5A PERCY SLADEN TRUST EXPEDITION. 
in spite of special natives being entirely employed in trapping them. Birds were as 
numerous as at Diego Garcia, the larger grey-headed tern breeding in the mapou trees 
of Ile Lubine, to the tops of which all the whimbrels and curlews of the whole atoll 
seemed to direct their flight when disturbed, constantly tumbling off in the wind, their 
feet being ill-adapted to a perching-habit. 
During our stay of nine days at Tle Sudest we had ample opportunity of seeing the 
oil-establishment, which differed in no respect from that described elsewhere. The 
produce is about 26,000 gallons per annum, which may be increased to 40,000 when 
certain new plantations come into bearing. The islands belonged then to the Hon. 
Leopold Antelme in Mauritius, but have since been bought by the company which owns 
Diego and Peros. The whole had evidently been somewhat neglected, but the plantations 
had more the characters of cultivation, the trees being in lines, 34 feet apart, with 30 feet 
between the rows. The population consists of about 120, 53 adult males with a white 
manager, M. Gaston de Comarmond. At first the people were perhaps rather afraid of 
us, but ended by making great friends with the ‘ Xanthus’ crew, for whom they got up 
fish-spearing excursions by torch-light and coconut-husking competitions. 
On the whole, we can now look back on our stay in Egmont with considerable satis- 
faction. It was the period of spring-tides, and we were enabled to get out and collect 
upon the reefs both by day and night. The crew of the ‘ Xanthus,’ too, were by this 
time thoroughly experienced in collecting, and we managed to put down about twenty- 
five dredgings in the lagoon. The weather had been showery and was especially suitable 
for land-collecting; and we had by that time got accustomed to the peculiar modes of 
life adopted by most forms of insects. Although we preserved a considerable number of 
organisms, we found very few which had not been already obtained in the Chagos. We 
are led therefore to hope that the collections of marine and land faunas and floras which 
we have brought home are sufficiently extensive to be of real value for comparison with 
those of the Maldives and other areas of the Indian Ocean. At a glance it is obvious 
that all Chagos atolls are of purely oceanic type, and we may expect that when worked 
out they will give a firm basis on which to estimate the possibilities of distribution to 
newly formed land across wide areas of the ocean. 
The night of July 28 was spent at anchor in Diego Garcia lagoon, and the following 
day we sailed for Mauritius. Our first objectives were two submerged banks, to the 
south-east of the group. We anchored on them on following days, Hancock going off 
in the whaleboat and running lines of soundings out from the ship. It was unpleasant 
work, as there was a heavy swell caused by the strong south-east trade-wind, broken up 
into a confused sea by the shallowness of the banks. We had no time to explore either 
bank fully, but where we passed on and off each we saw no trace of any uprising rim. 
The sea was too milky to allow the bottom to be seen plainly, even in 10 to 12 fathoms, 
but we took 25 samples of the bottom with the snapper lead from each bank. From 
these and what we could see we judged that there was little coral-growth (though we 
picked up a fragment of Psammocora) and practically no Lithothamnia. Large areas 
appeared to be covered with spreading Alcyonaceans, between which was sand, almost 
entirely composed of the shells of pelagic species of Foraminifera. 
