52 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ORNITHOLOGY OF INDIA. 



injurious to all iron immersed in it, buoys, chain cables, iron 

 barges and the like oxidizing with unusual rapidity. Not one 

 single sea bird was to be seen about the harbour. 



The neighbourhood of Port Blair has been already so 

 thoroughly worked by Davison, whom I sent down three months 

 ago, and avIio is now awaiting us at Camorta, that Ave would not 

 waste time there, and so the moment the steam barge, which 

 General Stewart most kindly placed at our disposal, could get up 

 steam, we started in her to Macpherson's Straits, where the Scotia 

 was to pick us up on her way to the Nieobars. 



Although we ran down close in shore the whole way to Bird- 

 nest Cape, every one eagerly on the look-out, Ave failed to see 

 one single bird of any description. The South Andaman, which 

 we thus coasted for some 14 miles, presented, throughout the 

 same characters, a ridge of rocks or reef on Avhich the surf Avas 

 breaking lustily, glittering and sparkling in the bright sun, little 

 strips of the whitest possible coral beaches, fringed and bounded 

 by dense mangrove belts composed of trees of many species, those 

 nearest the water low and of the brightest emerald green, those 

 behind more lofty and of a bluer tinge, all backed up by magnifi- 

 cent evergreen forest trees rising tier above tier to the summits of 

 the ridge of low hills (from six to eight hundred feet in elevation) 

 that run down the whole Avay near the coast. Only at Bird- 

 nest Cape itself, Ave have a small bare treeless promontory, Avhose 

 grey weather-beaten rocky precipices contrast strangely with 

 the intense verdure of the rest of the picture. Rounding the 

 Cape Ave stood on inside Macpherson's Straits, and landing 

 some of the party at Escape Bay, Ave steamed on right through 

 the Straits. 



Nothing could exceed the beauty of the scene. The Straits 

 vary from a quarter to nearly a mile in Avidth ; the water still, as in 

 some little mountain tarn, clear as crystal, here green, there blue 

 of an intensity known only in the tropics, everywhere paved 

 Avith coral reefs and plateaus, clustered over with marvellously 

 colored sponges, zoophytes, and corallines, and haunted by 

 innumerable shoals of still more brilliantly tinted fish ; it Avas 

 like looking down into a garden of another world to that 

 in Avhich my work-day life had passed. On either side 

 rising from the very bosom of the Avater the mangroves 

 stretched a broad unbroken emerald zone around the base of the 

 hills, Avhich overlook, in places almost overhang, the Straits 

 throughout, and on their southern shores, on Rutland Island, 

 rise to an elevation of 2,000 feet. Magnificent forests clothe these 

 hills. Huge trees, amongst AA T hich the Mimusops inclica and 



