314 CORALS AND CORAL ISLANDS. 
—represents a scene on Duke of York’s Island, another of the 
same solitary group of atolls. The view was taken on the 
lagoon side, and exhibits the placid lake, the border of verdure 
far away in the distance, and, near by, the margin of a native 
village beneath its cocoa-nut grove. A few young plants of 
the Pandanus stand along the point. The houses are like 
those of other islands to the west and northwest. The point 
in front of the village is one of three small quays, two feet out 
of water. The house, resting partly upon it and partly on 
poles in the water, and thatched with leaves of the Pan- 
danus, was apparently a shelter for canoes and fishing-tackle. 
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 with the preceding. 
The public-house of the island is even larger than that on 
Bowditch’s Island, measuring one hundred and twenty feet in 
length, forty-five feet in width, and forty in height to the 
ridge-pole. This island, unlike 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 circum- 
stances 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 was actually too large to have 
reached the deck except by the use of a tackle. It was evi- 
dent 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 
