56 A NOVICE IN THE ANDAMANS 



grounds beyond Cashmere, from the wind-swept deserts 

 of Baluchistan to the tepid jungles of Burma, you 

 will always find, rudely fenced in, some humble little 

 green monument upon which imagination may, with 

 likelihood to lead it, trace the proud inscription, " Quce 

 caret or a cruore nostro P " 



The little graveyard here was the resting-place of 

 the family of a former lighthouse-keeper. The wife 

 had brought them to share her husband's exile, and 

 they had all been drowned in attempting to land in 

 bad weather. 



As, during my service on the Investigator, we 

 visited the Andamans and Cocos several times again, 

 I shall defer speaking of the natural history of the 

 islands until another occasion. 



It is not worth while for me to record my hasty 

 impressions of the pigmy Negrito inhabitants of the 

 Andamans, who have been carefully studied from the 

 sociological point of view by residents like Man and 

 Portman, and from the anthropological point of view 

 by numerous European workers of established reputation. 



Nor, at this distance of time, can I say anything 

 about the Andamans as a penal settlement, more than 

 that in the general condition of the better-behaved 

 convicts I seemed to see in progress the conversion 

 of an incoherent mass of dissipated humanity into a 

 coherent smooth-working social machine, without any 

 painfully-evident compulsive force. 



