Where a Stone Is a Souvenir

A coral island contains no stone. It is built by polyps out of their own skeletons, topped with sand and cocoa-palms, and the few loose rocks ever found in its mud arrived by accident, drifted in on the ocean currents and, the book suggests, "probably entangled in the roots of some tree."

So when Kotzebue carried a group of Pacific lagoon-islanders north to Kamchatka, they did something that only makes sense to a person born on coral. They collected stones there, to take home with them^[1].