And if Mr. Ned Land did not repent of his gluttony at our oyster fest, it’s because oysters are the only dish that never causes indigestion. In fact, it takes no less than sixteen dozen of these headless mollusks to supply the 315 grams that satisfy one man’s minimum daily requirement for nitrogen. On December 25 the Nautilus navigated amid the island group of the New Hebrides, which the Portuguese seafarer Queirós discovered in 1606, which Commander Bougainville explored in 1768, and to which Captain Cook gave its current name in 1773. This group is chiefly made up of nine large islands and forms a 120-league strip from the north-northwest to the south-southeast, lying between latitude 2 degrees and 15 degrees south, and between longitude 164 degrees and 168 degrees. At the moment of our noon sights, we passed fairly close to the island of Aurou, which looked to me like a mass of green woods crowned by a peak of great height. That day it was yuletide, and it struck me that Ned Land badly missed celebrating “Christmas,” that genuine family holiday where Protestants are such zealots. I hadn’t seen Captain Nemo for over a week, when, on the morning of the 27th, he entered the main lounge, as usual acting as if he’d been gone for just five minutes. I was busy tracing the Nautilus’s course on the world map. The captain approached, placed a finger over a position on the chart, and pronounced just one word: “Vanikoro.” This name was magic! It was the name of those islets where vessels under the Count de La Pérouse had miscarried. I straightened suddenly. “The Nautilus is bringing us to Vanikoro?” I asked. “Yes, professor,” the captain replied. “And I’ll be able to visit those famous islands where the Compass and the Astrolabe came to grief?” “If you like, professor.” “When will we reach Vanikoro?” “We already have, professor.” Followed by Captain Nemo, I climbed onto the platform, and from there my eyes eagerly scanned the horizon. In the northeast there emerged two volcanic islands of unequal size, surrounded by a coral reef whose circuit measured forty miles. We were facing the island of Vanikoro proper, to which Captain Dumont d’Urville had given the name “Island of the Search”; we lay right in front of the little harbor of Vana, located in latitude 16 degrees 4′ south and longitude 164 degrees 32′ east. Its shores seemed covered with greenery from its beaches to its summits inland, crowned by Mt. Kapogo, which is 476 fathoms high. After clearing the outer belt of rocks via a narrow passageway, the Nautilus lay inside the breakers where the sea had a depth of thirty to forty fathoms. Under the green shade of some tropical evergreens, I spotted a few savages who looked extremely startled at our approach. In this long, blackish object advancing flush with the water, didn’t they see some fearsome cetacean that they were obliged to view with distrust?