and it is
generally agreed that they were located in the Straits of Messina
between mainland Italy and Sicily (and so not far from the site of a
previous Mediterranean catastrophe that was played out in emphat-
ically pre-Homeric times, as we related in Chapter 4). Charybdis, in
Homer's prose, is a fearsome thing, drawing the sea's waters down
into a vertiginous vortex (at the bottom of which an observer's terri-
fied gaze might see the sea floor, exposed) before dashing them out
again to spray high into the air. Even the mighty Odysseus only lived
through the encounter by clinging to an overhanging fig tree while his
raft was dragged down into Charybdis's maw. Charybdis is the model
for other whirlpools, such as the Norwegian Maelström, the setting
for one of Edgar Allen Poe's early spine-chillers. He wrote of an
encounter with this deadly funnel of spinning water that turned a
bold youthful sailor, overnight, into a white-haired, unhinged wreck
of a human. The Maelström, too, vanquished Captain Nemo's mighty
submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
Charybdis—and even the Maelström—have been overhyped. Nei-
ther, in reality, are the kind of ship-devouring undersea tornado
described in the fictionalized accounts. Nevertheless, strong currents
do run in those and other places, and these undoubtedly alarmed the
early sailors in their primitive boats. These are concentrations of a
kind of power that many ancient seafarers were well aware of. It is
the power of the tides. 67
Tides seem to be rather contradictory phenomena. On the one
hand, they are so predictable in their operation that today tide tables
can be printed years ahead, to allow seaside holidaymakers to plan
their shoreline walks carefully so as not to be cut off by the rising
waters. On the other hand, the distribution of tides seems entirely
capricious. They are generally a feature of shallow seas around