Grove Koger

When we talk about “the sea,” we usually mean the world’s oceans in general. When, on the other hand, we’re talking about “a sea,” we usually mean a smaller body of salt water, largely or partly (or sometimes wholly) bounded by land.

The one exception to these very general definitions is the Sargasso Sea, which you’ve probably heard of but just as probably not given a lot of thought to. The first unusual fact about the Sargasso (seen above in an 1891 map) is that it’s the only sea without a coast. It lies entirely in the North Atlantic Ocean and seems to be the product of what’s known as the “north Atlantic subtropical gyre,” a series of endlessly rotating currents. Clockwise from the west, those are the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic Current, the Canary Current, and the North Atlantic Equatorial Current.

The Sargasso’s name is derived from the strands of Sargassum seaweed—a large genus of what are known as holopelagic (freely floating) golden drift algae—that clump in long drifts or mats on its surface. Their buoyancy is due to little berry-like air-filled bladders known as pneumatocysts. In all, the genus Sargassum is made up of more than 300 species found worldwide, but the two found in the Sargasso are S. natans and S. fluitans. However, the algae are only the most obvious feature of the Sargasso. Nearly 150 species of invertebrates make their home on them, and some 80 species of fish are associated with the sea’s waters.

Those species of fish include European, American, and North African eels that breed and grow up in the Sargasso and eventually migrate to the fresh waters of one of the continents. There they mature over a period of several years, only to return eventually to the Sargasso, where they breed—and die. As migrations go, this one strikes me as particularly curious, and while scientists have only recently confirmed the details of the eels’ life cycle, the origin of this complex, multi-year pattern remains a mystery.

I wrote an entry for the Sargasso Sea in the 2018 ABC-CLIO volume The World’s Oceans: Geography, History and Environment, and concluded it with a note about the sea’s appearance in fiction. That’s an intriguing subject in itself, and I’ll write about it another day. Until then, I’ll explain my personal interest in the subject. My first wife and I skirted the Sargasso Sea’s northern edge aboard a freighter, aptly named the Hellenic Destiny, on our way to Greece in 1976. Thinking that we were pretty clever, we fashioned a hook out of a wire coat hanger and attached it to a length of fishing line we begged from a crew member. As we passed through a drift of the algae, we lowered the hook down the side of the ship and managed to pull up a strand that turned out to be a couple of feet long. To our surprise, it was crawling with tiny crabs and shrimp and the like, creatures that I’m sure were likewise surprised at being removed, however briefly, from their watery world.

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