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Updated: June 24, 2025
Thomas Island, Nicobar Islands, Cocos Island, Socotra Island, Loyalty Islands, and the Chagos Archipelago. The following pioneers have been inscribed on the Roll of Honor since my last sixth periodic announcement: Elizabeth Stamp, St. Helena; Mr. and Mrs.
At the same time the great continent whose position between the tropics has been alluded to, and whose previous existence is still indicated by the Coral islands, the Laccadives, the Maldives, and the Chagos group, underwent simultaneous depression by a counteracting movement.
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.
Nor do I attach any importance to the fact of certain submerged reefs, as those off Tahiti, or those within Diego Garcia not now being nearer the surface than they were many years ago, as an indication of the rate under favourable circumstances of the UPWARD growth of reefs; after it has been shown, that all the reefs have grown to the surface in some of the Chagos atolls, but that in neighbouring atolls which appear to be of equal antiquity and to be exposed to the same external conditions, every reef remains submerged; for we are almost driven to attribute this to a difference, not in the rate of growth, but in the habits of the corals in the two cases.
A vertical section, on the same scale, in an eastern and western line across the Great Chagos Bank, given for the sake of exhibiting more clearly its structure.
A perfect series such as we have here traced, impresses the mind with an idea of actual change; and it will hereafter be seen, that the theory of subsidence, with the upward growth of the coral, modified by accidents of probable occurrence, will account for the occasional disseverment of large atolls. The Great Chagos bank alone remains to be described.
In the northern part, also, of the Maldiva Archipelago and in the Chagos group, it is known that some of the islets are disappearing. The natives attribute these effects to variations in the currents of the sea. For my own part I cannot avoid suspecting that there must be some further cause, which gives rise to such a cycle of change in the action of the currents of the great and open ocean.
I observed, also, that the channels or breaches through the rim, were all of the same depth as the central lagoon-like space into which they lead; whereas the channels into the other atolls of the Chagos group, and as I believe into most other large atolls, are not nearly as deep as their lagoons: for instance at Peros Banhos, the channels are only of the same depth, namely between ten and twenty fathoms, as the bottom of the lagoon for a space about a mile and a half in width round its shores, whilst the central expanse of the lagoon is from thirty-five to forty fathoms deep.
Of the hundred and thirty-one territories listed in the Ten-Year Plan, only Spitzbergen, Nicobar Islands and the Chagos Archipelago, as well as eleven territories, which are either incorporated in the Soviet Union or are included within its orbit, remain to be opened by the band of intrepid warriors intent upon enlarging the limits, and spreading far and wide the fame, of the Faith of Bahá’u’lláh.
By these means, I have scarcely any doubt that the Great Chagos Bank has originated, a structure which at first appeared to me far more anomalous than any I had met with.
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