THE BIRDS OF THE ANDAMAN AND NICOBAR ISLANDS. 387 



vicinity, while the Nicobars are only visited, besides the short official visits 

 of the R. I. M. steamer stationed at Port Blair, by a few Burmese and 

 Chinese buggalows and junks trading in cocoanuts, and these do little travel- 

 ling about, but lie for months off the same island until they have got 

 together a full cargo. 



The best plan for a collector would be to hire a small sailing ship and 

 visit the islands in the fine months of February and March. 



Ornithological collecting in the Andamans is not very easy ; the rainfall 

 is excessive ; the trackless jungles are the most abominably dense and 

 thorny that I ever saw, and the atmosphere inside them is so intensely 

 steamy that forcing one's way through the tangled undergrowth is fatiguing 

 in the extreme. I know no place where nests are more difficult to find. 



To a casual observer the most noticeable feature in these Andaman forests 

 is the abundance of the Gurgeon trees, whose straight and lofty stems rise 

 like countless tall white masts among the dark greea cover of luxuriant 

 vegetation which clothes the hills. Inside the jungles the almost entire 

 absence of mosses (excepting some small and inconspicuous kinds) is very 

 remarkable. The absence of monkeys and squirrels, &c., is very 

 striking. 



The geographical position and physical aspects of the islands have been so 

 often described that no remarks on these are necessary here. 



Port Blair is, as Mr. Hume remarked twenty-four years ago, as well- 

 known as Southampton Water ; the Nicobars, however, are further from 

 the beaten-track, so I give a few notes on my stay among the islanders 

 whom I found most friendly and hospitable though very lazy and apathetic 

 when I tried to get any assistance from them. At whatever villages I 

 visited I was always made welcome, and received with offers of young 

 cocoanuts, cigarettes, etc. The latter are not a strong form of smoke, being 

 composed of a little China tobacco rolled up in a long strip of Pandanus 

 leaf, the tobacco being in about the same proportion to the Pandanus as the 

 lead to the wood in an ordinary pencil. 



The manner in which some of the Nicobarese have, with hardly any 

 iutercourse with Europeans since the abandonment of the settlement at 

 Camorta, kept up their curious pidgin English does them great credit. The 

 more intelligent of them have an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and some of 

 their questions are decidedly amusing. For instance, it was rather startling 

 to be asked in the year of Jubilee 1897 " Who got England Chief Commiss' ? 

 Colonel Temple brother ? I think so !'' 



Many of their enquiries are personal in the extreme. They nearly all want 

 to know whether you are married, and if not why not, and so on. My name 

 they rendered with every imaginable variation from " Buttala" to '* Pot- 

 luck," and they absolutely declined to accept my plea of impecuniosity as a 

 satisfactory explanation of my state of single blessedness. 



