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Updated: June 7, 2025
Numerous soundings were carefully taken by Captain Fitz Roy on the steep outside of Keeling atoll, and it was found that within ten fathoms the prepared tallow at the bottom of the lead invariably came up marked with the impressions of living corals, but as perfectly clean as if it had been dropped on a carpet of turf; as the depth increased, the impressions became less numerous, but the adhering particles of sand more and more numerous, until at last it was evident that the bottom consisted of a smooth sandy layer; to carry on the analogy of the turf, the blades of grass grew thinner and thinner, till at last the soil was so sterile that nothing sprang from it.
The sun came out, increasing the sultriness of the day, while the dead calm still held. The seas continued to increase in magnitude. "What makes that sea is what gets me," Raoul muttered petulantly. "There is no wind, yet look at it, look at that fellow there!" Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its impact shook the frail atoll like an earthquake.
And so with time enough before me to admit of a run ashore on the islands en route, I shaped the course now for Keeling Cocos, atoll islands, distant twenty-seven hundred miles. Taking a departure from Booby Island, which the sloop passed early in the day, I decided to sight Timor on the way, an island of high mountains.
One might be coming to an oasis in the boundless Sahara. Breakers dash against the outer side of the ring, but the lagoon within is smooth as a mirror in the lea of the corals and palms. Four thousand natives of Polynesian race live on the holms of the "Island Cloud," a couple of hundred on each atoll.
The great atoll of Makin, no higher than a man, no wider than a couple of furlongs, but in circumference a sinuous giant of ninety miles or more, lay like a snake on the boisterous waters of the equator and defied the sea and storm. Within the lagoon, and not far off the settlement, two ships rocked at anchor.
All the loose blocks of coral on Keeling atoll were burrowed by vermiform animals; and as every cavity, no doubt, ultimately becomes filled with spathose limestone, slabs of the rock taken from a considerable depth, would, if polished, probably exhibit the excavations of such burrowing animals.
In most lagoons the depth is considerably greater in the centre than in the channels; but in Tilla-dou-Matte, where the marginal ring-formed reefs stand far apart, the same depth is carried across the entire atoll, from the deep-water line on one side to that on the other.
Hence these islands ought probably to come within the class of fringed islands and be coloured red; but as I am determined to err on the cautious side, I have left them uncoloured. PALMERSTON Island is minutely described as an atoll by Captain Cook during his voyage in 1774; coloured blue.
A coral atoll, with a crystal lagoon in the middle for our ships, and a fringe of palms along the margin coco-palms, you remember; and the lagoon was green, sometimes, and sometimes blue; and the sharks never came over the bar, but the porpoises came in and played for us, and made fireworks in the phosphorescent waves...."
If we compare the external margin of the reef at Keeling atoll with that on the leeward side of Mauritius, which are very differently circumstanced, we shall find a corresponding difference in the appearance of the corals. At the latter place, the genus Madrepora is preponderant over every other kind, and beneath the zone of massive corals there are large beds of Seriatopora.
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