“On some of the smaller islets nothing could be more elegant than the manner in which the young and full-grown cocoa-nut trees, without destroying each other’s symmetry, were mingled into one wood. A beach of glittering white sand formed a border to those fairy spots.”
Mrs. Brassey writes enthusiastically of some coral fields in the South Pacific. “It is really impossible to describe the beauty of the scene before us. Submarine coral forests of every colour, studded with sea-flowers, anemones, and echinidæ, of a brilliancy only to be seen in dreamland; shoals of the brightest and swiftest fish darting and flashing in and out; [pg 76]shells, every one of which was fit to hold the place of honour in a conchologist’s collection moving slowly along with their living inmates: this is what we saw when we looked down from the side of the boat into the depths below. The surface of the water glittered with every imaginable tint, from the palest aquamarine to the brightest emerald, from the pure light blue of the turquoise to the deepest dark blue of the sapphire, and was dotted here and there with patches of red, brown, and green coral, rising from the mass below. Before us, on the shore, there spread the rich growth of tropical vegetation, shaded by palms and cocoa-nuts, and enlivened by the presence of native women in red, blue, and green garments, and men in motley costumes, bringing fish, fowls, and bunches of cocoa-nuts, borne, like the grapes brought back from the land of Canaan by the spies, on poles.
“At 5 p.m. we went for a row in the Glance and the Flash to the coral reef, now illumined by the rays of the setting sun. Who can describe these wonderful gardens of the deep, on which we now gazed through ten and twenty fathoms of crystal water! Who can enumerate or describe the strange creatures moving about and darting hither and thither amid the masses of coral forming their submarine home! There were shells of rare shape, brighter than if they had been polished by the hand of the most skilful artist; crabs of all sizes scuttling and sliding along; sea-anemones spreading their delicate feelers in search of prey, and many other kinds of zoophytes crawling slowly over the reef, and scarlet, blue, yellow, gold, violet, spotted, striped, and winged fish, short, long, pointed, and blunt, of the most varied shapes, were darting about like birds among the coral trees.”
Darwin speaks of the grandeur of the outer shore of these lagoon islands. He says:—“There is a simplicity in the barrier-like beach, the margin of green bushes and tall cocoa-nuts, the solid flat of dead coral rock, strewed here and there with great loose fragments, and the line of furious breakers all rounding away towards either hand. The ocean, throwing its waters over the broad reef, appears an invincible, all-powerful enemy; yet we see it resisted, and even conquered, by means which at first seem most weak and insufficient. It is not that the ocean spares the rock of coral; the great fragments scattered over the reef and heaped on the beach whence the tall cocoa-nut-trees spring plainly bespeak the unrelenting power of the waves. Nor are any periods of repose granted; the long swell caused by the gentle but steady action of the trade-winds, always blowing in one direction over a wide area, causes breakers almost equalling in force those during a gale of wind in the temperate regions, and which never cease to rage. It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock—let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz—would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral islets stand, and are victorious; for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime one by one from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments, yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polyp, through the agency of the vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean which neither the art of man nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist.” The poet summed the matter rightly when he wrote:—
“Millions of millions thus, from age to age,
With simplest skill and toil unwearyable,
No moment and no movement unimproved,
Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread,
To swell the heightening, brightening, gradual mound,
By marvellous structure climbing towards the day....