200 FOREST LIFE AND SPORT IN INDIA 
the Asiatic Steamship Company’s boat waited at the 
wharf to take us to a new country, to a land of 
truly primeval forests inhabited by the remnant of a 
savage race, but ruined by the presence of thousands 
of India’s worst criminals. 
A day and a half on a slow-going steamer brings 
the traveller from Rangoon to the harbour of Port 
Blair, and perhaps it is not only to the passengers 
that there comes a feeling of relief at having escaped 
a meeting with the cyclones which apparently have 
their birthplace to the south, and their playground 
in the Bay of Bengal. Some of these passengers 
there were who would have been indifferent to 
barometric disturbances even if they had been 
acquainted with their theory: there were men who 
sat silently behind iron bars with manacled limbs, 
on the way to expiate crimes of jealousy or of passion 
by long sentences of exiles, from whence they had 
little hope of returning; there were others, pro- 
fessional criminals, who had little to lose, for they 
had no home—a word as sacred in India as in 
England—who looked upon transportation as an un- 
pleasant episode in their career, and made light of it, 
while their companions were perhaps fretting against 
the treachery of intimates or at the failure of their 
revenge. 
Port Blair, with its quiet, transparent water into 
which one may gaze fathoms deep, with its cocoanut 
palms and undulating hills, is always beautiful ; 
while the coast line as it trends away in the distance, 
outlined by the breakers on the coral reefs or by the 
mountains covered thick with forest trees that rear 
their grey stems a hundred and more feet into the 
