X.] EISA ISLAND. 241 



seemed to me that I had never got into a more horrible place. A 

 living mangrove swamp at low tide is unpleasant enough, but, to 

 enable my reader to realise a dead one, I should need the pencil of 

 Dore, or the pen of Edgar Allan Poe. 



Leaving Cat Island we coasted round our newly-discovered bay, 

 and found it to be apparently quite free from shoals. At one 

 spot, just inside the jungle, we came across a little hut containing 

 an unmense store of dried fish, left there no doubt by some Batchian 

 fisherman until he could carry it off in a large prau. There were 

 great quantities of a little sardine-like fish, done up for smoking in 

 small bamboo frames, and our natives at once set to work and 

 purloined hard, completely loading our boat with the spoil. Our 

 excellent friend and skipper. Captain Hakkers, watched them, 

 placidly smoking. Wlien they had quite finished, he made them 

 return it all, even to the last fish ! 



We sailed on the following day for Bisa, and landed at its 

 extreme westerly point. It is a low and densely-jungied island, 

 thus differing conspicuously from Obi and Obi Latu, the latter of 

 which has some curiously sharp peaks, undoubtedly of limestone rock, 

 at its northern end. The dried-up bed of a small stream permitted 

 us to penetrate some distance into the forest, and we obtained some 

 good birds, among them a brilliant yellow Thickhead (Fachycephala 

 ohiensis) and a couple of the fine Nicobar pigeon — a generally 

 distributed, but at the same time uncommon bird in the Eastern 

 Archipelago. It is almost entirely confined to small islands, where 

 it is safer from the attacks to which its heavy build and terrestrial 

 habits expose it. Its coppery green plumage and snow-white tail 

 render it strikingly handsome, but the great development of the 

 neck feathers, which are elongated into drooping hackles of con- 

 siderable length, make it appear to the casual observer more like 

 a gallinaceous bird than a pigeon. We stopped two or three hours 

 only at Bisa, and arrived at Batchian the same night, having had a 

 most enjoyable cruise ; none the less pleasant from the sea having 

 been of unruffled calmness throughout. 



VOL. II. R 



