THE VOYAGE OF THE "RATTLESNAKE"
The Objects of the Voyage--The Route--The Naturalist and the
Surgeon--Collecting and Dredging--Stay in Sydney--Adventures with
the Natives--Comparison with Darwin's Voyage on the _Beagle_.
Her Majesty's ship the _Rattlesnake_, one of the old class of 28-gun
ships, sailed from Plymouth for the Torres Straits and the Australian
seas on December 12, 1846. Her commander was Captain Owen Stanley, a
young but distinguished officer, the son of the Bishop of Norwich and
a brother of Dean Stanley, who afterwards played so great a part in
the social and religious history of England. She carried a complement
of 180 officers and men, and was attended by the _Bramble_ and the
_Castlereagh_, two small vessels of light draught, whose purpose was
to precede her in shallow waters. The young colonies of Australia were
developing commerce with the mother country, and the business of the
_Rattlesnake_ was to survey the waters round about the Torres Straits,
that the passage towards India on the homeward trip might be made
safer. Incidentally the vessel was to land a treasure of £50,000 at
the Cape of Good Hope, and another of £15,000 at the Mauritius. The
Admiralty Commissioners left full powers to Captain Stanley to carry
out the details of his mission according to his own judgment, but he
was solemnly warned upon two points. Many very unfortunate casualties
had occurred when sailors came in contact with the little-known
savages of the southern seas, and the Admiralty instructed him as
follows:
"In stretching off from the Barrier Reefs to the eastward, in
order to explore the safety of the sea intervening between them
and Louisiade and New Guinea, you will have occasion to approach
these shores, in which case you must constantly be on your guard
against the treacherous disposition of their inhabitants. All
barter for refreshments must be conducted under the eye of an
officer, and every pains be taken to avoid giving any just cause
of offence to their prejudices, especially with respect to their
women."
The second warning concerned grave international matters. European
politics were in the unsettled condition which, after the illusive
international courtesies of the Great Exhibition of 1851, ended in the
Crimean War, and it was feared that in the event of hostilities
breaking out, the zeal of the officers for their country might tempt
them to transcend their peaceful occupation. The instructions with
regard to this ran as follows:
"In the event of this country being involved in hostilities
during your absence, you will take care never to be surprised;
but you are to refrain from any act of aggression towards the
vessels or settlements of any nation with which we may be at war,
as expeditions employed on behalf of discovery and science have
always been considered by all civilised communities as acting
under a general safeguard."
The great scientific expeditions sent out in recent times by the
governments of Britain, Germany, and the United States, were fitted
with every convenience for the staff of naturalists, and the luxuries
and comforts of civilisation attended them round the world. The late
Professor Mosely, for instance, who was a naturalist on the English
_Challenger_ expedition, told the present writer of a pleasant way in
which a peculiarity of the deep sea was made to pay toll to the
comfort of those on board ship. The great ocean depths all over the
world, under the burning skies of the tropics, or below the arctic
ice-fields, are extremely cold, the water at the bottom always being
only a few degrees above freezing point. When the dredge brought up a
sample of the abysmal mud at a convenient time, it was used to ice the
wine for the officers' mess. There was, however, no cooled champagne
for Huxley.
"Life on board Her Majesty's ships in those days," he writes,
"was a very different affair from what it is now, and ours was
exceptionally rough, as we were often many months without
receiving letters or seeing any civilised people but ourselves.
In exchange, we had the interest of being about the latest
voyagers, I suppose, to whom it could be possible to meet with
people who knew nothing of fire-arms--as we did on the south
coast of New Guinea--and of making acquaintances with a variety
of interesting savage and semi-civilised people. But apart from
experience of this kind, and the opportunities offered for
scientific work, to me personally the cruise was extremely
valuable. It was good for me to live under sharp discipline; to
be down on the realities of existence by living on bare
necessities; to find out how extremely well worth living life
seemed to be when one woke up from a night's rest on a soft plank
with the sky for canopy, and cocoa and weevilly biscuit the sole
prospect for breakfast; and more especially to learn to work for
the sake of what I got for myself out of it, even if it all went
to the bottom and I myself along with it. My brother officers
were as good fellows as sailors ought to be, and generally are,
but naturally they neither knew nor cared anything about my
pursuits, nor understood why I should be so zealous in pursuit
of the objects which my friends the middies christened 'Buffons,'
after the title conspicuous on a volume of the _Suites à Buffon_
which stood on my shelf in the chart-room."
Huxley was only the surgeon on board the _Rattlesnake_, and his
pursuit of natural history was his own affair. There was a special
naturalist appointed to the expedition, no doubt chosen because four
years earlier, as assistant to Professor Jukes, he had been attached
as naturalist to the expedition of the _Fly_ in the same waters. His
name was John MacGillivray, and he was the son of an exceedingly able
naturalist whose reputation has been overshadowed by the greater names
of the middle century. William MacGillivray, the father, sometime
professor at the University of Aberdeen, was one of those driven by an
almost instinctive desire to the study of nature. In his youth, when
he was a poor lad, desiring to see as much as possible of his native
land, and above all to visit the great museums and libraries of the
south, he walked from Aberdeen to London with no luggage but a copy of
Smith's _Flora Britannica_. He was an ardent botanist, a collector of
insects and molluscs, and one of the pioneers in the anatomy of birds.
There are many curious allusions in his writings which seem to shew
that he too was beginning to doubt the fixity of species, and to guess
at the struggle for existence and survival of the fittest which the
great Darwin was the first to make a part of the knowledge of the
world. It must be confessed that his son John, the companion of
Huxley, had little of his father's ability. He was three years older
than Huxley, and broke off his medical course at the University of
Edinburgh to sail in the _Fly_. After the return of the _Rattlesnake_,
he was appointed in 1852 as naturalist to H.M.S. _Herald_, then
starting under Captain Denham for surveying work round the shores of
South America. He left that ship at Sydney, and after many years'
wandering about the southern seas, accounts of which he communicated
from time to time to Sydney newspapers, he died in 1867. He was a
zealous collector of plants and animals, but apparently cared little
for the study of his captures, either in life, in relation to their
surroundings, like Darwin, or for the structure of their bodies, like
Huxley. The somewhat unpleasing nature of his regard for animals
appears in the following story which he himself tells:
"While at dinner off Darnley Island near the Torres Straits, news
was brought that Dzum was under the stern in a canoe, shouting
out loudly for Dzoka (MacGillivray's native name), and, on going
up I found that he had brought off the barit, which after a deal
of trouble I struck a bargain for and obtained. It was a very
fine specimen of Cuscus Maculatus, quite tame and kept in a large
cage of split bamboo. Dzum seemed very unwilling to part with the
animal, and repeatedly enjoined me to take great care of it and
feed it well, which to please him I promised to do, although I
valued it merely for its skin, and was resolved to kill it for
that purpose at my first convenience."
On the other hand, MacGillivray paid great attention to native
languages, and collected vocabularies of some value. To him was
entrusted the task of writing an account of the voyage, and it is from
his rather dull pages, brightened by illustrations from Huxley's
sketches, that the incidents of the voyage are taken. The references
to Huxley in the narrative are slight, and seem to shew that no great
intimacy existed between the two young men, the one a naturalist by
profession, the other as yet a surgeon, but more devoted to natural
history than the naturalist. Such references as occur relate to
Huxley's constant occupations on shore, sketching natives and their
dwellings, and his apparatus on board for trawling, dredging, and
dissecting.
The voyage out was uneventful. The ship touched at Madeira and at Rio
de Janeiro, and then crossed the South Atlantic to Simon's Town at the
Cape of Good Hope, where the first quantity of treasure was to be
landed. There they found the colony distressed by the long continuance
of the Kaffir war. Prices for everything were extortionate, and the
colonists had no mind for any affairs than their own, so after a short
stay the voyagers were glad to set out for the Mauritius. That island,
although in the possession of Britain, still retained a strong impress
of its French occupation, and the travellers were interested by the
mixture of population inhabiting it.[B]
"Passing through the closely packed lines of shipping, and
landing as a stranger at Port Louis, perhaps the first thing to
engage attention is the strange mixture of
nations,--representatives, he might at first be inclined to
imagine, of half the countries of the earth. He stares at a
coolie from Madras with a breech-cloth and a soldier's jacket, or
a stately bearded Moor striking a bargain with a Parsee merchant.
A Chinaman with two bundles slung on a bamboo hurries past,
jostling a group of young Creole exquisites smoking their
cheroots at a corner, and talking of last night's Norma, or the
programme of the evening's performance at the Hippodrome in the
Champ de Mars. His eye next catches a couple of sailors reeling
out of a grogshop, to the amusement of a group of laughing
negresses, in white muslin dresses of the latest Parisian
fashion, contrasting strongly with a modestly attired Cingalese
woman, and an Indian ayah with her young charge. Amidst all this,
the French language prevails; and everything more or less
pertains of the French character, and an Englishman can scarcely
believe that he is in one of the colonies of his own country."
From Mauritius they proceeded to the English-looking colony of
Tasmania, and after a few days set out for Sydney, arriving there on
July 16th. The surveying officers had tedious work to do there, and
Huxley stayed in Sydney for three months. Then, and in the course of
three other prolonged stays in that town during the expedition, Huxley
entered into the society of the town and became a general favourite.
He is still remembered there, and the accompanying illustration[C] is
a copy of an original sketch of himself, now in the possession of an
Australian lady. He drew it on the fly-leaf of a volume of Lytton's
poems and presented it on her birthday to the little daughter of a
friend. At Sydney, too, he met and gained the love of the lady, then
Miss Henrietta A. Heathorn, who afterwards became his wife.
On October 11th the _Rattlesnake_ sailed northwards to begin the real
work of the expedition. The great island of New Guinea, lying to the
north of Australia, is separated from it only by the comparatively
narrow Torres Straits. Through these lies the natural route for the
commerce between Australia and the Northern Hemisphere. The eastward
prolongation of New Guinea, and the coast of Queensland, enclose
between them a great tropical sea which gradually converges to the
Straits. The waters are very tempestuous, and the navigation is made
more dangerous by the thousands of coral islands and coral reefs that
stud the ocean. Following the shoreline of Queensland, at a distance
of from ten to one hundred and fifty miles, and stretching for twelve
hundred and fifty miles, is the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, one
of the wonders of the world. The shelving floor of the ocean rises
nearly to the surface along this line, and vast colonies of coral
building creatures have formed their reefs up to the water's edge
along the ridge. The turbulent waves scouring over this living mass
have carved and moulded it into millions of fantastic islands,
sometimes heaping detached masses of dead debris high above the
surface of the water. At low tide the most wonderful fields of the
animal flowers of the sea are exposed. Some of them form branching
systems of hard skeletons like stony trees, the soft, brightly
coloured animals dotted over the stems like buds. Others form solid
masses; others, again, rounded skull like boulders, or elevations like
toadstools. The colours of the skeletons and the animals are vivid
scarlets and purples and greens. Sea anemones, shell-fish, and
starfish of the most vivid hues are as abundant as the corals.
Brilliant fish dart through the blossoms of the marine gardens, and
sea birds scream and wheel in the air. The whole region is a paradise
for the naturalist. Along the seaward side of the reef the great ocean
surges and thunders perpetually. Between it and the shore the quiet
channel glows under the tropical skies. It was amid such scenes as
these that the _Rattlesnake_ moved for nearly four years in the slow
work of taking soundings, fixing the exact position of channels
through the outer reef by slow triangular measurements, and generally
preparing for the safety of the commerce of all nations. The ship went
first up to Port Curtis in Brisbane; then fetched back to Sydney. Its
next trip was south to the strait between Tasmania and Australia,
then back to Sydney; then again along the Barrier Reef right up to the
Torres Straits. After work there, it returned again to Sydney, and
then set out for the Louisiade Archipelago, which stretches through
the coral sea south-eastward from New Guinea; then again to the
Australian shores of the Torres Straits, and finally arrived in Sydney
in March, 1850, where the Captain suddenly died, and the ship was
ordered to return to England.
Throughout the voyage MacGillivray and Huxley busied themselves with
collecting animals on sea and on shore. MacGillivray seems to have
taken for his share of the spoil chiefly such animals as provided
shells or skins or skeletons suitable for handing over to museums.
Huxley occupied himself incessantly with dissecting tools and with the
microscope, with results to be described in a later chapter. The
better equipped expeditions of modern times were provided with
elaborate appliances for bringing up samples of living creatures from
all depths of the floor of the ocean, and with complicated towing nets
for securing the floating creatures of the surface of the seas. The
_Rattlesnake_ naturalists had to content themselves with simple
apparatus devised by themselves. At an early period of the voyage
attempts were made to take deep soundings, but no bottom was reached
at a depth of two thousand four hundred fathoms, and their later work
was confined to surface animals or to inshore dredging in shallow
waters. They began near Rio.
"None of the ship's boats could be spared, so I [MacGillivray]
hired one pulled by four negro slaves who, although strong,
active fellows, had great objections to straining their backs at
the oar, when the dredge was down. No sieve having been
supplied, we were obliged to sift the contents of the dredge
through our hands--a tedious and superficial mode of examination.
Two days after, Mr. Huxley and I set to work in Botafogo Bay,
provided with a wire-gauze meat-cover and a curious machine for
cleaning rice; these answered capitally as substitutes for
sieves, and enabled us, by a thorough examination of the contents
of the dredge, to detect some forty-five species of Mollusca and
Radiata, some of which were new to science."
By "new to science" MacGillivray meant no more than that the
particular genera and species had not been captured before. Huxley, by
his anatomical work, showed many of the most familiar creatures in a
light "new to science," by revealing their true structure and
relationships.
"Among the acquisitions," MacGillivray goes on, "I may mention a
new species of Amphioxus, a genus of small fishes exhibiting more
anomalies than any other known to Ichthyologists, and the lowest
organisation found in the class. It somewhat resembles the
sand-eels of Britain in habits, like them moving with
extraordinary rapidity through the sand. By dint of bribery and
ridicule we had at length managed to get our boatmen to work
tolerably well, and when we were alike well-roasted by the sun
and repeatedly drenched, besides being tired out and hungry, they
had become quite submissive, and exchanged their grumbling for
merriment."
The towing net repeatedly produced a rich harvest. It was constructed
by themselves, and consisted of a bag of the bunting used for flags,
two feet deep, the mouth being sewn round a wooden hoop fourteen
inches in diameter; three pieces of cord, a foot and a half long, were
secured to the hoop at equal intervals and had their ends tied
together. This net was towed behind the ship by a stout cord. The
water passed through the meshes of the cloth and left behind in the
pocket any small floating animals.
Excursions ashore to the little savage islands or to the mainland were
a source of constant interest, and it cannot be doubted that the
acquaintance Huxley thus gained with many of the very low savages of
Australia and New Guinea prepared his mind for the revolutionary
doctrine of descent which he embraced a few years later. At the
present time, there are probably very few parts of earth where there
are yet to be found savages unaltered by civilisation. Some of the low
races with which Huxley came in contact are now extinct. All the
survivors have come in contact with white races, and their habits and
customs have been altered. Before long the total extinction of these
lower races is to be expected, and there will then be left an enormous
gap between the lower animals and the dominant, aggressive, yellow and
white races which are spreading over the earth and making the lower
races perish before them, as the smaller but more cunning European rat
has exterminated the native brown rat of Australia. In their various
excursions upon the Australian mainland they had no trouble of any
kind with the natives. These were at first suspicious of the doings of
the white men, and their total ignorance of the use of firearms
tempted them to rashness; but a few friendly gifts, and the exercise
of tact in negotiating exchanges with them, made all the encounters
pass off pleasantly. On the other hand, in the Louisiade Archipelago
where the savages were of a higher type, difficulties constantly
occurred. On one occasion, in a bay on the south side of Joannet
Island the party was attacked.
"In the grey of the morning the look-outs reported the approach
of three canoes with about ten men in each. On two or three
persons shewing themselves in the bow of the pinnace, in front of
the rain awning, the natives ceased paddling, as if baulked in
their design of surprising the large boat; but, after a short
consultation, they came alongside in their usual noisy manner.
After a stay of about five minutes only they pushed off to the
galley, and some more sham bartering was attempted, but they had
nothing to give in exchange for the wares they so much coveted.
In a short time the rudeness and overbearing insolence of the
natives had risen to a pitch which left no doubt of their hostile
intentions. The anchor was got up, when some of the blacks seized
the painter, and others, in trying to capsize the boat, brought
the gunwale down to the water's edge, at the same time grappling
with the men to pull them out, and dragging the galley inshore
towards the shoal-water. The bowman, with the anchor in his hand,
was struck on the head with a stone-headed axe. The blow was
repeated, but fortunately took effect only on the wash-streak.
Another of the crew was struck at with a similar weapon, but
warded off the blow, although held fast by one arm, when, just as
the savage was making another stroke, Lieutenant Dayman, who up
till now had exercised the utmost forbearance, fired at him with
a musket. The man did not drop, although wounded in the thigh.
But even this, unquestionably their first experience of firearms,
did not intimidate the natives, one of whom, standing on a block
of coral, threw a spear which passed across the breast of one of
the boat's crew and lodged in the bend of one arm, opening a
vein. They raised a loud shout when the spear was seen to take
effect, and threw several others which missed. Lieutenant
Simpson, who had been watching what was going on, then fired from
the pinnace with buckshot and struck them, when, finding that the
large boat, though at anchor, could assist the smaller one, the
canoes were paddled inshore in great haste and confusion. Some
more musket shots were fired, and the galley went in chase
endeavouring to turn the canoes, so as to bring them under fire
of the pinnace's twelve-pounder howitzer, which was speedily
mounted and fired. The shot either struck one of the canoes or
went within a few inches of the mark, on which the natives
instantly jumped overboard into the shallow water, making for the
mangroves, which they succeeded in reaching, dragging their
canoes with them. Two rounds of grape-shot crashing through the
branches dispersed the party, but afterwards they moved two of
the canoes out of sight. The remaining one was brought out after
breakfast by the galley under cover of the pinnace, and was towed
off to some distance. The paddles having been taken out and the
spears broken and left in her, she was let go to drift down
toward a village whence the attacking party were supposed to have
come. Some blood in this canoe, although not the one most aimed
at, showed that the firing had not been ineffective. This act of
deliberate treachery was perpetrated by persons who had always
been well treated by us, for several of the natives present were
recognised as having been alongside the ship in Coral Haven.
This, their first act of positive hostility, affords, I think,
conclusive evidence of the savage disposition of the natives of
this part of the Louisiade Archipelago when incited by the hope
of plunder, and shews that no confidence should ever be reposed
in them, unless, perhaps in the presence of a numerically
superior force, or in the close vicinity of a ship. At the same
time, the boldness of these savages in attacking, with thirty men
in three canoes, two boats known to contain at least twenty
persons--even in the hopes of taking them by surprise--and in not
being at once driven off upon feeling the novel and deadly
effects of firearms, shews no little amount of bravery."
On their last visit to Cape York, in the extreme north of Australia,
the party had the remarkable experience of rescuing a white woman from
captivity among the natives.
"In the afternoon some of our people on shore were surprised to
see a young white woman come up to claim their protection from a
party of natives from whom she had recently made her escape, and
who she thought would otherwise bring her back. Of course she
received every attention, and was taken on board the ship by the
first boat, when she told her story which is briefly as follows:
Her name is Barbara Thomson. She was born at Aberdeen in
Scotland, and, along with her parents, emigrated to New South
Wales. About four years and a half ago she left Moreton Bay with
her husband in a small cutter, called the _America_, of which he
was the owner, for the purpose of picking up some of the oil from
the wreck of a whaler, lost on the Bampton shoal, to which place
one of her late crew undertook to guide them; their ultimate
intention was to go on to Port Essington. The man who acted as
pilot was unable to find the wreck, and after much quarreling on
board in consequence, and the loss of two men by drowning and of
another who was left on a small uninhabited island, they made
their way up to the Torres Straits, where, during a gale of wind
their vessel struck upon a reef on the eastern Prince of Wales
Island. The two remaining men were lost in attempting to swim on
shore through the surf, but the woman was afterwards rescued by a
party of natives on a turtling excursion, who, when the gale
subsided, swam on board and supported her on shore between two of
their number. One of these blacks, Boroto by name, took
possession of the woman as his share of the plunder; she was
compelled to live with him, but was well treated by all the men,
although many of the women, jealous of the attention shewn her,
for a long time evinced anything but kindness. A curious
circumstance secured for her the protection of one of the
principal men of the tribe. This person, acting upon the belief,
universal throughout Australia and the islands of the Torres
Strait, so far as hitherto known, that white people are the
ghosts of the aborigines, fancied that in the stranger he
recognised a long-lost daughter, and at once admitted her into
the relationship which he thought had formerly subsisted between
them. She was immediately acknowledged by the whole tribe as one
of themselves, thus securing an extensive connection in relatives
of all denominations. The headquarters of the tribe being on an
island which all vessels passing through the Torres Strait from
the eastward must approach within two or three miles, she had the
mortification of seeing from twenty to thirty or more ships go
through every summer without anchoring in the neighbourhood, so
as to afford the slightest opportunity of making her escape. Last
year she heard of our two vessels being at Cape York, only twenty
miles distant from some of the tribe who had communicated with us
and had been well treated, but they would not take her over and
watched her even more narrowly than before. On our second and
present visit, however, which the Cape York people immediately
announced by smoke signals to their friends, she was successful
in persuading some of her more immediate friends to bring her
across to the mainland within a short distance of where the
vessels lay. The blacks were credulous enough to believe that as
she had been so long with them and had been so well treated, she
did not intend to leave them,--only 'she felt a strong desire to
see the white people once more and shake hands with them': adding
that she would be certain to purchase some axes, knives, tobacco,
and other much-prized articles."
Although the external adventures of the _Rattlesnake_ party were less
varied and exciting than might have been expected in a voyage of four
years in the tropic seas and among barbarian tribes, the mental
adventures through which Huxley passed in the time must have been of
the most surprising kind. It was a four-years' course in the great
university of nature, and when he had finished it he was no longer a
mere student, capricious and unsettled in his mental tastes and
inclinations, but had set his face steadily towards his future
life-work. It is interesting to compare the importance in Huxley's
life of the _Rattlesnake_ voyage with the importance in Darwin's life
of the voyage on the _Beagle_ undertaken some fifteen years earlier.
Huxley, when he started, was a young surgeon with a taste of a vague
kind for dissecting and for drawing the peculiarities of structure of
different animals revealed by the knife and the microscope. Day after
day, month after month, year after year, in the abundant leisure his
slight professional duties left him, he dissected and drew, dissected
and drew, animal after animal, as he got them from the dredge or
tow-net, or from the surface of the coral reefs. He was not in any
sense of the word a collecting naturalist. The identification and
naming of species interested him little. What he cared for was, he
tells us, "the architectural and engineering part of the business: the
working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and
thousands of divers living constructions, and the modifications of
similar apparatuses to serve different ends." And so, on the
_Rattlesnake_, and in his work in continuation of the _Rattlesnake_
investigations,--which occupied most of his time for a few years after
his return to London,--there was gradually growing up in his mind a
dim conception of the animal kingdom as a group of creatures, not
built on half a dozen or more separate plans or types, each
unconnected with the other, but as a varied set of modifications of a
single type.
When Darwin set out on the _Beagle_, unlike Huxley, he was an
enthusiastic collecting naturalist. He had wandered from county to
county in England adding new specimens to his collections of
butterflies and beetles. As the _Beagle_ went round the world visiting
remote islands, far from land in the centre of the waters,
archipelagoes of islands crowding together, islands hugging the shore
of continents, and the great continents of the old and new worlds, he
continued to collect and to classify. Gradually the resemblances and
differences between the creatures inhabiting different parts of the
earth began to strike him as exhibiting an orderly plan. He saw that
under apparently the same conditions of food and temperature and
moisture, in different parts of the world the genera and species were
different, and that they were most alike in regions between which
there was the most recent chance of migrations having taken place. In
the quietness of England, while Huxley was on the _Rattlesnake_,
Darwin was slowly working towards the explanation of all he had seen:
towards the conception that animals and plants had spread slowly from
common centres, becoming more and more different from each other as
they spread. He realised on his voyage that species had come into
existence by descent with modification, and before long he was to
publish to the world in the _Origin of Species_ a vast and convincing
bulk of evidence as to the actual fact of a common descent for all the
different existing organisms, and, in his theory of natural selection,
a reasonable explanation of how the fact of evolution had come about.
Darwin's greatest ally in bringing the new idea before the world was
Huxley, and Huxley was teaching himself the absolute unity of the
living world. The two men were dissimilar in tastes and temperament,
and they were at work on quite different sides of nature. When the
time came, Huxley, with his commanding knowledge of the structure of
animals, was ready to support Darwin and to illustrate and amplify his
arguments by a thousand anatomical proofs. It is a curious and
dramatic coincidence to realise that both men learned their very
different lessons under very similar circumstances in the tropical
seas of the Southern Hemisphere.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote B: _Narrative of the Voyage of H.M.S. "Rattlesnake_," by
John MacGillivray, F.R.G.S. 2 vols. T.W. Boone, London, 1852.]
[Footnote C: This sketch was reproduced and described in _Natural
Science_, vol. vii., p. 381, and is now reproduced here by the
courtesy of the proprietors.]