DR. GUILLE113ARD'S "CRUISE OF THE ' MARCHE SA.' "* Cuatcres

it is to note the different ways in which exploration, whether it be simply geographical, or whether thereto be superadded researches in some other science, is carried on in these days. Thirty years ago, Mr. Wallace went knocking about the Indian Archipelago, for the most part in native crafts, putting up with inconveniences of every sort, and attended only by a few native assistants Not so long since, there was Mr. Henry 0. Forbes, whose excellent book was noticed in these columns in 1885 (Spectator, September 12th, 1885). Re had far greater advantages in his voyaginge than his great prede- 'maser, but yet met with hardships enough. New we have Dr. Guillemard, who traversed many of the same waters, and occa- sionally looked in at many of the same ports, but luxuriated nearly all the while in the comforts of a well-found steam-yacht. By this comparison we certainly hint no detraction in regard to

• The Cruise of the • Marchese' to Kamchatka and New Guinea. With Notlors of Formosa. Liu-kiu, ant various Islands of the Malay Archipelago. By F. He H. Guillemard, M.D. 2,515. London Murray.

the last of this trio of naturalist-travellers. Let us say at once that the book before us shows him to be a worthy follower of his predecessors, quite as venturesome in spirit, as well as hardy in body ; and in some respects it may be justly accounted superior to theirs, as will presently be evident. The first- fruits of the harvest in the Malay Archipelago were, of course, won by Mr. Wallace ; but so abundant is the crop there, that the gatherings of his successors have great value in our garners, and it is clear that much more remains to be reaped ere those who will have to be called gleaners begin their operations, even though Dutch and Italian naturalists have been working in the same field.

Now, the superiority of the present book over those to which we have referred lies in the greater variety of the subject-matter. Dr. Guillemard has to tell us not of the Malay Archipelago only. His Mend, Mr. Kettlewell, the owner of the yacht Marchese,' first took her and him to China, Japan, and, more than all, to Kamschatim—a country perhaps less known to Englishmen than most that could be readily named—and the account given of it is so exceedingly interesting, that we almost regret that it was not made the subject of a separate book, for our author could doubtless have told us much more about it that would be worth the telling than he has done, though he devotes nearly the whole of his first volume thereto,—giving ne even a condensed history of its conquest and subsequent colonisation by the Russians. To begin with, the going to such a country was a somewhat bold undertaking ; bat, arrived there, the happy inspiration occurred to some one of the party—which of them we are not told—to make an inland voyage instead of one by sea, and this bright idea was carried out with great success.

Everybody knows the look of Kamschatka on the map,—a long, pendent tongue of land some six hundred miles and more in length, that is to say, about as far as from Scilly to Orkney, and lying in much the same latitude, which jute out from that part of Asia where the continent reaches its narrowest limits, and, continued as it is by the Kurile Islands, shuts off the Sea of Ochotek from the North-Western Pacific. Few people, how- ever, have realised that the greatest portion of this considerable peninsula is drained by a big river, from which the country takes its name, a river that, rising in the southern quarter of the peninsula, pretty well bisects its middle half as it keeps a northerly direction, until it suddenly turns to the east, and flows into the Pacific. Our travellers—Mr. Kettlewell and Dr. Genie- maid as aforesaid, together with Lieutenant Powell, of the Royal Navy—had made up their minds to descend this river; and accordingly, disembarking at ill-omened Petropaulovsky, they crossed to its head-waters, and then, constructing rafts on poplar "dug-outs "—the only boats to be found—proceeded on their northern voyage, September 1st, 1882 :—

"The river ran between pebbly banks lined with birches, whose white-barked stems contrasted with the brilliant gold of their foliage. Reach after reach of still water opened out to us its quiet beauty, and here and there a little gap revealed a Hobbema-like scene of sunny distance, whose clearness was unbroken by the waver of a single leaf. Fur away in front rose a range of deep-blue hills, jagged and peaky, patched only with snow, for their southern slopes had been thawed by the beat of the summer sun. The calm surface of the water was covered by little packs of duok, which rose in long lines as our rafts approached, and the smoke of our guns formed miniature clouds in our wake which hung motionless above the stream, until the rounding of a corner bid them from our view. We paddled on silently, our natives talking bat little. Now and again the warning MI prays, no Zeno (to the right, to the left), told of the neighbourhood of a snag, or a shallow bank necessitated the use of the poles ; but for the most part our progress was one of uninterrupted quiet, and the laziest of Nature's lovers could have asked for nothing better than to sit and be paddled thus for the rest of his natural life." (Vol. I,, p. 137.) Melcova is the chief settlement on the Kamechatka River, and boasts of a resident" pope" and a travelled church,—that is to say, the latter had been originally built at a station higher up, but was many years ago moved down to its present site. It was not ornamental, being painted red on one side only, and bare within, except that "the walls were covered with English bedroom-paper of the commonest kind, set off by an occasional breadth of another pattern, in which pink roses on a bright- blue ground displayed themselves in the fall atrocity of the early Victorian epoch." However, another church was in building, though not with great rapidity. Want of space pre- eludes ne from following the details of the rest of this novel voyage. The weather, hitherto delightful, broke up, and some days of wet and cold ensued. But worse than this was the extortion attempted by the natives, ending in their disown-

fiture ; for our travellers, by lashing their four canoes together, and themselves building a raft thereon, made good their escape without any payment, though on returning to Petropaulovsky, they, as men of honour naturally would, deposited the amount actually due for the services rendered with the Ispravnik of that place. This was perhaps inevitable under the circumstances ; but all the same, we should not care to be of the next party of Englishmen who may descend the Kamsehatka River I Then the weather improved, and as they neared the wonderful group of active volcanoes—one of which, Klnchefskaya, called Kluchi "for abort," is nearly 17,000 ft, in height, and of course covered with snow—they enjoyed beautiful views of them. Representations of some of them appear in the volume, but Dr. Guillemard says : —"I have neither the wish nor the power to describe the scenery of the Kamschatka River audits great volcanoes. In these days of carelessly used superlatives, it is best left alone. But the memory of it will always remain with ma—the memory of scenes far more beautiful than anything I had conceived possible." The strange beauty, moreover, was not confined to the day :—

"At night the beacon-flame of Kluchi, now brilliantly illuminating the clouds of smoke that hang around the crater, now sinking almost to extinction, shone oat far above our heads. There was an angry look about the volcano, and we were told that its activity had of late been somewhat increased. The explanation was simple. The Ktusuli, or Spirits of the Mountains, whom home is in the bowels of the volcanoes, had merely been more fortunate than usual. It is hardly necessary, in these days of omniscience, to explain that it is to thew beings that all volcanic disturbances are due. They go to the sea at night to catch whales, which are their favourite food, and the roast.- Mg of several of these animals within the crater is, as may be imagined, an operation which requires the consumption of no incon- siderable amount of fuel." (Vol. I., p. 161.) In the midst of this superb scenery was made the discovery of a disaster, and one of which the readers of this book feel the effect. Though the greatest care had been taken of the photographic plates, so violent had been the shocks which the cases containing them had sustained while being carried on pack-horses to the river, that not half-a-dozen remained unbroken. How these were husbanded need not be told, and the results all can admire. Moreover, deep as the vexation thus caused must have been, it seems to have been got over pretty well; and, with fine weather, affairs prospered on the whole. At Kluchi, a squinting "pope," with unkempt hair and a total absence of conversation, was found uninteresting as a companion ; but his appearance was grateful, for he brought two remarkably fine cabbages as a present, though ultimately the landlord insisted on charging them in the bill. A dog, by name Verglaski,' at this time enters on the stage, with a stolid expression and steady gait. He was inimitable as a retriever, but nothing short of a bear ever roused him to a less dignified pace than a walk, and it was supposed that he regarded duck-shooting as a childish occupation. Alas ! he was lost, though a man was sent back in a canoe to look for him, and it seemed doubtful if he could ever find his way to a settlement. Onward paddled our voyagers, now heading east- wards, and to their surprise heard of the arrival at the mouth of the river of a vessel at first supposed to be their own ‘Marcheea,' though how to account for her early appearance in those bd. tildes was a puzzle. A steam-launch which they met soon after put an end to all doubt, and revealed the presence of the ` Nemo,* bailing from Saghalin, now made a penal colony by the Russians. Suspicion was roused as to her business, and she eventually turned out to be a fur-poacher. Arrived at last at Ust. Kamchatka, the river's month, they found the yacht ; and the presence of two ships in that little-frequented port—a village, Dr. Guillemard calls it, but surely, though without gas-lamps or pavement, it would rank as a city on the other side of the Pacific—was celebrated by a ball. The festivity cannot be described here. Our travellers' hearts (we are told) were safe, notwithstanding that it was attended by all the beauty and fashion of the place, and everything was proper and correct, only "in lieu of the suspicion of 'White Rose' or Ess ' of Western civilisation, an extrait double of dried salmon lent its not uncertain perfume to the ball-dresses of our partners." The room was lighted by candles stuck in empty bottles. In dancing, time was of no particular object, and smoking was permitted. "Suddenly the music [a solitary fiddle] stopped ; everybody clapped their hands ; and short and stern, the order rang out in Russian, ' Kiss.' " Here the sequel must be learnt from our author's pages—the dory of the sirens is too sad for us to sing —pathetically he concludes, "Before the next dance I had fled,"

From Kamschatka the Marcheea' sped on to Bering Island, the scene of one of the most mournful and heroic tragedies that. the annals of exploration describe. The navigator whose name* —systematically misspelt by nearly all writers—must have been one of the greatest in his calling, and worthy of association with Hudson, Franklin, Richardson, and Greely. Dr. Guillemard most properly tells again the touching story, which in these days is known but to few, and tells it with evident sympathy. It has great interest for the naturalist, since this island was the home—and, moreover, the only home—of that great sea-beast which the learned call Rhytina gigas, whose discovery and death were almost simultaneous,—for in sustaining the lives of Bering's shipwrecked crew, it laid down its own, and became extinct. Fur-seals, however, still resort to this and the neigh- bouring island, and their " rookeries" (to use the misapplied term) though not so large as those in the well-protected Prybilof Islands on the other side of Bering'e Sea, are still thronged sufficiently to convey a pretty good notion of what they most have been before the destroyer net foot among them. The sub- ject is too vast for us to enter upon, only let ne put on record once more our admiration of the way in which the Government of the United States has interfered to save from extirpation a species no less interesting to scientific men than valuable to unscientific women.

All this is an episode. The ' Marchese ' returned to Kam- schatka that the voyagers might enjoy some sheep-shooting. This sounds like tame work, but the Orbs nisicola —an inter- mediate relative of the " Bighorn " of the American Rocky Mountains, and its cognate races of the higher Asiatic, ranges— has its haunts on mountains that are only accessible with the greatest difficulty, from the dense brushwood that surrounds their base. It was a triumph of our author and his friends to have secured no fewer than nine examples, and to have brought home the first that have reached this country. Here, though with great regret, we must leave this part of Dr. Gnillemard's narrative; but we have not alluded to one-half of the interesting matters which he describes with more or less fullness; and of these neglected topics, what he tells us of the swarming salmon in the rivers of Kamschatka, though not unknown to naturalists, will be new to most readers, and fill fishermen with feelings that we can neither forecast nor fathom.

When Dr. Guillemard returns from these Northern latitudes, and the Marchese ' proceeds on her course hither and thither in the Indian and Malay Archipelago, the reader feels almost at home again. Yet islands or parts of islands were visited by her which have been never, or only imperfectly described before, and with great skill our author picks out those places alone about which there was something now to be said, or old misconceptions to be corrected. This is sufficient to show the trouble be has taken in this work. No one can doubt the interest be and his companions took in places which were new to the eye of the visitor, but could not be new to that of the reader, and with admirable judgment our author passes them over. It certainly could not be that, if he had chosen, he might not have exhibited some of them to us in a new light ; for he not only thinks for himself, but is a keen observer. Yet the general reader, who has a sort of acquaintance, more or less slight, with Japanese and Chinese ports, with Singapore and suchlike frequented resorts, knows, or ought to know, that if he wants to learn more of them, he will get better information from works written by men to whom they are thoroughly familiar, than from the chance visitor of a few days, be he never so observant or intelligent. Want of space, too, forbids us from pursuing the rest of the cruise in any detail. In points of interest, the second volume yields only to the first, and there will be some who will think it the more interesting of the two,— particularly the chapters on North Borneo and New Guinea; while the naturalist will especially rejoice over the account of Sumbawa, an island of considerable size, hitherto zoologically unknown.

Few works of this kind have been so profusely illustrated as this, and in execution the illustrations are so far above the average as generally to excite our highest commendation. A few, however, are disfigured by an attempt at what we suppose is to be called mstheticism. Certainly :estheticism is never shown in a worse light than when it disfigures the fairest representations of Nature. Some of the woodcuts are rendered ridiculous by the adoption of a new-fangled whim whereby a bit of the block is cut out and letterpress inserted instead. The effect thus pro-

Bering was a Dane, and people of his family 'till survive. The abomineble oorrupl ions, "Shoring,. o Sebring,. "Behrens," and what not, doe to zrdolg15:13 tmlyitte=n1froatiiirssit saofie,ens„:pasnd applied to the Island. Strait,

duced—it is to be seen in the defacement of the otherwise beau- tiful views, beautifully engraved, of the "Scene on the Meimbun River" (Vol. IL,p. 73), and of the" Falls of the Maroo River" (Vol. II., p. 161)—is exactly similar to that of a vulgar placard of a "world's hair restorer" displayed on the walls of a cathe- dral, of an advertisement of Warren's blacking on the Great Pyramid, or the "universal mousetrap" in front of Niagara. Hardly less silly is the unnatural arrangement of such woodcuts as those wherein the outskirts of a landscape (as Vol. II., pp. 02, 178) are brought over an unnecessary boundary-line. For the rest, the illustrations are as good as can well be ; in parti- cular, we should commend the beautiful lithographs of the Kamschatkan volcanoes, while the figures of plants and animals are well chosen and well delineated, and last of all, the maps, which are numerous, are beautifully clear.

A few words must be said of Dr. Guillemard's style, and here we have naught but praise to bestow. He is generally instructive and never dull, for there is a vein of humour running through nearly the whole narrative which is delightful when caught; but we must allow that, being rather deeply seated, there will be many a reader who will never catch it. It is the sort of humour often exhibited by an American converser of the best kind, who, saying a neat thing, says it in a grave tone, but is content if a single listener intimates by an intelligent glance that he sees the point which the rest of the company have missed. We should be sorry if Dr. Guillemard thought we failed to recognise this rare quality in his style. We have not attempted to give instances of it, for it is hardly to be shown by quotations. The book must be read to perceive it, and as we expect that many will fail to do this, some may thank us for the hint, and be on the look out for it. Another point on which the author deserves praise is that he is most impersonal, both as regards himself and his companions—in fact, of the latter, the dogs only are men- tioned—and we are not bored by being constantly told what took place day by day on the yacht, for however much that might concern those on board, it would be wearisome to those who were not. Lastly, we have to say that though almost every chapter proves the writer to be a man of scientific taste and ability, the general reader will not find enough science to daunt him. Dr. Guillemard has wisely relegated to a series of appendices a summary of the scientific results he attained, and tells those who would like to know more, where it is to be found. In scientific circles it is well known, that he has not laboured in vain, modest as are the terms in which he expresses himself in the concluding passage of his preface :—

"In these regions there is, indeed, hut one thing that mars the traveller's enjoyment. The book of Nature lies freely open to him, but without years of study he cannot read it. It is written in an unknown language. He is confused with the unfamiliarity of the character and the apparently insuperable obstacles it presents. finch, at least, were my own feelings, although travel in tropic lands was no new thing to me. The few sentences I have deciphered have for the most part, I fear, been already translated by others, and in giving them to my readers, I can only express my regret that Nature's volume has not met with a better exponent."