Note 41 — I.

Admiral Smyth says that the currents in the Faro are so numerous and varied, that it is difficult to ascertain anything precise about them. In settled seasons a central stream runs north and south, at the rate of two to five miles an hour. On each shore there is a refluo, or counter-set, often forming eddies to the central current. When the main current runs to the north it is called Rema montante, or flood; when it runs south, Rema scendente, or ebb; and this has obtained, perhaps, even from the days of Eratosthenes. He considers that the special danger from the Faro currents is insignificant. There are dangerous squalls from the ravines or river-beds on the high Calabrian coast.

He admits some little more of reality in the celebrated vortex of Charybdis, which must have been formidable to the undecked vessels of the ancients; for in the present day small craft are sometimes endangered, and he has seen even a seventy-four whirled round on its surface. The “Galofaro” appears to be an agitated water of from seventy to ninety fathoms in depth, circling in quick eddies, but rather an incessant undulation than a whirlpool, and the cases are only extreme when any vortiginous ripples threaten danger to laden boats. “It is owing probably to the meeting of the harbour and lateral currents with the main one, the latter being forced over in this direction by the opposite point of Pezzo. This agrees in some measure with the relation of Thucydides, who calls it a violent reciprocation of the Tyrrhene and Sicilian seas, and he is the only writer of remote antiquity I remember to have read who has assigned this danger its true situation, and not exaggerated its effects.” (Abridged from Smyth’s Mediterranean, pp. 180-1). Our author seems to mix up the two phenomena in his exaggerated account. The upward and downward current suggest that he had heard the local terms quoted by Admiral Smyth.