19073 Astrolabe Reef 



with palms and screw-pines — Pandanus — and on 

 the south shore are shehered inlets filled with man- 

 grove, which, walking into the sea, forms tangled 

 tidewater thickets. There, as in Samoa, the uncanny 

 pop-eyed goby or skippy, obviously a fish but with 

 the habits of the lizard, hops about among the leaves 

 in search of insects. 



Fijians interested me. As a rule they are larger Fijians 

 than Samoans, and their hair — unlike that of the 

 natives of the islands farther east — is very curly. 

 This fact would seem to indicate a hybrid race, a 

 cross between the negroids of the New Hebrides and 

 the Solomon Islands and straight-haired people like 

 the Samoans, Tongans, and Maoris. 



Studying the chart as we sailed by the long, coral- 

 guarded coast of Kandavu, I saw the words "Astro- 

 labe Reef," and recalled the experience of my illus- 

 trious predecessor, Rene Constant Quoy, who in 1827, 

 as the corvette Astrolabe seemed about to be piled on 

 the reefs in a hurricane, stuck resolutely to the work 

 on which he was then engaged. He thus finished the Quay's 

 painting of a handsome labroid fish, dark maroon and ^'''"'*"s 

 violet with a great golden saddle on the shoulder, the 

 head bespangled with golden spots and the fins 

 trimmed with scarlet. Facing the "perdition" in 

 which ship, fish, and artist seemed soon to be en- 

 gulfed, he called the new species Labrus perditio. 

 But artist and painting both survived, though not 

 the fish, and the dramatic name still holds. Accord- 

 ing to Cuvier, Quoy executed his sketch while they 

 were on the edge of 



very dangerous reefs, on the verge of losing their ship, the shore 

 lined with ferocious natives, " insulaires feroces," waiting to 

 seize the debris of the wreck. In this position the Astrolabe 



I 203 3 



