ULAEUA. 255 



whom lie had had only bad reports, and begged us not 

 to go shooting round about this village, but to make for an- 

 other where he was known. After liaving lost nearly half 

 an hour in conferring, we returned to our boat, and went 

 and landed on a nice coral beach near a village situated to 

 the left and facing the first village, where we went ashore. 

 The island of Ulakua is low and uniformly flat, not the 

 least eminence being visible. The shore, as fixr as I could 

 see, is very rough, with coral rock in most places. There 

 is a cliff along the shore some 15 or 20 feet high, from 

 which huge blocks of coral have been detached in many 

 places. The island seems to be more of coral formation 

 than any I have seen, except Savage Island. It has evidently 

 been uplieaved, and probably rather roughly too. I picked 

 up on the beach a great many pieces of flint scattered about 

 among the broken up coral ; one wonders how it got there. 

 I could find no lava or other kinds of rock, and there does 

 not appear to be any great depth of soil. The cocoa-nut 

 trees, however, are in great profusion, grow very high, and 

 yield large quantities of fruit, of which we had our share, 

 the natives giving us on our way as much of it as we could 

 possibly desire. On that part of the beach where we landed 

 we found a great number of fish-stakes put up in a curious 



covered with a black varnish, one end of which was engraved with a 

 flower of nine petals enclosed in a Vandyke border, the incised jjarts 

 being filled with white paint. Both are now in the Christy Col- 

 lection, together with a larger and more ornamented one which Mr. 

 Franks, of the British Museum, was fortunate enough to meet with 

 at Hamburg, and which no doubt belongs to this group. 



