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Updated: June 10, 2025
Indeed, most of them seem to consist of a volcanic nucleus, on which lie great coral banks, often 200 m. high; these usually drop in five steep steps to the sea, and then merge into the living coral-reef in the water. Most of the islands, therefore, appear as typical table-islands, out of which, in the largest ones, rise the rounded tops of the volcanic stones.
The men accepted his decision as a reasonable one; they were all well-disposed and tractable on the whole. Percival was amazed to find them so easy to manage. But they were more depressed that morning at the thought of their lost comrades, their wrecked ship, and the prospect of passing an indefinite time upon the coral-reef, than they had been on the previous day.
Then all at once, in the midst of the hot stillness of that tropic land, with the blue sea lying calm beyond, the sparkling creamy foam where the ocean pulsated on the coral-reef, there came a hideous screech and the swift beat of wings.
And ere you have done wondering, you hear that all three are congeners of the ugly, shapeless, white "dead man's hand," which you may pick up after a storm on any shore. You have a beautiful madrepore or brain-stone on your mantel-piece, brought home from some Pacific coral-reef.
The others were not dead yet, so he had a right to his life, if he could keep it; and toward that end he strained, swimming as he had never swum before, diving, darting this way and that, feeling rather than seeing which spot to avoid, which to strive for. At last his foot touched rock. He had reached that part of the jagged coral-reef which rose out of the sea.
The engine seemed to be in a great state of commotion; and the vessel began to writhe with a heavy, laborious movement, as if attempting to free herself from the grasp of some monster. We dressed hastily, and went into the cabin, where we found a good many of the passengers, and learned that the vessel had struck on a coral-reef.
It may be impossible in your eyes: but remember always that nothing is impossible with God. But you said that the coal was made from plants and trees, and did plants and trees grow on this coral-reef? That I cannot say. Trees may have grown on the dry parts of the reef, as cocoa-nuts grow now in the Pacific.
The air was perfectly calm, yet the gentle swell of the ocean terminated in great waves, which came rolling in like walls of glass, and fell on the coral-reef like rushing snow-wreaths with a roar as loud as thunder. Thousands of sea-birds screamed and circled in the sky.
It is one great sheet of old coral-reef and coral-mud, which is now called the carboniferous limestone. You see red and purple patches rising out of it, like islands and islands I suppose they were, of hard and ancient rock, standing up in the middle of the coral sea.
The misleading comparison of coral-rock with the combs of bees and the nests of wasps is perhaps responsible for much of this misunderstanding; one writer has indeed described a coral-reef as being "built by fishes by means of their teeth."
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