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In previous books of this series dealing with the achievements and adventures of the pioneers whose journeys led to the foundation of the British Empire beyond the seas, I have described the revelation of West Africa, the exploration of British North America, and the experiences of those who laid the foundations of our knowledge concerning India and Further India. The scope of this last volume brought us to Sumatra, Singapore, and Java: that is to say the western part of Malaysia. I now propose to set before my readers the more remarkable among the voyages and strange happenings which led to the discovery of Australasia, and to the inclusion within the British Empire of northern Borneo, south-eastern New Guinea, the continent of Australia, the large islands of New Zealand, and a good many islands and archipelagoes in the Pacific Ocean. The most convenient general term for this region of innumerable islands, large and small, is "Australasia", since it lies mostly in the southern hemisphere and yet is more nearly connected by affinity or proximity with Asia rather than any other continent.

Yet this title is not strictly correct, for Borneo, like Sumatra and Java, is really part of Asia so far as its geological and human history, animals, and plants are concerned; whereas the Malay islands farthest to the east—such as Timor, the Moluccas, and Jilolo—more correctly belong to a distinct region of the world, of which New Guinea and Australia are the headquarters, and New Zealand, Easter Island, the Marquezas Islands, and Hawaii the farthest outlying portions. But in regard to the landing of Europeans and the order of its exploration, Borneo, like the Philippines, forms part of that "Australasia" which was first reached (1521) from the direction of the Pacific Ocean.

Australasia (it is necessary, if wearisome, to repeat) consists of islands, great, small, and very small; Australia being so large an island that it ranks as the fifth and smallest of the continents. The insular character of Australasia has caused most of the great adventures connected with its discovery and colonization to be extraordinary feats of ocean rather than of land travel. But when we consider the size of the sailing ships, or of the mere junks, boats, or canoes in which some of the journeys were made, and the fact that the home of the explorers was not two, three, or four thousand miles away across the sea (as in the discovery of America and the West African coast), but more than treble that distance; that these hardy adventurers had to reach the unknown islands of the Pacific either round the stormy Cape of Good Hope or the still more stormy Cape Horn in ships on which we might hesitate to embark in order to cross the Bay of Biscay or the Irish Channel: the achievements of the Australasian pioneers in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries become almost unbelievable in their heroism and power of endurance. The Victoria of Magellan's fleet which sailed from Spain to the Pacific and back across the Atlantic and Indian oceans was of 85 tons capacity! Matthew Flinders in 1803 crossed the Indian Ocean from North Australia to Mauritius in a schooner of 29 tons! Sir James Brooke sailed in 1883 from the mouth of the Thames to conquer North Borneo from the pirates in a sailing yacht of 148 tons.

Think of the courage that must have been required by a Magellan, a de Quiros, or even a Captain Cook, when they steered into the Unknown from the coast of South America across the broad waters of the Pacific! They had only a limited stock of fresh water: how long would it be before an island or a continent was encountered whereon they could land to replenish their supplies from some spring near the seashore or some stream falling from the hills? They had very little in the way of fresh provisions: when these were exhausted might not their mariners develop that dread disease scurvy,[1] and rot into madness or death? or before arriving at such an extremity mutiny and murder their officers? Food of any kind might become exhausted before fresh supplies could be obtained; and we know from many instances how ready the ship's crew of famished, uneducated sailors was, first to talk of cannibalism, and at last to lay violent hands on an officer or a comrade, kill him, and eat him. Or the undiscovered lands which would be their only resource against a death from starvation, disease, or thirst might be populated by ferocious man-eating savages (as indeed many of them were) and the landing parties of seamen and officers be promptly massacred. Or it might be a desert island, and the pleasing-looking herbs or fruits be deadly poison, or the strange fish, mussels, oysters, clams, whelks, or turtles prove to be so unwholesome that all who ate of this new fare were prostrated with illness. The gallant little sailing ship—little in our eyes whether its capacity were of 30 or even 400 tons—might be charged by a bull cachalot whale as big as an islet, and then and there spring a leak and founder with all on board. There might well be—and there were—treacherous coral reefs just masked by two or three feet of water on which the vessel would be driven at night-time and break her back. The crew would take to their frail boats and then have a thousand or more sea miles to cross, with oar and ineffective sail, before they could find a landing place and sustenance. Perhaps on the way thither (the giant, greedy sharks following in their wake) they died of sunstroke or thirst, or went mad and jumped into the sea and the shark's maw. Or they did reach some South Sea island—not to be discovered again for a century or two—where they were received as demigods by the astonished savages, but where they had to pass the rest of their lives as savages too; consoling themselves as best they could with a Polynesian wife or husband (for there were women sometimes in these ventures, especially on the Spanish vessels) and the growing up of a half-caste family; but never heard of again in their far-away homes, and ever and anon weeping and crying in vain to Heaven to be restored once more to the fair cities and romantic life of Spain or Portugal, or to the comfort and the orderly beauty of a Norman or an English homestead.

After sailing, sailing, sailing across the equatorial belt of the Pacific Ocean they at length reached—if no disaster arrested their progress—the limits of the known: they came to some part of Malaysia where the natives were no longer naked, black, unreasoning cannibals, or crafty, yellow, naked thieves; some seaport in the Philippines, Celebes, Timor, or Java where they met men of the Muhammadan religion, or even other European Christians who had reached Australasia round the Cape of Good Hope. But the Muhammadans might out of jealousy or of revenge for wrongs they had suffered from other Christians cause them to be imprisoned or murdered, while more often than not the fellow Christians they were greeting after a twelve-thousand miles' voyage half round the world belonged to some nation in rivalry or at war with their own. Then they might be held long years in captivity, or be executed (with or without torture) outright. (Matthew Flinders was imprisoned in Mauritius for six and a half years by the French not much more than a hundred years ago.) At any rate they would probably be refused those sea stores and materials necessary for repairing a crazy ship, and have to face the return voyage across the Indian Ocean, round the stormy extremity of Africa, and through the violent gales of the northern Atlantic with but a slender hope of reaching home, or even of surviving the perils of the sea, in a leaky, worm-eaten ship with splintered masts and rotten sails.

This fifth division of the earth's surface which they had come to explore consisted of an almost uncountable number of islands ranging in size from Australia, with an area of 2,946,691 square miles, New Guinea, which has about 312,330, and Borneo, with another 290,000, to tiny islets like the Fanning atoll, 9 miles by 4, or little Pitcairn, 2 miles square, on which the mutineers of the Bounty long hid themselves. The larger islands nearer to Asia were for the most part fragments of a former extension of the Asiatic or Australian continents; even New Zealand (104,000 square miles) must once have formed part of a huge strip of continental land stretching southwards from New Guinea and north-east Australia. But most of the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia (as distinct from Melanesia[2]), though they may have been larger than they are now and have risen out of comparatively shallow seas, were nevertheless always oceanic, that is to say, never connected with any great continent in recent ages.

These small islands are divided into two classes: the mountainous or volcanic and the coral or flat islands, also called "atolls", from a word in a South Indian language. Atolls, or coral islands, in the Pacific and Indian Oceans are made by the coral animals (a polyp or minute jellyfish-like creature living in communities like the cells of a human body), building upwards towards the surface of the sea the lime structures in which they exist. They start, of course, from some reef or submerged volcanic cone which is not far below the surface of the water. The limestone rock which they make out of secretions from the sea water gradually forms an irregular circle of narrow islets, with a lagoon in the centre and one or more deep openings to the sea. Vegetation—always coconuts—slowly covers these coral islands, and at last they become habitable by man. If the land beneath them is rising above the waves, the coral fossilizes into coralline rock and the living coral animals go on building and extending farther out to sea. If the land is sinking faster than the coral animal can build, then by degrees the once pleasant islets become a jumble of barren and crumbling rocks, only haunted by sea birds (but sometimes valuable for their guano), and finally a dangerous reef or shoal.

Of the smaller Pacific islands that are not mere coral reefs and atolls the Hawaii group, the Marquezas, Tahiti, Easter Island, Pitcairn, the Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji groups, the New Hebrides, most of the Ladrones, and one or two of the Caroline Islands are volcanic, high, and of recent formation, even though like the New Hebrides and the Marquezas they may rest on submerged extensions of sunken lands. The Solomon Islands are also mainly volcanic, but with the Bismarck archipelago practically form an extension of New Guinea; while New Caledonia is a very old fragment of unsubmerged land, and so is tiny Norfolk Island between New Caledonia and New Zealand. The southern island of New Zealand is, like New Caledonia, a portion of an ancient continent which has never been submerged; and the north island of that dominion is a very volcanic region.

The volcanic islands of the Pacific are always of more importance than the coral, partly because they are larger, but still more on account of their singularly fertile soil, high peaks, good rainfall, and picturesque scenery. They are, in fact, the "summer isles of Eden, set in dark purple spheres of sea", of Tennyson's poem. The climate is almost invariably healthy, the temperature a perpetual summer, with a never-absent invigorating sea breeze. The only grim reminder that there is another side to Nature lies in the occasional hurricane which drives great ships on to the coral or the basalt rocks, which lays low many a dwelling and plantation, or the earthquake followed by the still more alarming tidal wave. In Hawaii there is one of the largest active volcanoes in the world, into the seething crater of which victims used to be thrown as sacrifices to the god of fire. In the New Hebrides and Santa Cruz Islands there are other volcanoes, also active and occasionally emitting great streams of molten lava. This is, or was, also the case in the little islands—mere volcanic peaks rising above the waves—that form a broken chain round the north coast of New Guinea. Here were the "burning islets" so often noted in Tasman's and Dampier's voyages. Weird was the sight of them at night—a great cone standing out of the blue-black darkness, vomiting red fiery gas and red-hot ashes, columns of dense smoke turned gold and orange by the incandescent lava bubbling up and boiling over the crater's lips, and streaming in blazing cascades down the mountain's sides. The thundering discharges of gas, the crackling of electricity, added to the terror of the scene; and yet one can realize that after a time and the passing of many such small active volcanoes the Dutch, Spanish, and English sailors became used to them, and even found the presence of a burning mountain in the dark tropic night a cheering beacon in the pathless seas.

Borneo, Celebes, Buru, Jilolo, and the Spice Islands, Timor, Ceram, the eastern Sunda Islands were, of course, with Java and Sumatra on the west, New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago on the east, and the Philippines on the north, continental islands; that is to say, fragments of the former prolongation of Asia towards Australia: old lands, large or small portions of which have always risen above the very shallow sea which now separates them from one another. Yet Malaysia, like Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, is very volcanic. Of all its islands Borneo is the least so at the present day, in fact there is no active or recently active volcano in that huge island; whereas the Philippines are occasionally racked with earthquakes and have twelve active volcanoes. Java has a long range of lofty craters—some hundred and twenty-five in all, of which at least thirteen are active. The Lesser Sunda Islands, east of Java, likewise contain many volcanoes: Lombok and Sumbawa are little more than exceedingly large groups of craters, and when the Sumbawa volcano (of which something like 6 cubic miles was blown away) erupted in 1815, its red-hot lava and ashes killed forty thousand of the inhabitants on its slopes. There are volcanoes in Celebes, the Moluccas, Jilolo, and some of the islands off the west end of New Guinea. Timor only shows traces of past volcanic activity. In consequence of its being the most volcanic region in the world, Malaysia is very subject to earthquakes; and these disturbances of the earth's surface not only cause devastating tidal waves on the seacoasts, but in some way affect the atmosphere, provoking fearful cyclones of wind, followed by torrential rain. Similar disturbances of the atmosphere, however, occur frequently before or after the rainy season. Borneo is frightfully hot—perhaps hotter all the year round than any other country—but it is less afflicted with devastating winds. Nearly all Malaysia has a tremendous rainfall, though one or two islands, such as Flores and parts of Timor, have a rather drier climate, more suggestive of northern Australia. As a rule, however, Malaysia, in consequence of its perpetual summer under an equatorial sun, its rich alluvial soil—often of that peculiar richness associated with volcanic materials—and its plentiful rainfall, is clothed with a primeval forest which for luxuriance can scarcely be matched in West Africa or Brazil. These lands have been styled "the gardens of the sun"; "enormous forcing houses crammed with vegetation"; "great zoological gardens, full of rare and curious beasts". Here may be seen many species of palms: the gloriously beautiful Cyrtostachys palm of Java, with vividly red sheaths to the fronds and flower stalks, and bright yellow inflorescence changing to scarlet fruit; the creeping, climbing palms (the "rattan" or Calamus); stately Areca palms (which produce the betel nut, and the smaller species the "cabbage", so often described by travellers in Australia and the Pacific islands); useful Sago palms (Metroxylon); the sugar-yielding Arenga; the toddy or "rum" palm (Caryota); the Nipa, used for thatching; and, of course, the Coconut. As one travels eastward into the Pacific, this variety of palms thins out until at last only the Coconut remains on the coral islands.

Of the other far-famed trees of the Malaysian forest there is the tall Duriān, with its evil-smelling, delicious-tasting fruit; there are stately, evergreen oaks, chestnuts, and mulberries; many kinds of fig trees—some growing like the Indian Banyan, with dependent roots that reach down from the far-spreading branches and form a grove of trees in time; others that live like grey, snaky parasites writhing about the trunks of victim trees, which in time they strangle; there are giant laurels, cinnamon laurels, huge myrtles, clove myrtles with their intensely aromatic flowerbuds, caoutchouc trees producing indiarubber, nutmeg trees, with their fragrant spice which so early drew traders to the most eastern part of the Malay Archipelago; and there are trees of sweet-smelling wood like the sandalwood and the Aquilaria or eaglewood, others like the damar-attam (Hopea), which produce a valuable glass-like resin; there are two or more kinds of big-leaved Bread-fruit trees (Artocarpus), yielding their farinaceous, fig-like pods; and Artocarpi of a creeping habit whose branches are covered with small fig-like fruits remarkable for their gorgeous coloration—scarlet spotted with white, scarlet and purple, white and orange. Bamboos, often of huge girth, grow everywhere; orchids of incredible loveliness in colour and strangeness of form fringe the great boughs of the forest trees, which also afford harbourage to parasitic aroids of fantastic appearance; the glades are full of pitcher plants, ground orchids, brilliantly-coloured Cannas, "Grains-of-Paradise", calladiums with painted leaves, and wild bananas, with their beautiful, glossy, emerald-green fronds, or in some species with vividly coloured flower spikes. The marshy places are thickly grown with rushes resembling the papyrus of Africa; the shores of estuaries and low-lying coasts are the domain of tall mangroves and of the pandanus or screw pine—a semi-aquatic tree of the tropical parts of the Old World, which, with many aerial roots, and long, pointed, sword-like leaves, is distantly akin to the palms, and in Australasia produces fruit which is much eaten by the natives, especially in the Pacific Islands. These dense jungles of mangrove, pandanus, and other trees growing in the mud and brackish water—the habitat of mud-hopping fish, and numbers of large, brightly-coloured shore crabs, some so blue and so white and glossy that they are called "porcelain" crabs—were often a great barrier to the early explorers on the coasts of Borneo, Celebes, and Timor, besides being a prime hiding place for the praus of the Malay pirates. In the dense forests the lianas and climbing plants are a remarkable feature in the pictures of triumphant vegetation—pictures of which my untravelled readers can gain some faint idea by ascending the winding staircase in the great Palm House at Kew Gardens and looking down on the complex assemblage of tropical trees and plants. In these Malaysian woods there are many species of wild vines, with small brightly-coloured grapes; there are exquisite wreaths of the climbing asparagus—Smilax; festoons of climbing ferns, of the various kinds of pepper that hang their clusters of aromatic seeds from tree to tree, of the ipomœas (convolvuluses), passion flowers, bignonias, jasmines, purple and scarlet loranthus (a kind of mistletoe), and many climbing peas and beans, remarkable for their delicate or brightly-coloured flowers, which often exhale a delicious scent. In the higher parts of Java, Borneo, the Philippines, and even of New Guinea there are jungles of rhododendrons with vivid crimson blossoms. It is, however, a common mistake to suppose that the entire surface of the Malay islands is covered with primeval forest. Considerable spaces have been cleared for cultivation, or after such clearing have relapsed into jungle; and this jungle is either a second growth of poor and scattered trees or more often a coarse and luxuriant grass. In the hilly interior of Dutch Borneo there are dry moors, deep in sand and sparsely covered with scrub. On the high plateaus and the mountain ranges of Flores and Timor considerable areas are open, treeless spaces, but covered instead with low-growing herbs, offering to the eye spectacles of brilliant colour when they blossom during the rainy season.

The splendid vegetation of Malaysia extends throughout New Guinea and the adjacent archipelagos, but with a diminution of species eastwards and a gradual infiltration of Australian forms, such as the Eucalyptus (a relation of the Myrtle family), the Casuarinas,[3] and the Araucaria conifers. More and more attenuated, the Malaysian flora spreads out over the tropical Pacific islands, wearing itself out finally in Hawaii, to which the sandalwood and a few other Malayan trees extend; and Pitcairn Island, where, however, the few Malayan species may have been anciently introduced by man.

The larger and more western islands of the Malay Archipelago have a fauna of beasts, birds, and reptiles, fish and insects, spiders and land crabs as remarkable as the wealth of their flora, and next to Africa the richest in the world. Here may still be seen—in Borneo—the wild Indian elephant and a two-horned rhinoceros; in Java there is a tiger and a small form of one-horned Indian rhinoceros. In Borneo exists the large red-haired ape called Orang-utan; in Java there are smaller anthropoid apes known as Gibbons. Java and Borneo both have a handsome wild ox, the Banteng, besides more or less wild long-horned Indian buffaloes. The smallest and most remarkable of all the buffaloes is the Anoa, found only on the island of Celebes, and a larger but similar short-horned buffalo is found in the Philippines. Nearly all the islands have wild swine—generally of a type near to the wild boar, but with a very long head—the parent form of the domestic pig of Polynesia. But the queer island of Celebes, and Buru, which lies to the east, possess the strangest pig in the world: the Babirusa, a type with—for pigs—a small and slender head and (in the male) tusks which grow up and out through the cheeks. In Borneo there is a large monkey with an immense drooping nose; in Celebes a creature called the Black Ape—an intermediate form between baboons, macaques, and the higher apes. The macaque monkeys—creatures with short tails and bare faces, rather like small baboons (the Gibraltar monkey is a macaque)—are very common throughout Malaysia, extending as near to New Guinea and Australia as the islands of Buru and Timor. The other monkeys belong to the Semnopithecus genus, the long-tailed sacred monkeys of India. One of these found in Borneo is a combination in colouring of black, white, and chestnut red. The more northern and western of the Malay Islands possess a few strange lemurs, a large flying creature, the colugo, allied to lemurs and bats, and the Tupaias or squirrel-tailed Insectivores. Deer, without any white spots and related to the Sambar type of India, are found in the Philippines, Borneo, Java, the eastern Sunda Islands as far as Timor, Celebes, and the Moluccas; and in the Philippines there are spotted deer like the hog deer of India. Carnivorous mammals are represented more especially by a small tiger and a leopard in Java, the Clouded tiger of Borneo (a kind of leopard), several small cats, numerous civets, a small bear, and wild dogs. Cats and civets extend their range to Timor and the Philippines, and a civet—probably brought by the Malays—is found in Celebes. The fruit-eating bats or flying foxes are very large, often attaining to 5 feet across the wings. Their range extends eastwards beyond the Solomon Islands to north-east Australia and the New Hebrides. Nearly all the Pacific islands, including New Zealand and Hawaii, have bats of their own, but they are insect-eating, and very often day-flying. In the eastern islands of Malaysia begin to appear the marsupials of Australia, but until New Guinea is reached there is only one type to be seen, the Cuscus—a kind of phalanger akin to the "Opossum" of Australia.[4] There are porcupines, squirrels, and many strange rodents of the Rat family in western Malaysia. Peculiar genera and species of rats penetrate not only to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, but also to Australia. The native rats of New Zealand and the Polynesian islands, however, have been introduced by man, chiefly for food.

The wealth in birds in Malaysia makes the naturalist's and artist's mouth water! There are no vultures, but several types of eagle—amongst them, in the Philippine Islands, a very large monkey-eating eagle with a huge, narrow beak—and some very handsomely coloured kites and hawks. Amongst the parrots are the gorgeous crimson Eclectus, the lovely Lories, and those "white parrots"—Cockatoos—which furnished so much amazement and delight to the early Italian voyagers. But the strangest looking of all the parrots are the black cockatoos, peculiar to New Guinea. The peacock reaches to Java but not to Borneo, but in Borneo and Palawan there are superb pheasants and peacock-pheasants, and most of the Malaysian islands possess wild jungle fowl. Peculiar to Malaysia and Australia are the Megapodes, a family of gallinaceous birds allied to the Curassows of America, and which hatch their eggs by depositing them in mounds of decaying vegetation. There are very large cuckoos, the size of big pheasants; but perhaps the most remarkable bird groups in their Malaysian developments are the Hornbills and the Pigeons. The Fruit Pigeons of this region transcend description in their exquisite tints of peach colour, green of several shades, crimson, purple, and maize yellow. One kind is jet-black and pale-cream colour. These fruit-eating pigeons extend their range into New Guinea, Australia, and the Pacific Islands. In New Guinea there is the celebrated Victoria Crowned Pigeon, largest living of all the tribe; and in the Samoa Islands, without any near relation, the Didunculus, or Little Dodo—a ground-frequenting bird (which has since taken to the trees) that shows us how the large Dodo of Mauritius developed from the ordinary fruit-pigeon type. The Kingfishers of Malaysia are also very wonderful, and reach their climax of development in the New Guinea region. Some species are remarkable for their long storklike beaks, their long racquet tails, and superb plumage of ultramarine blue, purple, and white.

But the crown of glory which rests on eastern Malaysia and New Guinea in regard to bird life has been bestowed on this region because of the presence here—and here only together with the north extremity of Australia—of the Paradise Birds. These marvels of creation, which are fast becoming exterminated by the agents of the wicked plumage trade, and without any opposition from the Dutch, German, or British Australian Governments of these countries, first make their appearance to a traveller coming from the west when he reaches the island of Jilolo or the Aru Islands, neither of which groups is very far from New Guinea. The Paradise Birds do not extend their range to the Bismarck Archipelago. East of the Solomon Islands there are fewer and fewer species of birds. Two Lories and three or four Parrakeets are found in Fiji, a beautiful blue and white lory inhabits Tahiti, together with a species of parrakeet. An ultramarine-blue and purple lory is found in the remote Marquezas archipelago, the farthest prolongation eastwards of the Malayan fauna. The other land birds of the Polynesian islands are pigeons, thrushes, flower-peckers, starlings, shrikes, babblers, a screech-owl, one or two plovers and rails, a sea-eagle, and two or three species of ducks. This seems to represent the totality of the resident birds of the Pacific islands east of Fiji and the New Hebrides. The birds of the Hawaii archipelago are very peculiar and have come thither chiefly from America. They include a peculiar family of starling-like birds—the Drepanidæ—celebrated for the beauty of their plumage which, in fact, has led to the extinction of several species.

The reptile life of Malaysia comprises many strange and remarkable forms, but, like the beasts, birds, and freshwater fish, it thins out in variety of species as the traveller crosses the boundary line between the Malay islands of Asiatic affinities and those belonging more to the Australian region; while, of course, in Polynesia reptiles are very few, or absent altogether. One or two species of harmless snakes are found as far eastwards as Fiji and Samoa. No land reptile of any kind exists in Tahiti or in Hawaii. Perhaps the biggest Crocodile in the world[5] (Crocodilus porosus) is found in all the great Malay Islands, and its range extends through New Guinea to the Solomon archipelago and Fiji, and to the extreme north coast of Australia. A much smaller—barely 7 feet long—crocodile with a long, narrow muzzle is found in northern and north-eastern Australia, and is quite harmless. Borneo has a peculiar gavial (fish-eating crocodile) with a very narrow snout. Large Pythons—perhaps the biggest known to science—extend over the same Austro-Malayan region, but do not reach lands to the east of New Guinea and Australia. Their place in the Melanesian islands of the Pacific is taken by small Boa snakes of a harmless nature. A prominent reptile in the life of the aborigines in Austro-Malaysia is the Monitor lizard, nearly always miscalled by Europeans "Iguana". This Monitor is the largest of the lizards, with a long, flexible tail, and sometimes as much as 8 feet in length in its Melanesian types, and is not infrequently mistaken for a crocodile by Europeans. It has very sharp teeth and can give a severe but not a very dangerous bite, its most powerful weapon being its whip-like tail. It is often eaten by the natives, and in its turn devours their fowls. Curiously enough, there is a real iguana in the Fiji Islands—one of the puzzles of animal distribution, for the Iguana family of vegetable-eating lizards is otherwise confined to Tropical America and Madagaskar. The seas of Malaysia and of Polynesia (as far south as the New Zealand coasts) swarm at times with different types of real sea-serpents, that is to say, snakes that live entirely in the water and resort only to the shore to give birth to their young, which are born alive. These sea-snakes are of the Cobra family and are very poisonous. They are sometimes brightly coloured and marked in bold patterns.