Transatlantic Climate and Gulf Stream Aesthetics DANIEL WILLIAMS In 1855 the United States naval officer Matthew Fontaine Maury ushered oceanography into popular consciousness, in a lyrical passage early in his The Physical Geography of the Sea: There is a river in the ocean: in the severest droughts it never fails, and in the mightiest floods it never overflows; its banks and its bottom are of cold water, while its current is of warm; the Gulf of Mexico is its fountain, and its mouth is in the Arctic Seas. It is the Gulf Stream. There is in the world no other such majestic flow of waters. Its current is more rapid than the Mississippi or the Amazon, and its volume more than a thousand times greater. Its waters, as far out from the Gulf as the Carolina coasts, are of an indigo blue. They are so distinctly marked that their line of junction with the common sea-water may be traced by the eye. 1 Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 76, No. 1, pp. 57–91, ISSN: 0891–9356, online ISSN: 1067– 8352,  2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/ reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ncl.2021.76.1.57. 1 Matthew Fontaine Maury, The Physical Geography of the Sea, and Its Meteorology, ed. John Leighly (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, [1855] 1963), p. 38. Further quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text. I am grateful to the Vcologies collective (especially Benjamin Morgan, Elizabeth Car- olyn Miller, Nathan K. Hensley, and Siobhan Carroll) for comments on an earlier version of this essay, and to Nicole Williams for conversations about art history. 57