French
planters and then sailed for Malekula, anchoring in Port Sandwich.

Port Sandwich is a long, narrow bay in the south of Malekula, and
after Port Vila the most frequented harbour of the group, as it is
very centrally located and absolutely safe. Many a vessel has found
protection there from storm or cyclone. The entrance to the bay is
narrow, and at the anchorage we were so completely landlocked that
we might have imagined ourselves on an inland lake, so quiet is the
water, surrounded on all sides by the dark green forest which falls
in heavy waves down from the hills to the silent, gloomy sea.

Immediately after our arrival my companions went pigeon-shooting as
usual; but I soon preferred to join the son of the French planter
at Port Sandwich in a visit to the neighbouring native village. This
was my first sight of the real, genuine aborigines.

No one with any taste for nature will fail to feel the solemnity
of the moment when he stands face to face for the first time with
primitive man. As the traveller enters the depths of the virgin
forest for the first time with sacred awe, he feels that he stands
before a still higher revelation of nature when the first dark, naked
man suddenly appears. Silently he has crept through the thicket, has
parted the branches, and confronts us unexpectedly on a narrow path,
shy and silent, while we are struck with surprise. His figure is but
slightly relieved against the green of the bushes; he seems part of
the silent, luxuriant world around him, a being strange to us, a part
of those realms which we are used to imagine as void of feeling and
incapable of thought. But a word breaks the spell, intelligence gleams
in his face, and what, so far, has seemed a strange being, belonging
rather to the lower animals than to human-kind, shows himself a man,
and becomes equal to ourselves. Thus the endless, inhospitable jungle,
without open spaces or streets, without prairies and sun, that dense
tangle of lianas and tree-trunks, shelters men like ourselves. It
seems marvellous to think that in those depths, dull, dark and silent
as the fathomless ocean, men can live, and we can hardly blame former
generations for denying all kinship with these savages and counting
them as animals; especially as the native never seems more primitive
than when he is roaming the forest, naked but for a bark belt, with a
big curly wig and waving plumes, bow and arrow his only weapons. When
alarmed, he hides