In his capacity as catechist, he has not succeeded in converting any of his adult neighbours to Christianity, although one or two are occasionally present at his Sunday services. We met with one proselyte to Mohammedanism among them, but he, having been adopted by a trader when a boy, was taken to the Maldives and spent some years there. The natives as a body are still as averse to foreign influence on this point as they have been in the past, when missionary endeavour—Moravian and Jesuit—time after time met with complete failure. In the second quarter of the last century they expelled two priests of the latter sect from the island, and Captain Gardner, in 1851, gives an account of the same fate befalling a pair of Moravians.[28] "Having converted a few natives, disputes arose between these and their heathen countrymen. They were of such a serious nature that it was determined to hold a general council of delegates from every village to consider a remedy for the evil. They came to the conclusion, that, as they had always lived in love and amity with each other before the arrival of the missionaries, with their strange story of the first woman stealing the orange, etc., the obvious remedy was to send them away. Accordingly, the missionaries were waited on, and told respectfully that they must leave at the first opportunity: that the natives were not to be joked with, and must be obeyed. The mission house was then burnt down, and a fence erected round the spot, inside which no native will step. It is unholy ground, they say, where the devil first landed; for, until the missionaries brought him with them, he had never been in the island, or knew where it was. I was told that a day is now set apart in the year when all the inhabitants assemble to drive the devil out of the island."
On the fourth morning of our visit our sympathy was due to Mr Solomon on the occasion of his wife's death—an event that occurred with some suddenness as the result of an apoplectic fit. One sequel to this was, that on the following night the entire village was engaged in expelling the spirit of the deceased from the neighbourhood with much ceremony and noise.
Kar Nicobar has an area of about 50 square miles, with a surface that is exceedingly level, as the highest point it attains is barely 200 feet above the sea-level; only in the north does the coast rise in low cliffs, and all round the shore is a fringe of coral-reef.
The geological formation consists of a foundation of serpentine, on which rest thick clay beds and layers of sandstone, exposed in parts, and in some places overlaid by upheaved coral banks, the whole having acquired a covering of sandy alluvium and drift, which was deposited before upheaval, with an additional layer of vegetable débris since accumulated.
With the exception of an indigenous coco palm zone, where coralline alluvium has formed, the beach forest of Casuarinas, Barringtonias, Ficus, Pandani, Hibiscus, Calophyllums, and other characteristic species, and irregular strips of inland forests, containing canebrake and bamboo, with Terminalias and Sterculias, the whole island appears to be covered with stretches of coarse lallang grass, dotted with tall screw-pines (Pandanus mellori), bearing the large globular fruit that supplies the inhabitants with their staple food; or with the natives' plantations of coconuts, betel, plantains, and yams. The nature of the forests depends entirely on the character of the soil and on the composition of the underlying rock.
WOMEN AND CHILDREN, KAR NICOBAR.
Although ranking only fourth or fifth in point of size, Kar Nicobar contains nearly three-fifths of the total population of the group; the number of its inhabitants has remained stationary for many years, and has lately been ascertained to stand at a trifle under 3500.
"The people of Kar Nicobar ought to be among the most contented in the world. Everyone lives on terms of perfect equality with his neighbours. Beyond occasional illnesses, they have no cares or troubles, and there is absolutely no struggle for existence, coconuts and pandanus, their staple foods, being in such profusion that a child old enough to climb a tree could support himself without exertion."[29]