Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/95

Rh tude of rocks and shoals which encumber this region, are now well known. Much, however, yet remains to be done on the eastern and southern confines of this sea. Only the most important harbors and sections of coast in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies have been well charted. Parts of Tonquin and the southern, and especially the eastern, passages into the China Sea need much additional examination in detail. Australia and New Zealand are enveloped with good nautical charts, which are constantly being amended as new developments give rise to increased needs for more detailed surveys, and most of the important harbors and the thickly inhabited maritime sections have been quite completely done. The Coral Sea, or what is termed the outer passage between Australia and the Indian Ocean, is now much improved beyond its former state, owing to the necessity of providing more direct routes than those which were formerly followed, and most of its dangerous reefs are now set down in the charts. British India is better surveyed than many other parts of the best-known coasts of the world, and the shores of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean have been minutely surveyed excepting in a few parts where minor details are not now important.

Of the coast of Africa, aside from that portion which fronts on the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, the most vaguely charted portion is that of Somaliland, and the most completely charted parts are embraced in that well-surveyed section, including Madagascar, which extends southward from Zanzibar around the Cape of Good Hope to the regions of Table Bay. The whole of the west coast can now be laid down with closeness to its true position on the face of the globe, and while some parts of it have been merely explored by the nautical surveyor, many other parts are better known, and some of the harbors and off-lying islands have been surveyed with considerable approach to completeness.

The coasts of Europe, excepting the Spanish peninsula and those parts bordering on the Arctic Ocean, are completely surveyed, and an important center of activity in marine hydrography has for many years existed in Great Britain, resulting not only in elaborate surveys of the waters of Great Britain and Ireland, but in meeting the demand for reliable nautical charts in every part of the British Empire and in whatever other parts of the world British trade has been active or springing up. Nearly a century has now elapsed since the close of the era of discoveries among the vast groups of islands and coral reefs with which the immense area of the Pacific Ocean is studded, and the chaotic state of geography at that time, in which it was sometimes impossible for discoverers to return to the islands discovered, has given place to a state of order at the present day. The ships of all the great maritime nations have contributed in a greater or less degree to this advance by fixing the correct geographical positions of individual islands, by surveying harbors and anchorages in the various groups, and by disproving the existence of many supposed rocks and dangers which were set down in the older charts from reports of former navigators, often doubtless based upon misleading appearances of the sea.

But important as is the surveying work that has already been accomplished in the Pacific, it is only the beginning of that which is to come. There is scarcely an island group in the whole of Oceania that is completely charted. The great work that remains to be done here ought to progress more rapidly in the future, since all these lands have at length been parceled out among leading nations of the world.