Word: reef
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Washington, Secretary of the Navy Swanson had ordered the Navy to start hunting. By last week the search was costing $250,000 a day. The battleship Colorado hove to off the Phoenix Islands, catapulted three planes from its deck. The flyers skimmed over Gardner and McKean Islands and Carondelet Reef, saw nothing but ruined guano works and the wreck of a tramp freighter. Thousands of startled seabirds fluttered up, menacing the propellers and forcing the flyers to climb. Some days equatorial squalls and vanishing visibility crippled the hunt, but on others the weather was perfect, visibility unlimited. By week...
...salvage tugs were moving her off. A $10,000 repair bill came near grounding the expedition then & there. "Ports," warns Author Villiers, "are bad places for ships and men." Luck was with them in the only other mishap of the voyage when they grounded on a coral reef in the South Seas...
...Musick again soared into the sky. this time turned southwest and faced the world's most ticklish navigation problem- that of finding a speck of land 120 ft. long, 90 ft. wide, and only three feet high, which no plane had ever seen. This tiny spot is Kingman Reef, discovered some 80 years ago by Captain John Kingman of the U. S. schooner Shooting Star. Other ships occasionally spotted it afar, but not until 1921 was it officially recorded by the U. S. S. Eagle...
...Anderson planted three cocoanut palms there and the U. S. Geographical Survey finally put it on charts, but not until transoceanic aviation suddenly zoomed into commercial and military importance in 1935 did the U. S. formally claim jurisdiction over Kingman Reef. Some 1,100 miles from Honolulu, this coral atoll is part of the Territory of Hawaii, is in the exact geographical centre of the Pacific. Its five-mile horseshoe is awash at high-tide except for one patch of sand. But the barrier breaks the combers, provides a quiet lagoon which is a mid-ocean lake, perfect...
...pieces until they let it run with the gale. After three days of it, more dead than alive, they reached New Guinea, found a native pilot and set out for Port Moresby. Two days away, in a sudden cyclone, the Sirocco was smashed to splinters on a reef, "kindly, lovable old Dook" drowned...