A POWERFUL OCEAN CURRENT.

Kumara Times, Issue 1576, 15 October 1881, Page 2

A POWERFUL OCEAN CURRENT.

The loss of the fine steamer the Teuton off Cape Agulhas, on the night of the 31st August, with (so far as accounts have yet reached us) a loss of 215 lives is an event unparalleled in South African waters since the fate of the Birkenhead on the 26th February, 1852, when 454 lives were lost. There seems to be no doubt from the particulars to hand that the Teuton was hugging the land too closely, and that, too, in one of the most rapid and powerful currents known south of the line.

The Liverpool Journal of Commerce remarks :—An observation made recently by a vessel passing round the Cape of Good Hope is of great interest* as elucidating the “ Gulf Stream” of the Southern Hemisphere. This vessel the Lorenzo, Captain Henderson—which arrived at Boston on the 2nd June, reports that on April 2, while east of the Cape of Good Hope, she encountered a hurricane from the northwest, and for 58- hours, 10 of which she was under bare poles, she was drifted by the Agulhas stream as ranch as 80 miles to the westward, in a direction contrary to the gale. The Agulhas stream has long been known as the most powerful ocean current south of the equator, and this observation attests its might and majestic flow. Nautical writers have recorded a storm which forced back our own gulf stream and caused it to inundate the Florida Keys ; but in the instance of the hurricane off the Cape of Good Hope, the Agulhas stream was more than a match for a gale t dowing over 80 miles an hour. A similar instance of a ship bein<* carried by the Japan stream a distance of 90 miles in about three days* in the teeth of a north-east gale, has been well authenticated, and while the last reported case is a more remarkable manifestation of the power of an ocean current, it is probably not exa gg eva t e d. From its great volume and velocity as a warm current, bear* ing the enormous heat stores of the equatorial Indian Ocean into the An* tarctic basin, the Agulhas stream, as Captain Bent suggested in 1872, “ would probably affbrd the best avenue toward the South Pole." If the Italian Antarctic expedition announced for this year succeeds in getting off, this suggestion may prove profitable, as, by following the drift of the Agulhas stream into the south polar area, the advance can probably be longer maintained in open water, and a higher southern latitude attained than on any other course.