In deep water, far from the land, the number of living creatures is
extremely small: south of the latitude 35 degs., I never succeeded in
catching anything besides some beroe, and a few species of minute
entomostracous crustacea. In shoaler water, at the distance of a few
miles from the coast, very many kinds of crustacea and some other
animals are numerous, but only during the night. Between latitudes 56
and 57 degs. south of Cape Horn, the net was put astern several times;
it never, however, brought up anything besides a few of two extremely
minute species of Entomostraca. Yet whales and seals, petrels and
albatross, are exceedingly abundant throughout this part of the ocean.
It has always been a mystery to me on what the albatross, which lives
far from the shore, can subsist; I presume that, like the condor, it is
able to fast long; and that one good feast on the carcass of a putrid
whale lasts for a long time. The central and intertropical parts of
the Atlantic swarm with Pteropoda, Crustacea, and Radiata, and with
their devourers the flying-fish, and again with their devourers the
bonitos and albicores; I presume that the numerous lower pelagic
animals feed on the Infusoria, which are now known, from the researches
of Ehrenberg, to abound in the open ocean: but on what, in the clear
blue water, do these Infusoria subsist?
While sailing a little south of the Plata on one very dark night, the
sea presented a wonderful and most beautiful spectacle. There was a
fresh breeze, and every part of the surface, which during the day is
seen as foam, now glowed with a pale light. The vessel drove before
her bows two billows of liquid phosphorus, and in her wake she was
followed by a milky train. As far as the eye reached, the crest of
every wave was bright, and the sky above the horizon, from the
reflected glare of these livid flames, was not so utterly obscure as
over the vault of the heavens.
As we proceed further southward the sea is seldom phosphorescent; and
off Cape Horn I do not recollect more than once having seen it so, and
then it was far from being brilliant. This circumstance probably has a
close connection with the scarcity of organic beings in that part of
the ocean. After the elaborate paper, [8] by Ehrenberg, on the
phosphorescence of the sea, it is almost superfluous on my part to make
any observations on the subject. I may however add, that the same torn
and irregular particles of gelatinous matter, described by Ehrenberg,
seem in the southern as well as in the northern hemisphere, to be the
153