Page:Voyage in search of La Perouse, volume 1 (Stockdale).djvu/287

] ourselves in the greatest security, when we found the ship in shoal water, which the watch had not perceived. It was so shallow, that we could easily distinguish the fishes upon the rocks, some points of which, higher than others, put us in dread of shipwreck every instant.

We were then in 4½ fathoms of water, and the boat, which immediately began to sound different parts of the shoal, found only 3 fathoms at one of its extremities. The whole bottom was coral.

Thus we were involved in the most imminent dangers, being surrounded on all sides with shoals, which threatened us with the immediate destruction of the ship.

Boats were dispatched, to sound the water over the rocks, on each side of us. The least depth they discovered was 3 fathoms; so that, a slight agitation of the sea in that place, might have made us touch the bottom, and lose the ship.

Those rocks, like the reefs of New Caledonia, are the work of polypi; like those reefs they are built perpendicularly, and quite close to them, no bottom can be found with one hundred fathoms of line. They rise, like so many columns, from the bottom of the sea, and their progressive augmentation daily increases the danger of navigating those parts of the ocean. At