Sargasso-Seaward

They build ships of steel nowadays; some of them approach 1,000 feet in length and 60,000 tons in displacement. But the little steamer Arcturus that slipped out of New York Harbor, last week, is built of wood, is less than 300 feet in length and not 2,500 tons in displacement. Yet she went forth on what promises to be a great voyage.

Dr. William Beebe was in command of the expedition. Spare, tall, sinewy, with strong hands, rugged features, he is the picture of an adventurer. Bui he is also a naturalist. Ornithology is his specialty, although he has invaded other fields, has tramped the jungles of South America and Asia, studied the fauna of the famed little island of Galapagos.

Under his command was a ship's company of 48 persons, including a number of scientists. One of them was Professor C. J. Fish of the University of Pittsburgh, an authority on marine life another, Dr. William R. Gregory of the American Museum of Natural History

The company went forth at the in stance of the Department of Tropical Research of the New York Zoological Society. The Arcturus, equipped for deep-sea fishing, has a drum and seven miles of cable, with trawls to catch fish at various depths. One of the chief objects of this Odyssey is to catch the self-illuminated deep-sea fish, the little monsters of the great depths. Dr. Beebe has expressed hope of capturing a giant squid, one of the great octopi with tentacles many feet in length. Scars which these sucking tentacles have left have been found on whales' sides, remains of less agile octopi in whales' stomachs.

Another object of the expedition is to investigate the Sargasso Sea, a drifting mass of seaweed in mid-Atlantic, about the latitude of Florida and the Canaries and about the longitude of the Newfoundland Banks. It is only gradually being disentangled from the popular legend surrounding it, although Christopher Columbus himself ran afoul of it on his first voyage to America. It has been asserted that the weeds are so thick that they entangle whole ships which never escape.*

As a matter of fact, its area and position are inexactly known, because, no doubt, it varies in extent. It consists of seaweed assembled in that very mild sort of eddy which is developed by the Gulf Stream on the one side and by the Equatorial Current on the other. Similar aggregations of weeds, though smaller in extent, exist under like conditions in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The weeds, however, are not dense. They grow in patches here and there over the area, affording food for marine life.

The expedition plans to spend about six months crossing the Atlantic north of the equator, to make a stop on the shore of Africa; it will probably cross into the Pacific at Panama to make similar studies in Western waters.

*The early cartographers located the sea in different parts of the unknown ocean, populated it with hideous mythological monsters.