8184 



A Visit to Pratas Island. 



my visit to the Pratas Shoal, which possibly may interest some of your readers, as 

 conveying some notion of what these isolated coral islands are like. During our trip 

 to the Reef, in the ' Dove,' April 20th, 1858, about one hundred miles from Hong 

 Kong, a padi-bird is observed on the wing, making futile attempts to get on board. 

 This is so far interesting, as tending to confirm the idea that, after the web-footed 

 aquatic birds, like the albatrosses, gulls and gannets, the wading birds form the 

 earliest colonists of oceanic atolls and other islets. When T land on the island, 

 through the surf, like Robinson Crusoe, I light a fire and make a tent of the boat's 

 sail, choosing for my bivouac a little sheltered glen, with bushes of Scaviola on one 

 side and stunted Tournefortia trees on the other. Having arranged the house to my 

 satisfaction, I walk round the island. Near the sea I observe a carpet of creeping grass, the 

 flowers with large white anthers, and bearing a delicate feathery stigma, and gemmed 

 all over with Convolvulus flowers — red, white and pink. At the first blush nothing 

 was visible inland but dense masses of green glaucous shrubs, mostly Scaviola, with 

 here and there traces of Tournefortia. As I advance, however, I see open spaces, 

 with heaps of fine coral sand, white as the driven snow. The bones of shipwrecked 

 men, mingled with those of the turtle on which they had fed, are bleaching in the sun. 

 The heat is intense, and, with dozens of gannets hovering over my head, I bathe in 

 the view of the shoreless ocean. So bold grow the gannets as to threaten my eyes, 

 and I leave the water to pelt them with fragments of coral, for stones there are none. 

 The fin of a shark looks rather ominous of evil, so I dress and proceed with my explor- 

 ation. I capture a white heron, with a crest of two long feathers ; I then rob a gan- 

 net's nest of two light green eggs, about as large as those of a duck ; I come to a little 

 jos-house filled with offerings to the Chinese goddess of the sea ; looking for beetles 

 in the undergrowth, I am stung by a little scorpion : I observe, moreover, that Ocy- 

 pode, or horsemen crabs, lun about the sand; that a huge locust everywhere leaps 

 about, and that a splendid humming-bird hawk-moth hovers incessantly about the 

 white, fissured flowers of the Scaviola lobelia. On the outskirts of the Uliputian jungle 

 are carpets of crassulaceous plants, in which the land-crabs, Thelphusa and Ocypode, 

 form large, deep burrows. I now come to a double lagoon, divided by a tongue of 

 land, and near the end of which Pandanus and other trees form quite a miniature 

 picture of a tropical forest. Madrepore masses, left high and dry, fringe one margin 

 of the lagoon ; hermit-crabs abound ; and among the herbage I notice rounded 

 masses of pumice-stone, which must have been floated hither by currents from Formosa, 

 for I cannot discover any traces of a volcanic origin for my little island. In fact it 

 appears to be merely one end of the horse-shoe coral reef the ' Dove' is now surveying, 

 elevated above the level of the sea and covered with vegetation. Wading birds are 

 seen fishing in the waters of the shallow lagoon, sandpipers on the yielding sands, 

 snipes on the soft, oozy ground of the margin, and herons standing in the water. The 

 number of gannets on the island is astounding; the ground in some parts is strewn 

 with their eggs, two in each shallow nest of sticks, and often, instead of eggs, two 

 callow unfledged young ones. The contents of their pelican pouch I observe to be 

 chiefly flying fish, the flavour of which the infant gannets appear to fully appreciate. 

 Arthur Adams. 



