The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries Part 29

The curator shook his head.

"You'll find," he said, "that we can see almost as well with these as though you and I were a couple of angel fish, swimming in and out of the grottoes of the coral. The water--as you noticed when we were coming into the harbor--is as clear as crystal. There's nothing in coral sand to make it cloudy or muddy."

"Are we going out this morning?" the boy queried eagerly, as he helped in the unpacking of the various instruments that the museum expert had brought.

"The boat is to be here at half-past eight," was the reply, "and we're going to find the most beautiful spot that there is in the submarine Garden of Eden. Our darky boatman, 'Early Bird,' they call him, says he knows a place quite far out on the reef where there are wonderful groves and parterres unspoiled by tourists because they lie so distant that it is not worth while for the excursion boats to make the trip."

"I don't quite see," said Colin, "how the visit of tourists floating over a stretch of sea could harm the seaweeds and the coral growing on the bottom."

"But it does, because a number of the gla.s.s-bottomed boats carry a diver who goes down and breaks off specimens of coral at the tourists'

request, selling them for a good sum. But the gardens to which we are going, I understand, are entirely out of the beaten track and are very much finer besides. Here is 'Early Bird' now."

As he spoke, a white sailboat with a large spread of sail came skimming into the little bay, heading for the private wharf of the hotel at a rapid clip. Colin held his breath as the craft came rus.h.i.+ng in, for the inlet was not much wider than twice the length of the boat and it seemed certain that the vessel would crash full upon the rocks not twenty feet beyond the wharf. But at the very last second the tiller was put over, the sail jibed, and as gently as though she had crept up in a calm, the _Early Bird_ glided up beside the wharf, her bowsprit narrowly missing the bushes on the bank as she turned.

"You sure can handle a boat!" cried Colin admiringly.

The owner of the vessel, a young colored man, of good address and with a clever face, showed his white teeth in a gratified smile as he replied:

"Yas, sah, Ah've sailed a boat roun' the harbor quite a good deal."

"It looked that time as though you were going to be smashed up, sure."

"Ah nevah even sc.r.a.ped the paint of a boat in ten yeahs o' sailin', sah," the colored boatman answered, "an' thar's lots o' shoals, too."

"It looks as if she were resting on the bottom now!" the boy said.

"No, sah," was the confident reply, "the tide's full in an' Ah knows this whahf right well. Thar's two feet of wateh under her, right now."

Early Bird--for both boatman and boat answered to the same name--deftly took aboard the gla.s.ses and other special material that had been prepared, not forgetting a large lunch basket that had been sent down from the hotel, and then he pushed off into the clear and s.h.i.+ning water.

The early morning breeze laid the little craft over on her side but she had a good pair of heels and in a few minutes the party was well on its way across Gra.s.sy Bay.

"Where are we going?" asked Colin.

Early Bird pointed beyond a group of small islands to where there seemed to be a depression in the land.

"Thar's a channel, sah," he said, "right in between those two islands.

Thar's a swing bridge across, but the keepeh is always on the lookout and we can go right through."

A half hour's sail brought them to the gap between the islands. Though the bridge was shut Early Bird steered confidently straight for the center, and it swung just in time, the boat shooting by with undiminished speed and rounding a point to the open water beyond. Before them stretched an unbroken vista of ocean.

"The next land south of you, Colin," remarked the curator, "is Antarctica."

Colin thought for a moment, then said in a surprised voice:

"Why, yes. Bermuda is an isolated point, isn't it? I hadn't thought of that before. Nearly all islands are in chains, but this little bit of a place is set off all by itself. I wonder why that is?"

"Bermuda is the top of a submarine mountain," was the reply, "perhaps part of the lost Atlantis--who knows? This stupendous peak rises almost fifteen thousand feet sheer from the ocean bed and its rugged top forms the basis of the islands. Think what a magnificent sight it would be if we could see its whole height rising from the darkness of the ocean deep."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE _EARLY BIRD_ Pa.s.sING THE BERMUDA AQUARIUM, AGAR'S ISLAND.

_Photograph by C. R-W._]

"But I thought Bermuda was a coral island!"

"The coral polyp has got to grow on something, hasn't it?" the scientist reminded him. "Don't forget that the little creatures can't live in deep water. And, you see, Bermuda has gradually been sinking, the coral builders keeping pace with the subsidence, so that although the island is only two miles across at the widest point the reefs are ten miles wide."

"It really is coral, then?"

"As much as any island is. The base of any coral island is limestone, being made of the skeletons of coral polypi which have been broken and crushed by wind and weather and beaten into stone. Just as chalk is made of thousands of tiny sh.e.l.ls, so coral limestone is made of myriads of coral skeletons."

"Why, that's like sandstone," cried Colin, in a disappointed tone. "I had an idea that coral was a sort of insect that lived in a sh.e.l.l and that colonies of these grew up from the bottom of the water like trees and when they died--millions of them--they left the sh.e.l.ls and these stone forests grew up and up until they reached the top of the water and then soil was formed and that was how coral islands began."

"I'm not surprised at your thinking that," his chief replied, "lots of people do. And though that theory is all wrong, still if it has given folks an idea of the beauty and wonder of the world, there's no great harm done. Plenty of people still talk about the coral 'insect.' It never occurs to them to call an anemone an 'insect,' but they don't know that the coral polyp is more like an anemone than anything else."

"But an anemone is a soft flabby thing that waves a lot of jelly-like fingers about in the water."

"So does coral," was the reply, "and it eats and lives just in the same way, only that the coral polyp has a stony skeleton and most of the sea anemones have not. But every different one has some sort of a story to tell and I believe they get joy out of life just as we do. Else why should some of these forms be so beautiful? You note them closely when we pa.s.s over some of the reefs, and I should judge we are coming to them now."

Certainly if the coloration was any clue, the boat was coming to the great sea-gardens. Above the white bottom the water shone a vivid emeraldine green, changing to sharply marked browns over the shoals, while beyond the inner reefs it varied from all shades of sapphire blue to radiant aquamarine. Nowhere was the water of the same color for a hundred yards together, while every ruffling of the surface, every slant of sunlight gave it a new hue. Colin was entranced and wished to see more closely, but the boat was going too swiftly to let down a water gla.s.s and he was forced to wait a few minutes.

"Ah b'lieve, sah," said Early Bird presently, hauling in the sheet, "we might let the sail down heah. We'll drift just about fast enough fo' you to watch the bottom."

Mr. Collier handed one of the water gla.s.ses to the boatman. It was formed like a deep square box with a gla.s.s window for a bottom, and a specially prepared crystal had been used.

"That's an improvement on the old kind, Early Bird," he said; "what do you think of it?"

The Bermudian darky looked through the gla.s.s critically.

"Yes, sah," he said, "thar's no compah'son 'tween the two. The bottom looks bettah through that gla.s.s than it does when yo' down theh yo'self. Ah used to do a little diving at one time, but the reefs nevah showed up that cleah. It would be a big thing fo' the boats that take tourists out if they could have gla.s.ses like that one there."

"It would be, perhaps," the scientist said, laughing, "but they could almost build a boat for what one of these would cost."

"Isn't that the most gorgeous thing you ever saw!" cried Colin, as he set his eye to the gla.s.s, which Early Bird handed him. "There's no garden on land with such colors as that."

"There are no flowers in the garden you're looking at, remember," his friend reminded him.

"Don't need them," said the boy. "Look at that tall purple plant waving to and fro. Isn't that a sea-fan?"

"Yes," his companion answered, "that's a sea-fan, but it isn't a plant.

It's a kind of coral."

"Is it? I always thought it was a seaweed."

"You'll be calling a sponge a plant next. See those red lumps, near the bottom of that rock? Those are sponges."

"Now there's some real coral!" the boy cried.

"All coral is real coral. What you are looking at is probably a form of the stag's horn variety," the curator said, "and that does look more like the coral of commerce. But everything you are looking at, nearly, is coral. These great dome-like stones, do you see them?"