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Updated: May 7, 2025
In the chapter on Keeling atoll, I attempted to show by direct evidence, that the island underwent a movement of subsidence, during the earthquakes lately felt there.
And in this same archipelago, Mahlos-Mahdoo atoll is divided by a bifurcating channel from 100 to 132 fathoms in depth, in such a manner that it is scarcely possible to say whether it ought strictly to be called three separate atolls, or one great atoll not yet finally divided.
In cases like that of Hogoleu and the Gambier Islands, where a few small peaks rise out of a great lagoon, the conditions scarcely differ from those of an atoll, and I have already shown, at some length, that the filling up of a true lagoon must be an extremely slow process.
And if you turn to Mr. Darwin's great work upon the coral reefs, you will see a very beautiful chart of the world, which he prepared with great pains and labour, showing the distribution on the one hand of the reefs, and on the other of the volcanoes; you will find that in no case does the atoll accompany the volcano, or the volcano burst up among the atolls.
Then, leaving the Carolines behind us, we passed on to the Marshall group, where the atoll which we had already encountered in a somewhat modified form here and there among the Carolines was to be found in its typically perfect development.
This new obsession, bewitching whatever you may choose to term it was not momentary. In defense of my consistency I declare that the thing required two weeks at least for its accomplishment. And in those two weeks other affairs were developing. Of course, I had been told, as has every traveler in the south seas, that there is not an atoll or island left for discovery.
My usual companions were the resident native teacher and two stalwart young natives of the island Tulu'ao and Muli'ao; and I may here indulge in a little vanity when I say that my success as a palu-fisher was regarded as something phenomenal, only one other white man in the group, a trader on the atoll of Funafuti, having ever caught a palu, or, in fact, tried to catch one.
But these are by no means the only sort of coral reefs in the world; on the contrary, there are very large areas, not only of the Indian ocean, but of the Pacific, in which many many thousands of square miles are covered either with a peculiar kind of reef, which is called the "encircling reef," or by a still more curious reef which goes by the name of the "atoll."
He states that he found in almost every atoll which he visited, the shores of the lagoon raised from eighteen to thirty inches above the sea-level, and containing imbedded Tridacnae and corals standing as they grew; some of the corals were dead in their upper parts, but below a certain line they continued to flourish.
After that Thomas sullenly did Triplett's bidding and half-heartedly assisted in the work of getting the Kawa into the atoll. It was an arduous task. For four days we labored, working our vessel close in shore opposite a clearing in the forest, where the outer island was not more than quarter of a mile wide and free from trees.
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