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Updated: June 10, 2025
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."
There are streets of good Spanish houses in Vera Cruz, built of white coral-rock from the reefs near the shore, but they are mildewed and dismal-looking. Outside the walls is the Alameda; and close by is a line of houses, uninhabited, mouldy, and in ruins. We asked who built them. "Los Españoles," they said.
The River Jacatra runs through the city, and it is intersected likewise in all directions by canals. It has also a moat running round it, as likewise a wall of coral-rock. Its defences consist of twenty bastions, and a castle near the sea, with a mud-bank in front of it. It is, indeed, completely a Dutch city.
Vavao, also, at the opposite or northern end of the group, consists, according to the Rev. J. Williams, of coral-rock. Tongatabou, with its northern extensive reefs, resembles either an upraised atoll with one half originally imperfect, or one unequally elevated; and Anamouka, an atoll equally elevated. In the NAVIGATOR ARCHIPELAGO, Mr.
The banks of the second level, might at first sight be thought analogous to the internal step-like ledge of coral-rock which borders the lagoons of some atolls, but their much greater width, and their being formed of sand, are points of essential difference.
Thus have we traced the history of these great rings of coral-rock, from their first origin through their normal changes, and through the occasional accidents of their existence, to their death and final obliteration. In my volume on "Coral Formations" I have published a map, in which I have coloured all the atolls dark-blue, the barrier-reefs pale-blue, and the fringing reefs red.
Built it was, on its sea-front, like any island fortress, with walled coral-rock to oppose the sea and chance marauders from the sea, and with launching ways through the walls for the long canoes. To the rear, where it encroached on the jungle, it was like any scattered bush village.
They walled the confines of their coral reefs and sand-banks with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark nights. Fine masonry, without mortar or cutting chisel, they builded to withstand the ocean surge. Likewise stolen from the mainland, as mice steal from human habitations when humans sleep, they stole canoe-loads, and millions of canoe-loads, of fat, rich soil.
Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth. "Why, I've pulled out a squid with tentacles eight feet long, and done it under fifty feet of water. I could stay down four minutes. I've gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear a fouled anchor.
I cannot refrain from once again remarking on the singularity of these complex structures a great sandy and generally concave disk rises abruptly from the unfathomable ocean, with its central expanse studded and its edge symmetrically bordered with oval basins of coral-rock just lipping the surface of the sea, sometimes clothed with vegetation, and each containing a lake of clear water!
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