180 
VOYAGE TO THE 
CHAP, 
VIII. 
Feb. 
1826. 
the interpreter on board the Dart, amount altogether to about a hundred 
souls. 
As my stay at the island was limited to four days, my time 
was much occupied at the observatory, and I am indebted to the 
journals of the officers for many interesting particulars relating to other 
parts of it, and to its natural productions. 
By our trigonometrical survey. Bow Island is thirty miles long by 
an average of five miles broad. It is similar to the other coral islands 
already described, confining within a narrow band of coral a spacious 
lagoon, and having its windward side higher and more wooded than 
the other ; which indeed, with the exception of a few clusters of trees 
and heaps of sand, is little better than a reef. The sea in several places 
washes into the lagoon, but there is no passage even for a boat, except 
that by which the ship entered, which is sometimes dangerous to boats, 
in consequence of the overfalls from the lagoon, especially a little after 
the time of high water. It is to be hoped that the rapid current which 
sets through the channel will prevent the growth of the coral, and 
leave the lagoon always accessible to shipping. It lies at the north 
side of the island, and may be known by two straggling cocoa-nut trees 
near it, on the western side, and a clump of trees on the other. 
The bottom of the lagoon is, in parts, covered with a fine white 
sand, and it is thickly strewed with coral knolls ; the upper parts of 
which overhang the lower, though they do not at once rise in this form 
from the bottom, but from small hillocks. AVe found comparatively 
few beneath the surface, though there are some ; at the edge of such as 
are exposed, there is usually six or seven fathoms water ; receding from 
it, the lead gradually descends to the general level, of about twenty 
fathoms. The lagoon contains an abundance of shell-fish, particularly 
those of the pearl-oyster kind. The party in the employ of the Dart 
sometimes collected seventeen hundred of these shells in one day. 
The height of water in the lagoon is subject to the variations of 
the tides of the ocean ; but it suffers so many disturbances from the 
waves, which occasionally inundate the low parts of the surrounding 
land, that neither the rjse of the tide nor the time of high water can be 
estimated with any degree of certainty. Were the communication be- 
