CHAP. ni. ARRIVAL OF SHIPWRECKED PASSENGERS. 63 



its owner a prize, and he perhaps felt as rich, and found as 

 much satisfaction in the award, as an English amateur would 

 do who had successfully exhibited in London a saccolabium 

 or a vanda from Nepal or Calcutta. This exhibition was 

 quite a fete day for the higher classes. A band attended. 

 The acting Grovernor, Greneral Sutherland, and his lady, to- 

 gether with his suite, came during the afternoon ; a number 

 of military and naval officers were present; and for some 

 time the several avenues around the flowers — the most at- 

 tractive objects — were literally thronged with company, pre- 

 senting, in this respect, on a smaller scale, a similar scene to 

 the gatherings on an English exhibition day at Chiswick or 

 the Eegent's Park. 



The Sechelles, from which some of the most beautiful 

 fabrications exhibited had been brought, comprise a number 

 of low islands to the northward of JNIauritius, which often 

 prove dangerous to vessels navigating that part of the Indian 

 Ocean. Two wrecks had recently occurred amongst them ; 

 and on the 26th of September the shipwrecked crew and pas- 

 sengers of an English vessel arrived at Port Louis under cir- 

 cumstances which excited very deep and general sympathy. 

 The " Meridian," a fine new ship of nearly 600 tons' burden, 

 with a valuable cargo, and eighty-four passengers, making, 

 with the crew, 108 souls, sailed from England on the 4th of 

 June, and on the evening of the 24th of August struck on 

 the rocks on the south-west point of Amsterdam, the smallest 

 of two solitary, uninhabited, and rocky islands, situated in the 

 Southern Ocean, midway between the Cape of Grood Hope and 

 Kew Holland. On the first shock the captain had rushed on 

 deck, and was almost immediately washed overboard and 

 drowned, as were also the cook and one passenger. The force 

 of the sea was so great, that soon after midnight the main- 

 mast fell over the side of the vessel, the upper end reaching 

 to the shore. About the same time the strongly built new 



