Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 November 1895 — Lofty Mountains in the Sea. [ARTICLE]

Lofty Mountains in the Sea.

There exists in the great ocean between Australia and New Caledonia a range of mighty submarine mountains, whose limestone top 3 rise within 300 fathoms of the surface. The discovery of these peaks, rising sheer 7,500 feet from the bottom of the deep sea, was made by the men who have just finished laying the, first section of the trans-Pacific cable. Sir Audley Coote, who was at the head of the cable expedition, arrived here yesterday on the steamer Alameda from Sydney, New South Wales. He said: “The sea from Australia to New Caledonia has been surveyed by a British and by an American vessel. Your Albatross went there and did some very good work, but as it happened, both this expedition and the other missed the strange feature of the ocean that I can describe. We had anticipated no great difficulty in laying the cable section, and did not find any until suddenly the bottom of the ocean began to rise. We were forced to cut the cable there in midocean and to buoy up the ends. It was then found that what had hindered us was a range of submarine mountains.

“There is nothing else like this in the world that I know of. The mountains rise in abrupt peaks, and are hard limestone and granite. By careful measurement we found that the peaks were more than 7,000 feet on the average, and the highest of them 7,500 feet from the bottom of the ocean. than 300 fathoms from the surface of the water we found the tops of the highest mountains. The range extends for nearly seventy-five miles—that is, measuring from the extreme northerly to the extreme southerly point. To lay the cable around this range took forty-eight miles more of cable than we had counted on . We had to go around the peaks as a railroad would go around a mountain on land. ”