THE COMPLETED ATOLL. 237 



Style in the garden of Eden. These primitive fashions, 

 however, are not peculiar to the group, being in vogue also 

 in other parts of the Pacific. 



As a set-off against the geographical ignorance of these 

 islanders, we may state that Captain Hudson and the best 

 map-makers of the age knew nothing of the existence of 

 Bowditch Island until he discovered it ; and from him comes 

 the name it bears, given in honour of the celebrated author of 

 " Bowditch's Navigator " as well as of the translation of 

 Laplace's " Mecanique Celeste. " 



The Gilbert Group affords an example of a less isolated 

 coral-island people. A beautiful view representing a part of 

 the village of Utiroa, on Drummond's Island, is contained in 

 the same volume of Wilkes's Narrative. The public house of 

 the island is even larger than that on Bowditch Island, 

 measuring one hundred and twenty feet in length, forty-five feet 

 in width, and forty in height to the ridge-pole. This island, 

 unhke the Duke of York's, was densely peopled, and, owing 

 apparently to the scant supply of fish and vegetables thus 

 occasioned, many of the natives were afflicted with leprosy, 

 and also had bad teeth, both circumstances unusual for the 

 Pacific. Lean in body and savage in look and gesture, they 

 strangely contrasted with their fat, jolly kinsmen on some of 

 the more northern islands of the same group. An old, fat chief, 

 who came from one of these islands to the ship's side in his 

 canoe w^as actually too large to have reached the deck except 

 by the use of a tackle. It was evident that infanticide — a 

 necessity according to their system of political economy — 

 was more thoroughly practised than on Drummond's Island, and 

 that the population was thus kept from becoming uncomfortably 

 numerous. The obesity was probably owing to their having 

 nothing to do, and plenty, in the vegetable way, to eat ; for 

 these somewhat elevated equatorial islands, as elsewhere 

 observed, are unusually productive for atolls, — just the place for 

 a voluptuous barbarian. 



The people on Drummond's Island were great thieves, and 

 knew the pleasures of a cannibal feast. Without metals, or 



