Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/224

198 399. The "desolate" region.—Between Humboldt's Current and the great equatorial flow, there is an area marked as the "desolate region," Plate IX. It was observed that this part of the ocean was rarely visited by the whale, either sperm or right; why, it did not appear; but observations asserted the fact. Formerly, this part of the ocean was seldom whitened by the sails of a ship, or enlivened by the presence of man. Neither the industrial pursuits of the sea nor the highways of commerce called him into it. Now and then a roving cruiser or an enterprising whale-man passed that way; but to all else it was an unfrequented part of the ocean, and so remained until the gold-fields of Australia and the guano islands of Peru made it a thoroughfare. All vessels bound from Australia to South America now pass through it, and in the journals of some of them it is described as a region almost void of the signs of life in both sea and air. In the South Pacific Ocean especially, where there is such a wide expanse of water, sea-birds often exhibit a companionship with a vessel, and will follow and keep company with it through storm and calm for weeks together. Even those kinds, as the albatross and Cape pigeon, that delight in the stormy regions of Cape Horn and the inhospitable climates of the Antarctic regions, not unfrequently accompany vessels into the perpetual summer of the tropics. The sea-birds that join the ship as she clears Australia will, it is said, follow her to this region, and then disappear. Even the chirp of the stormy-petrel ceases to be heard here, and the sea itself is said to be singularly barren of life.

400. Polynesian drift.—In the intertropical regions of the Pacific, and among the heated waters of Polynesia, a warm current or drift of immense volume has its genesis. It rather drifts than floats to the south, laving as it goes, the eastern shore of Australia and both shores of New Zealand. These are the waters in which the little corallines delight to build their atolls and their reefs. The intertropical seas of the Pacific afford an immense surface for evaporation. No rivers empty there; the annual fall of rain there, except in the "Equatorial Doldrums," is small, and the evaporation is all that both the north-east and the south-east trade-winds can take up and carry off. I have marked on Plate IX. the direction of the supposed warm-water current which conducts these over-heated and briny waters from the tropics in mid-ocean to the extra-tropical regions where