In the Eastern Seas

by William Henry Giles Kingston

“You will not have much difficulty in providing our supper,” I observed, “considering the number of birds flying about in all directions.”

The woods were indeed full of sounds of all sorts. I fancied that among them I could distinguish the voices of wild beasts.

“Hark!” I said. “Surely that must be a lion! It is just like the cry I have heard they often give.”

My uncle laughed.

“No, indeed,” he said. “The voices you hear are those of pigeons.”

I could scarcely suppose, however, that he was right, so loud and booming was the sound which came from the woods.

“Oh, what beautiful apples are those?” I observed, as I looked up at a tree in which a number of various birds were collected, among which were several white cockatoos. “I should like to carry some back to the camp.”

The fruit we were looking at was round, with a smooth shining skin of a golden orange colour, which might rival in appearance the golden apples of the Hesperides.

“Let them remain where they hang,” he answered. “Whoever might attempt to eat them would certainly be made very ill, if they did not die. Those beautiful apples possess the most poisonous properties of any fruit in these regions. They are what we naturalists call Apocynaceae. The birds, however, eat those rosy seeds which you see displayed from the ripe fruit, which has burst open.—But stay! There’s a fellow; I must have him.” He raised his gun, and brought down a fine jungle cock, which Merlin, who had accompanied us, instantly ran forward to catch. He brought it to us, highly pleased with his performance. “He, at all events, will afford a supper for a couple of us, hungry as we may be,” said my uncle. “This fellow, or his ancestors rather, is the grandfather of all our domestic poultry in England. They have lost a good deal of their beauty, to be sure, by civilisation, though they may have improved in size and egg-laying powers.”

I was fortunate in shooting a couple of great green fruit-pigeons directly afterwards; indeed, in a short time we had as many birds as would supply us for supper and breakfast. We were passing through a wood which consisted chiefly of the great palm, which my uncle said the Malays call the gubbong. The trees were in various conditions. Some were simply in leaf, others had flowers on them, others fruit, while many were dead, apparently ready to fall. The leaves were large and fan-shaped, and I remarked that those which had flowers were destitute of leaves; indeed, I could scarcely have supposed that they were the same trees. The full-grown trees had lofty cylindrical stems, and were mostly two hundred feet in height, and two or three feet in diameter. The flowers were on the summit, in the form of a huge terminal spike. On the top of this was the fruit, consisting of masses of smooth round balls, of a green colour, and about an inch in diameter. My uncle told me that each tree only flowers once in its life; and that when the fruit ripens the tree dies, though it remains standing a year or two before it falls to the ground. It was on a branch of one of these trees that I saw the pigeons, where they had settled after feeding on the fruit.