PACIFIC AND HEERING'S STRAIT. 185 



deed it does, support life, cannot be said to do more. 

 Rats and lizards were the only quadrupeds we saw 

 upon the islands. Of the feathered tribe, oceanic 

 birds form the greater part ; but even these are rare, 

 compared with the numbers that usually frequent 

 the islands of the Pacific, arising, no doubt, from the 

 Gambier Islands being inhabited. The whole con- 

 sist of three kinds of tern, the white, black, and 

 slate-coloured — of which the first is most nume- 

 rous, and the last very scarce; together with a 

 species of procellaria, the white heron, and the tro- 

 pic and egg birds. Those which frequent the shore 

 are a kind of pharmatopus, curlew, charadrine, and 

 totanus ; and the woods, the wood-pigeon, and a 

 species of turdus, somewhat resembling a thrush in 

 plumage, but smaller, possessing a similar though 

 less harmonious note. The insects found here were 

 very few, the common house-fly excepted, which on 

 almost all the inhabited islands in the Pacific is 

 extremely numerous and annoying. Of fish there 

 is a great variety, and many are extremely beautiful 

 in colour ; as well those of large dimensions, which 

 we caught with lines, consisting of several sorts of 

 perca, as the numerous family of the order of bran- 

 chiostigi, which sported about the coral. 



The largest portion of the natives of the Gambier 

 Islands belong to a class which Mr. J. R. Forster 

 would place among the first variety of the human 

 species in the South Seas. Like the generality of 

 uncivilized people, they are good-natured when 

 pleased, and harmless when not irritated; obsequi- 

 ous when inferior in force, and overbearing when 

 otherwise ; and are carried away by an insatiable 

 desire of appropriating to themselves every thing 



