XL] EXPLORATION OF CHABROL BAY. 261 



had settled to divide our party, one of us remaining with the yacht 

 at Monios, while the others, taking six of the hunters, were to 

 explore Chabrol Bay ; and accordingly just before midnight we got 

 our necessaries on board the boats and started. 



Our prau was manned by ten men, two of whom were jMalays, 

 the rest coast Papuans of mixed descent, and half-breeds of Papuan 

 and Malay parentage. We w^ere lulled to sleep by the monotonous 

 splash of the paddles, and early on the following morning awoke to 

 find ourselves lying in a small mangrove harbour on the western 

 shore of the gulf, at the mouth of a little stream. We worked the 

 forest from sunrise till late in the afternoon, and on reassembling 

 at the praus and laying out our spoil found that w^e had not done 

 badly. Among the parrots were the curious Aprosmictus {A. 

 dorsalis), gorgeous in crimson and cobalt dress, with a broad and 

 graduated tail nine or ten inches in length ; the still more brilliant 

 Lorius lory, which was perhaps the most common of any ; and 

 Wallace's Eos — a brush-tongued lory of great beauty. In New 

 Guinea the pigeons, equally with the parrots, have their fountain- 

 head, and the number of species is marvellous. The Pigmy Doves 

 are especially numerous, and exhibit a diversity of colouring that 

 an Englishman accustomed only to the sober plumage of European 

 species would hardly credit. The " lively iris " which " changes on the 

 burnished dove " is indeed almost entirely absent from the tropical 

 genus (Fiilopus) to wdiich I refer, but it is replaced by yellow, 

 orange, scarlet, mauve, magenta, and a score of other shades which 

 perhaps are not equalled in any other family for variety. On this 

 occasion we had the largest and the smallest of the pigeons among 

 our collection — the huge Goura or Crowned Pigeon, now a familiar 

 object in the Zoological Gardens of almost every capital, weighing 

 perhaps four or five pounds, and a tiny l*tilopus (P. pulchellus), the 

 size of a lark, grass-green in colour, with the forehead bright 

 magenta. 



Two or three hours before daybreak we again started, in spite 

 of having been up far into the night skinning and making notes of 



