September 17, 1492. The crew was restive, their 94-foot caravel Niña becalmed in strange waters. Christopher Columbus, perhaps the first person to describe this place, wrote in his log that the sailors "saw much weed and very often, and it was vegetation from rocks and it came from a westerly direction; they judged themselves to be near land." But the crew's soundings touched no bottom; they were far from shore. We now know the weed as sargassum. It lives nearly all its life in the Sargasso Sea.
A week later the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria were still drifting aimlessly. Columbus wrote: "Since the sea had been calm and smooth the men complained, saying that since in that region there were no rough seas, it would never blow for a return to Spain. But later the sea rose high and without wind, which astonished them. . . . "
Sunlight pours down through golden fronds of sargassum, the brown algae that gives the Sargasso Sea its name. "It's a mysterious weed," says Fred Lipshultz, senior scientist at the Bermuda Biological Station for Research.
These were seasoned sailors, not easily astonished, trying to get used to a sea unlike any other—clear and calm, with an eerie beauty, but empty and dead. Fishing produced little to eat; the only life seemed to be sea turtles, an occasional whale, and the Sargasso weed itself. They began to see it as nothing more than a desert. In fact, this sea generates little life beyond single-celled diatoms and tiny dinoflagellates. Its water is less than a third as fertile as coastal seawater. Heart-stoppingly blue and a half-mile deep, the 2-million-square-mile body of gin-clear water floats in the middle of a colder, deeper North Atlantic ocean. Across the surface pass great mats of golden sargassum—from a Portuguese word for little grapes, referring to the tiny, air-filled balloons that keep the weed, a form of brown algae, afloat.
For centuries the Sargasso's mysteries have obsessed mythmakers and scientists alike. Its remoteness, its unearthly blue, its slow-moving air and water, and its often thick beds of seaweed gave rise to legends: a place where the weed itself snares ships in its barnacle-encrusted tentacles, holding fast until nothing remains but a rotting hulk with a skeleton crew. Turn-of-the-century paintings depicted steam-driven freighters, ancient Roman triremes, Spanish galleons, and clipper ships trapped in the sea, all draped and shrouded in Sargasso weed. It is only in the past few decades that this strange body of water has yielded its mythology to actual research.
