nesia.

Given a good breeze and plenty of daylight, the whale-ships of the olden
days could stand round the western horn of the island, a projecting
point rendered pleasingly conspicuous by the grove of graceful
coco-palms which Cook was so glad to observe so many years before, and
then enter a deep bay on the north-west coast, where they obtained
good anchorage in from fifteen to twenty fathoms of water of the most
wonderful transparency, and within a mile of the vast stretches of
white sandy beach that trend away for miles on either hand. And then the
sailors, overjoyed at the delightful prospect of running about in the
few and widely-apart palm groves, and inhaling the sweet, earthy smell
of the thin but fertile soil, covered with its soft, thick bed of
fallen leaves, would lower away the boats, and pulling with their united
strength through the sweeping eddies of the dangerous passage, effect
a landing on a beach of dazzling whites and situated in the inner
south-west border of the wide lagoon.

On our first visit to the island, in 1872, we had some glorious fishing;
and when we returned on board, under the rays of a moon that shone with
strange, uncanny brilliancy, and revealed the coral bottom ten fathoms
below, the scene presented from our decks was one of the greatest
imaginable beauty, though the loneliness of the place and the absence of
human life was somewhat depressing. We remained at the island for three
days, and during our stay our crew of South Sea Islanders literally
filled our decks with fish, turtle and birds' eggs. Curiously enough,
in our scant library on board the little trading vessel I came across
portion of a narrative of a voyage in a South Seaman, written by her
surgeon, a Mr Bennett, in 1838,{*} and our captain and myself were much
interested in the accurate description he gave of Christmas Island and
its huge rookeries of oceanic birds.

* _Narrative of a Whaling Voyage round the Globe, from_ 1833
to 1836. By F. D. Bennett.

This is what he says: 'Here and there among the low thicket scrubs are
vast rookeries of aquatic birds, whose clamour is deafening. They nest
and incubate upon the ground, and show not the slightest fear of the
approach of human visitors. Among the sooty terns, whose number it was
impossible to estimate, were many hundreds of tropic birds and pure
snow-white petrels.' (He no doubt imagined the pure snow-white petrels
to be a distinct species--they were you