In 1873 Her Majesty’s ship Challenger made soundings in the Atlantic off the north coast of Africa, and in 1874 the German frigate Gazelle made further soundings in the same region.
In 1877 Commander Gorringe, of the U. S. sloop Gettysburg, discovered, about one hundred and fifty miles from the Straits of Gibraltar, an immense bed of pink coral in thirty-two fathoms of water.
“These various series of soundings, when located on a map, indicate the existence of an extended bank of comparatively shallow water, in the midst of which the Canaries and the Madeiras rise to the surface. The location of the newly discovered mountain in the Atlantic lies within the fifteen-thousand-fathom line, and here is probably the stump of the ancient Atlantis.”
- Transcriber’s Notes:
- Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
- Typographical errors were silently corrected.
- Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.