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"I spoke to you concerning Borneo and the necessity for coaling stations in the Eastern seas. Taking Mauritius with its large French population, the Cape with its conflicting elements, and Hongkong, Singapore, and Penang with their vast Chinese populations, who may be with or against us, but who are at any time a nuisance, I would select such places where no temptation would induce colonists to come, and I would use them as maritime fortresses. For instance, the only good coaling place between Suez and Adelaide would be in the Chagos group, which contain a beautiful harbour at San Diego. My object is to secure this for the strengthening of our maritime power. These islands are of great strategical importance vis
The Maldiva atolls and the Great Chagos Bank differ in so many respects, that I shall devote to them, besides occasional references, a third section of this chapter. Keeling atoll may be considered as of moderate dimensions and of regular form.
The Chagos group is less elongated than is usual with other groups, and the individual atolls in it are likewise but little elongated; this is strikingly seen by comparing them with the neighbouring Maldiva atolls. In the Marshall and Maldiva archipelagoes, the atolls are ranged in two parallel lines, like the mountains in a great double mountain-chain.
The submerged reefs in the Chagos atolls generally have from one to seven fathoms water on them, but some have from seven to ten. Why then have not these lagoon-reefs reached the surface, like the innumerable ones in the atolls above named? If we attempt to assign any difference in their external conditions, as the cause of this diversity, we are at once baffled.
The northern portion with its ledge-like margin, closely resembles any one segment of the Great Chagos Bank, between two of the deep-water channels, and the scattered banks, southward appear to be the last wrecks of less perfect portions.
All islands figuring in that Plan, over seventy in number, situated in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans, in the Mediterranean and the North Sea, have, likewise been opened except Nicobar Islands, Chagos Archipelago, Hainan Island, Sakhalin Island, Spitzbergen and Anticosti Island.
The Chagos group appears from some cause, possibly from the subsidence having been too rapid, at present to be much less favourably circumstanced for the growth of reefs than formerly: one atoll has a portion of its marginal reef, nine miles in length, dead and submerged; a second has only a few quite small living points which rise to the surface, a third and fourth are entirely dead and submerged; a fifth is a mere wreck, with its structure almost obliterated.
In the Chagos group there are some ordinary atolls, some annular reefs rising to the surface but without any islets on them, and some atoll-formed banks, either quite submerged, or nearly so. Its longest axis is ninety nautical miles, and another line drawn at right angles to the first, across the broadest part, is seventy.
Thomas, Anticosti, and the Falklands, have been opened. All Indian Ocean islands with the exception of Socotra, the Cocos, Comoro, Mentawei, Nicobar, Chagos Archipelago and Kuria-Muria have been opened.
GREAT CHAGOS BANK, in the Indian Ocean; taken from the survey by Captain Moresby and Lieutenant Powell; the parts which are shaded, with the exception of two or three islets on the western and northern sides, do not rise to the surface, but are submerged from four to ten fathoms; the banks bounded by the dotted lines lie from fifteen to twenty fathoms beneath the surface, and are formed of sand; the central space is of mud, and from thirty to fifty fathoms deep.
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