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THE KINGS OF THE SEA
way places, so did our ancestors manage to cross the oceans by
using the wind to pass from one current to another when the first
one turned in a direction different from that where they wanted
to go.
The global map of sea currents shows six main ocean currents,
all of circular form, caused by the rotation of the earth. This is
the Coriolis effect, and it is also what makes the water in your
bathtub drain rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and
counterclockwise in the southern.
With the help of the circular currents, it
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was always possible
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to come back home. The chance of a safe return was so
that regular transport Hues probably were strung across the Atlantic
and Pacific oceans.
The great North Atlantic current flows south along the coasts
of Portugal and Mauretania to the Cape Verde Islands, where it
turns westward to the Antilles, northwest between Puerto Rico
and the Bahamas, then north to Newfoundland, across the North
Atlantic and back to Portugal after skirting the shores of Brittany.
This current has a curious feature—it forms at its westernmost
tip a smaller separate current of a circular form that encloses
the Bermuda Triangle, where ships and planes disappear
without trace, and the Sargasso Sea where migrating birds fly in
circles for hours as if searching for an island that is there no
more. This is the only place where the eels come for spawning,
as if there were a river estuary there for them to ascend. The genetic
memories of a distant past are demonstrating here most visibly
the possibility that 12,000 years ago this part of the Atlantic
could have been the sunken continent of Atlantis.
The South Atlantic current starts at the Cape of Good Hope,
flows up along the West African coast as far north as Gabon,
then crosses the Atlantic at its narrowest from east to west till it
reaches Natal in Brazil, and descends in southerly direction to
Buenos Aires, where it turns back east to the Cape of Good
Hope.
Both these currents played very important roles in the past.
After circumnavigating Africa, Hindu and Sumerian sailors used
the South Atlantic current to go to the estuary of the Amazon,
the Antilles, or the Gulf of Mexico, and if the search for traces