118 "ALBATROSS" TROPICAL PACIFIC EXPEDITION. 



Nukutavake. 



Plates 70, figs. 3, 4 ; 71, 201, 203. 



Nukutavake is another interesting island from the fact that it also has no 

 lagoon. It is about five mUes long and not more than one and a half miles 

 wide. As seen approached from the north, it appears highest at the north 

 point, where there is a high shingle beach with a wide reef flat. The 

 beach extends half-way towards the other extremity of the island, and is 

 in many places edged with beach rock ledges extending along the foot 

 of the coral sand or shingle beach. The island is a very narrow ridge 

 which has been formed by beaches thrown up on opposite sea faces thus grad- 

 ually building up the outer rim of the island, leaving the interior somewhat 

 depressed, or rather lower than the outer beaches. One of the beaches is 

 fully twenty feet high, and from its crown the land falls off very rapidly. 



The reef flat platform is about 150 feet wide, with an occasional outcrop 

 of old ledge along the face of the high coral sand beach facing the village. 

 A section across Nukutavake from the west shows a very steep outer beach, 

 either shingle or sand, sloping very gradually inland, the inland .slope covered 

 at first with coarse coral shingle, passing gradually into finer material and 

 then into fine soil in the central part of the island, occupied by three or four 

 depressions or sinks, many of them full of water, ruiming in general parallel 

 to the trend of the island. We come then upon the inland slope of the beach 

 of the opposite side, which is ver}- much steeper, rising rapidly to a consider- 

 able height and sloping abruptly to the sea face. In the depressions we 

 could see beach rock and recent conglomerate cropping out, and fragments 

 of coral and coral boulders more or less cemented togetlier. 



Where we examined tlie island it was about half a mile wide. The 

 whole of the south side of Nukutavake is faced b}' a line of dunes more 

 or less overgrown with grass or low vegetation. Pandanus are exceedingly 

 numerous on this side of the island. The dunes have killed a large tract 

 of Pandanus, and through their slopes project dead bushes and stumps of all 

 sizes of Pandanus, cocoanuts and other trees. On tlie east side the sand 

 dunes are bare. The sand dunes which are characteristic of the south face 

 of this island rise in places to fully 30 feet above the top of the beach, as 



