HIDDEN DEPTHS. 



12^ 



It is a little difficult to stand on Swan Island, and looking 

 due north, towards the Mysteriosa Bank, to realize fully 

 what the sea is hiding beneath its smooth sunlit face, 

 or to appreciate the fact that one is really looking across 

 one of the most deeply furrowed regions which have been 

 ploughed on the face of the earth. 



Out there, beyond the reef, beneath the opal-tinted sea, 

 apparently so smiling and so seductive, lies a region of 

 awful depths, of impenetrable darkness, of fearful canyons 

 and stupendous submarine ridges. 



Hidden in the vast profundities of these horrid abysses, 

 there lives an assemblage of weird and fantastic fish or 

 other marine animals, under conditions which almost 

 surpass belief — creatures of nightmare aspect, living a 

 life of nightmare nature. 



The little spot of consolidated coral debris, on which 

 we have imagined ourselves standing, forms above tide- 

 mark one of several patches of land, to "buoy," as it were, 

 this extraordinary submarine region. The Ca5maan Islands 

 mark its northern limits ; and if the Mysteriosa Bank, 

 which is a plateau of reddish coral, some twenty-eight 

 miles long by seven miles wide, and sunk from ten to 

 twelve fathoms beneath the surface, were now, what we 

 presume it will eventually become, namely another coral 

 island, it would go to form yet another mark to define 

 that stupendous fold in the restless surface of the earth's 

 crust, known to students of the sea bottom as Bart let t's 

 Deep. 



Bartlett's Deep extends for about seven hundred miles, 

 right across the Honduran Sea. It commences in the 

 bight of land known as the Gulf of Honduras; and ends 

 opposite the southern extremity of Cuba, at the foot of 

 the vast submarine declivity, which terminates, above 

 sea-level, as the range of mountains called the Sierra 

 Maestra, which extends from Cape Cruz to Santiago. 

 According to Agassiz, it " has an average breadth of 

 about eighty miles, and an average (italics ours) depth of 

 twelve thousand feet." There are several places, within 



