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Updated: June 24, 2025
For the sake of uniformity, I have adopted the style used in the charts of the Chagos Archipelago, published by the East Indian Company, from the survey by Captain Moresby and Lieutenant Powell.
The process of formation is nearly the same with that, by which Mahlos Mahdoo had been trisected; but in the Chagos Bank the channels of the oceanic currents entering at several different quarters, have united in a central space.
I make these statements, after having examined the charts of each atoll. In the lagoon of Peros Banhos, which is nearly twenty miles across, there is only one single reef which rises to the surface; in Diego Garcia there are seven, but several of these lie close to the margin of the lagoon, and need scarcely have been reckoned; in the Great Chagos Bank there is not one.
From these facts, and considering the manner in which the beds of clean coral off Mauritius, Keeling Island, the Maldiva and Chagos atolls, graduated into a sandy slope, it appears very probable that the depth, at which reef-building polypifers can exist, is partly determined by the extent of inclined surface, which the currents of the sea and the recoiling waves have the power to keep free from sediment.
I may first observe, that the reefs within the lagoons of atolls and within lagoon-channels, would, if favourably circumstanced, grow upwards during subsidence in the same manner as the annular rim; and, therefore, we might expect that such lagoon-reefs, when not surrounded and buried by an accumulation of sediment more rapid than the rate of subsidence, would rise abruptly from a greater depth than that at which the efficient polypifers can flourish: we see this well exemplified in the small abruptly-sided reefs, with which the deep lagoons of the Chagos and Southern Maldiva atolls are studded.
Chagos as well as Seychelles forms part of the administrative group of the Mauritius. The former with, as Gordon states, an admirable port in San Diego, lies in the direct route to Australia from the Red Sea, and the latter contains an equally good harbour in Port Victoria Mahé.
A little further south, at about the same distance as the southern rim of the Great Chagos Bank is from the northern rim, there are two other small banks with from 10 to 20 fathoms on them; and not far eastward soundings were struck on a sandy bottom, with between 110 and 145 fathoms.
No sooner did the captain of one of them see Alfred, than he held out his hand towards him, exclaiming "I am delighted to meet you again, my dear sir. Why, you are the very person who in so gallant a manner swam off to my ship when she was cast away on the coast of Chagos, and were the means of saving the lives of all on board."
Thomas; all the islands of the Pacific Ocean except Comoro Islands, Cocos Island, Nicobar Islands, Hainan Island, Portuguese Timor, Chagos Archipelago, Loyalty Islands, Marshall Islands, Admiralty Islands, Mariana Islands, are now included within the orbit of an irresistibly unfolding, rapidly consolidating, world-girdling Administrative Order.
Hence this bank closely resembles in structure, and I may add from Captain Moresby's information in composition, the Pitt's Bank in the Chagos group; and the Pitt's Bank, must, after what has been shown of the Great Chagos Bank, be considered as a sunken, half-destroyed atoll; hence coloured blue.
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