It is really impossible to describe the beauty of the scene before us.  Submarine coral forests, of every colour, studded with sea-flowers, anemones, and echinidae, of a brilliancy only to be seen in dreamland, shoals of the brightest and swiftest fish darting and flashing in and out; shells, everyone of which was fit to hold the place of honour in a conchologist’s collection, moving slowly along with their living inmates:  this is what we saw when we looked down, from the side of the boat, into the depths below.  The surface of the water glittered with every imaginable tint, from the palest aquamarine to the brightest emerald, from the pure light blue of the turquoise to the deep dark blue of the sapphire, and was dotted here and there with patches of red, brown, and green coral, rising from the mass below.  Before us, on the shore, there spread the rich growth of tropical vegetation, shaded by palms and cocoa-nuts, and enlivened by the presence of native women in red, blue, and green garments, and men in motley costumes, bringing fish, fowls, and bunches of cocoa-nuts, borne, like the grapes brought back from the land of Canaan by the spies, on poles.

As soon as we touched the shore the men rushed forward to meet us, and to shake hands, and, having left the muskets and revolvers judiciously out of sight in the boat, we were conducted to a cluster of huts, made of branches, or rather leaves, of the palm-tree, tied by their foot-stalks across two poles, and hanging down to the ground.  Here we were met by the women and children, who, likewise, all went through the ceremony of shaking hands with us, after which the head-woman, who was very good-looking, and was dressed in a cherry-coloured calico gown, with two long plaits of black hair hanging down her back, spread a mat for me to sit upon just outside the hut.  By this time there was quite a little crowd of people assembled round, amongst whom I noticed one woman with a baby, who had her hair sticking straight out all round her head, and another who held a portion of her dress constantly before her face.  After the gentlemen had walked away she removed the cloth, and I then saw that her nose had been cut off.  Most of the women were good-looking, with dark complexions and quantities of well-greased, neatly-plaited black hair, but we did not see a single young girl, though there were plenty of children and babies, and lots of boys, the latter of whom, like some of the older women, had only a piece of palm matting round their loins.  We therefore came to the conclusion that the girls must have been sent away intentionally when the approach of the yacht was observed.

[Illustration:  Our First Landing in the South Pacific, Hao or Bow Island.]

As soon as I was seated, the head-woman told one of the men to knock down some cocoa-nuts from the trees close by, and after cutting off the ends she offered us a drink of the fresh cool milk, which was all the sweeter and better for the fact that the nuts were not nearly ripe.  While this was going on, the natives brought piles of cocoa-nuts, fish, and fowls, and laid them at our feet as a present.  Some of the fish were of a dark brown colour, like bream, others were long and thin, with a pipe-like nose and four fins, somewhat resembling the wings of a flying-fish.