"TRAVELLERS' TREES" IN GARDENS AT SINGAPORE.
Soon after, a party of officers, including myself, proceeded to land. On touching the beach we were met by a pair of negroes, who, we learned, formed the entire human population of the island. They occupied some wretched huts which had been hitherto screened from our view by a dense thicket of bushes, which forms a fringe around the margin of the island, and gives it, from the anchorage, the delusive appearance of being well wooded.
Their occupation consisted in catching and drying fish, and in salting, for consumption at Mahé, the bodies of sea-birds, which breed on the island in vast numbers, and which are easily taken on their nests during the breeding season—now just coming to an end. The negroes spoke a French dialect, and, whether owing to their habitual taciturnity, or to linguistic difficulties on our part, we could not succeed in extracting much information from them. We gathered, however, that turtle visited the island for breeding purposes, but not at this time of the year.
Bird Island is half-a-mile long, and a quarter of a mile in width, being thus more or less oval in outline. It is formed entirely of coral, and is margined all round with white glistening beaches of calcareous sand. Outside this extends a fringing reef, which forms a submerged platform, on which there is some three or four fathoms of water, and which has a mean width radially of about a quarter of a mile. There is no encircling barrier reef, while the soundings are so regular as to exclude the existence of coral knolls. The general surface of the island is quite flat, and has a mean elevation above the sea-level of about eight feet. Immediately within the sandy beach above mentioned is a raised inner beach composed of blown sand and lumps of coral, on which flourishes a belt of low green Tournefortia bushes. After traversing this, one walks over a rugged plain of honeycombed coral rock, the interstices of which are in some places filled with sand and vegetable mould, which supports a more or less general mantle of scrubby grass, interspersed with several introduced plants gone wild. Among these were cotton, sugarcane, papaws, yams, gourds, cocoa-nuts, and perhaps a few others. It appeared that none of these had been found to thrive, which no doubt accounts for their present neglected state. We now ascertained that the large tree which had attracted our attention from the offing was a Casuarina, of which there were altogether two or perhaps three on the island.
There were no land-birds. Sea-birds, however, were very abundant, and seemed in many ways to have partially adapted themselves to the habits of their terrestrial congeners. The sand and light soil, which in some places occupied the cavities in the coral rock, were everywhere excavated by the burrows of petrels, so that within an area of four square yards one might count as many as a dozen. There were also smaller burrows—not admitting the hand—in one of which I captured a land-crab. Walking over the island—small as it was—proved to be very fatiguing and aggravating, for after one had extracted a bruised ankle from some treacherous hole in the coral, which the long grass concealed, the next step, taken with misplaced confidence on an inviting-looking patch of sand, would probably put the other foot through the frail roof of a petrel burrow, into which it would descend, to the alarm and indignation of its proper tenant, no less than to the mortification of the explorer.
Many gannets were breeding on the island. I approached a large brown bird as it sat on its nest, and, being anxious to obtain a specimen of the egg, endeavoured to frighten it off by going within a couple of yards and shouting riotously. The bird, however, did not seem to heed me. I then tried stones, but with no better result. Eventually I had to resort to sterner measures, which I forbear to mention, but which proved satisfactory. The nest consisted of a few twigs and pieces of withered grass, placed on the surface of the hard coral.
The terns, of which there were great numbers, either standing quietly on the ground in flocks or perched singly on the low bushes, had just concluded their breeding labours, and I found a few abandoned eggs. Their nests were similar to those of the gannet above mentioned. Consorting with the terns and gannets were multitudes of white egrets, stalking about unconcernedly in the long dry grass, or perching in a dreamy sort of way on the topmost twigs of the bushes. All these birds, terns, gannets, and egrets, seemed to be quite as much at home when perching on the bushes or standing in the grass as in their usual attitude on the wing. They seemed indeed very loth to fly, and after being rudely disturbed soon settled down again. The beaches of the weather or east side of the island were studded with great flocks of turnstones and curlews, with which were a few oyster-catchers, and soaring high overhead was a great flock of frigate birds.
At an early hour on the following morning (March 5th) we were again under way, and steering towards Port Mahé, which lies sixty miles to the southward of Bird Island. The dredge had been laid out from the stern of the ship soon after anchoring, and on hauling it up just before weighing, one of the tangles was found to have attached to it a large slab of dead coral, which contained a great variety of forms of life. There were on its surface several detached masses of growing Corals, comprising five or six different species, and an equal number of Polyzoa, besides some Nullipores and Millepores. In the interstices were several species of shells, worms, and Ophiurids, and two or three species of sponge.
At three o'clock in the afternoon we anchored at Mahé, the chief island of the Seychelle Group.
Seychelles, a term which is used to comprise the group of eighty islands, has been a British colony since the year 1794, when it was taken from the French by force of arms. Most of the land is in the possession of descendants of the old French settlers, men who have the reputation of being devoid of enterprise, and of squandering the produce of their land in habits of dissipation. We were told that among the upper classes there were only about six Englishmen in the group, including the governor, secretary, and doctor, etc. By a census taken in 1880, the total population was 14,035, of which 2,029 was represented by African negroes. The population of the chief island, Mahé, alone amounted to 11,393, so that there remains less than 3,000 to be divided among the remaining islands of the Group. The total has since been increasing, owing to a stream of immigration having set in from Mauritius, where there exists a commercial depression; so that at the time of our visit it was said to amount to 18,000.