United States or Haiti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Between 1830 and 1859 more than 36,000,000 cubic yards of sediment were deposited in the marsh and shoal-water lake of Castiglione alone. See Memoir by Fantoni, in the appendix to Salvagnoli, Rapporto, p. 189.

Paul Vapoor evidently understood the situation, and must have been preparing for it for some time, though the shoal-water had prevented the steamer from taking advantage of his effort. She had suddenly begun to dart ahead as though she had been an object shot from one of her biggest guns; and she seemed almost to leap out of the water in her struggle to come between the Leopard and the Dauphine.

"You see, the mere fact that he was alive at all was proof that he had come triumphantly through many terrible dangers, so it was no wonder he had a good deal of confidence in himself. And his shapely little body was so packed full of energy, so thrilling with vitality, that he felt himself already a sort of lord in those shoal-water domains.

Knowing what he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister had brought with him a twenty-foot Hudson's Bay freight canoe, a capacious shoal-water craft with high topsides. He slid this off the float, loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern, paddled inshore to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsetting current of a river.

After crossing the channel, which runs between the island and the continent, whose waters were deep and rough, we got aground in the Shallows, off Zarzees. Here commences the shoal-water, or bassa-fondo, as our semi-Italian boatmen called it, which continues east along the coast for eighty miles, as far as Rais-el-Makhbes.

On the contrary, a brisk wind was rising sharper from the east, and the waves on the open Pacific were growing each moment higher and loppier. But the huge mountain of water that washed Muriel Ellis overboard was not a regular ordinary wave; it was that far more powerful and dangerous mass, a shoal-water breaker.

This bay was named Port Hunter; its latitude is 4° 7' 30" south, and longitude 152° 42' east; although it is not large, it is convenient and safe at this season; it lies on the north-west part of the island, and you may anchor in any part of it, from twenty-five to fifteen fathoms, but the shoal-water has the worst ground: in twenty fathoms it is soft, with loose patches of coral; the watering place is on the east side, but as the tide flows up to the place from whence the fresh water issues, it is best to fill from half ebb to half flood.

These soon arrived; and on the 8th of the month the enemy's forces, consisting of a frigate, brig, and two schooners, moved up the river to the mouth of the creek. Farther they could not go, owing to shoal-water; but they fitted out a small flotilla of barges, and sent them on up the creek.

Although in other parts of Patagonia I have no direct evidence of shoal-water shells having been buried under a great thickness of superincumbent submarine strata, yet it should be borne in mind that the lower fossiliferous strata with several of the same species of Mollusca, the upper tufaceous beds, and the high summit-plain, stretch for a considerable distance southward, and for hundreds of miles northward; seeing this uniformity of structure, I conceive it may be fairly concluded that the subsidence by which the shells at Santa Cruz and S. Julian were carried down and covered up, was not confined to these two points, but was co-extensive with a considerable portion of the Patagonian tertiary formation.

But although the animals of the early geological deposits indicate shallow seas by their similarity to our shoal-water animals, it must not be supposed that they are by any means the same.