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The several islands lying N.W. of Tongatabou, namely ANAMOUKA, KOMANGO, KOTOU, LEFOUGA, FOA, etc., are seen in Captain Cook's chart to be fringed by reefs, in several of them are connected together.
The same conclusion may be extended, though with somewhat less certainty, to the islands of the FRIENDLY GROUP, which have been well described in the second and third voyages of Cook. The surface of Tongatabou is low and level, but with some parts a hundred feet high; the whole consists of coral-rock, "which yet shows the cavities and irregularities worn into it by the action of the tides."
Judging from the chart in Freycinet's "Atlas," I should have supposed that it had been regularly fringed; but as nothing is said in the "Hydrog. TONGATABOU: In the "Atlas of the Voyage of the 'Astrolabe'," the whole south side of the island is represented as narrowly fringed by the same reef which forms an extensive platform on the northern side.
Vavao, also, at the opposite or northern end of the group, consists, according to the Rev. J. Williams, of coral-rock. Tongatabou, with its northern extensive reefs, resembles either an upraised atoll with one half originally imperfect, or one unequally elevated; and Anamouka, an atoll equally elevated. In the NAVIGATOR ARCHIPELAGO, Mr.
He had scarcely readied the island of Tongatabou when the vessel struck upon the rocks that surround this island; he saved himself by swimming to the shore, having lost everything. From thence he went to the Marianne islands, where grief and bad food caused him to fall ill; he returned to Manilla, labouring under dysentry.
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