The same afternoon, with the turn of the tide the current set in our favour, and towards 10 P.M. we reached the roadstead protected to the eastward by the northernmost point of Little Nicobar, to the westward by the island of Pulo Milù, and southward by the mainland of Little Nicobar itself. It is not very large, but it has excellent holding ground, and would be available at all seasons as a harbour of refuge for vessels. As most of the villages of Little Nicobar lie on the N.W. and S. sides of the island, and were with difficulty accessible from our anchorage, it was thought preferable to select the small but beautiful island of Pulo Milù for our visit. Already, while we were lying at anchor in front of the island of Treis, a few natives had come on board the frigate, and had shown much confidence. They possessed all the characteristics of the residents of Nangkauri, and they also spoke, with but slight variations, the same idiom. Only for certain objects, and those, singular to say, articles of the very first necessity, such as cocoa-nut trees, palms, screw-pines, and the like, did they employ different expressions. The island of Pulo Milù, with its variety of forest-vegetation, and its charming woodland-scenery, displays all the beauty and all the marvels of the tropics. The screw-pine (of the family of _Pandaneæ_), that peculiar tree which imparts to the forests of Asia a character so different from those of America, is seen here in exceptional size and majesty. Nowhere have we met with this marvellous tree growing in such luxuriance as on Pulo Milù, where it appears in such quantities as to resemble a forest, and leaves an impression of such lonely wildness as makes one almost imagine it a remnant of some earlier period of our earth. Wondering at the capricious vagaries of nature, the traveller contemplates these extraordinary trees, which have leaves arranged in spiral order like the dragon trees, trunks like those of palms, boughs like those trees presenting the ordinary characteristics of foliage, fruit-cones like the _conifer[oe]_, and yet have nothing in common with all these plants, so that they form a family by themselves. On Pulo Milù we saw some of these trees with slim smooth stems 40 or 50 feet in height, which are nourished by and supported upon a pile of roots of 10 to 12 feet high, resembling a neatly-finished conical piece of wicker-work, composed of spindle-shaped staves. Many of these roots do not reach the soil, and in this undeveloped state these atmospheric roots assume the most peculiar shapes. Higher up the same formation is repeated among the branches, from which depend beautiful massy fruit-cones, a foot and a half in length, by one in thickness, which, when ripe, are of a splendid orange hue.