Chap, iii.] EQUATORIAL CURRENT. 59 



leucogaster) is a kind of gannet. The full-grown birds are 

 white on the belly, with a black head and throat ; the black 

 ending on the neck, where it joins the white in a straight con- 

 spicuous line. The back is dark. The younger birds are 

 brown all over. Some few of both birds soon came off to have 

 a look at the ship. 



We moved gradually up to the islands, sounding as we went 

 the Captain and Lieutenant Tizard mounted into the foretop, 

 and steered the vessel from thence, looking out for rocks. The 

 water is deep right up to the rocks, and a hawser was sent on 

 shore in a boat, and made fast round a projecting lump of rock, 

 and the ship was moored by means of it in about 100 fathoms 

 of water, although not more than 100 yards distant from shore. 

 Such an arrangement is only possible under the peculiar 

 circumstances which occur here. The wind and current are 

 constantly in the same direction, and keep a ship fastened to 

 the rock always as far off from it as the rope will allow. 



I never properly realized the strength of an oceanic current 

 until I saw the equatorial current running past St. Paul's Rocks. 

 Ordinarily at sea the current of course does not make itself 

 visible in any way ; one merely has its existence brought to 

 one's notice by finding at mid-day, when the position of the 

 ship is made known, that the ship is 20 miles or so nearer or 

 farther off from port than dead reckoning had led one to suppose 

 she would be, and one is correspondingly elated or depressed. 

 But St. Paul's Rocks is a small fixed point in the midst of a 

 great ocean current, which is to be seen rushing past the rocks 

 like a mill-race, and a ship's boat is seen to be baffled in its 

 attempts to pull against the stream. 



Between the two extremities of the main body of rocks is a 

 bay, enclosed by a somewhat semicircular arrangement of the 

 rock masses. We landed on the eastward side of this bay. 

 Landing from a boat is a little difiiicult. There is a perpetual 

 swell running in the bay, although it is on the sheltered side of 

 the rocks, and one has to jump as the boat rises, and cling to 

 the rocks as best one may. 



I landed in the first boat. The rock was covered with 

 noddies, and their nests, some containing eggs, whitish in 

 colour, with red spots at the larger end, and others with young 

 in them, little round balls of black down. The air was full of 

 noddies and boobies, circling about, and screaming in disgust 

 at the invasion of their home. 



The noddies' nests are made of a green seaweed {Caulerpa 

 davifera) which grows on the bottom in the bay and around 

 the rocks, and which getting loosened by the surf, floats, and 

 is picked up Ijy the birds on the surface. The weed is 



