The 26th July, 1851, found him at Tonga Taboo, in the Friendly Islands, revelling in his first glimpse of nature in mid-Pacific. The fringing reef proved somewhat disappointing, for amid the multitudinous and many-coloured animal forms only a few green Algae were to be found. Harvey spent six months in the Pacific, visiting island after island according as the mission boats supplied a means of transport, collecting seaweeds and a good many marine animals. At that time social conditions in the South Seas were very different from what they are now. The adjoining Fiji Island group, for instance, was still in a savage state: the captain of the mission vessel told Harvey how, only four years before, he had seen one hundred human bodies laid out for a great feast, and cannibalism was still a habitual practice there; but the Friendly Islands, though but recently in a similar condition, seem already to have deserved their name, and Harvey's experiences of the natives, with whom he was much in contact, appear to have been of the pleasantest description; in Fiji also, where several weeks were spent, the founding of a Christian mission (permitted only two years before after eighteen years' refusal) had already greatly altered local practices; devil-worship and cannibalism were rapidly dying out. Harvey, applying at the mission station for a responsible guide, was furnished with a man entitled "Koroe," which, it appeared, was an honourable title "something equivalent to a C.B. in England," and bestowed only on a person who had committed at least five murders. Harvey returned to Sydney, and thence to Europe by Valparaiso and Panama, having a severe bout of fever on the way. He reached home in October, 1856, after an absence of over three years.