ultimately obliged to leave the place.
The Malays are now nominally in a state of freedom, and certainly are
so, as far as regards their personal treatment; but in most other
points they are considered as slaves. From their discontented state,
from the repeated removals from islet to islet, and perhaps also from a
little mismanagement, things are not very prosperous. The island has
no domestic quadruped, excepting the pig, and the main vegetable
production is the cocoa-nut. The whole prosperity of the place depends
on this tree: the only exports being oil from the nut, and the nuts
themselves, which are taken to Singapore and Mauritius, where they are
chiefly used, when grated, in making curries. On the cocoa-nut, also,
the pigs, which are loaded with fat, almost entirely subsist, as do the
ducks and poultry. Even a huge land-crab is furnished by nature with
the means to open and feed on this most useful production.
The ring-formed reef of the lagoon-island is surmounted in the greater
part of its length by linear islets. On the northern or leeward side,
there is an opening through which vessels can pass to the anchorage
within. On entering, the scene was very curious and rather pretty; its
beauty, however, entirely depended on the brilliancy of the surrounding
colours. The shallow, clear, and still water of the lagoon, resting in
its greater part on white sand, is, when illumined by a vertical sun,
of the most vivid green. This brilliant expanse, several miles in
width, is on all sides divided, either by a line of snow-white breakers
from the dark heaving waters of the ocean, or from the blue vault of
heaven by the strips of land, crowned by the level tops of the
cocoa-nut trees. As a white cloud here and there affords a pleasing
contrast with the azure sky, so in the lagoon, bands of living coral
darken the emerald green water.
The next morning after anchoring, I went on shore on Direction Island.
The strip of dry land is only a few hundred yards in width; on the
lagoon side there is a white calcareous beach, the radiation from which
under this sultry climate was very oppressive; and on the outer coast,
a solid broad flat of coral-rock served to break the violence of the
open sea. Excepting near the lagoon, where there is some sand, the
land is entirely composed of rounded fragments of coral. In such a
loose, dry, stony soil, the climate of the intertropical regions alone
could produce a vigorous vegetation. On some of the smaller islets,
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