niggerhead

A bollard made from an old cannon.

A geode.

A coneflower.

A coral or stone outcrop that stands above the surface of the water.

We were sailing swiftly along on a calm and glassy sea, past beautiful headlands and bits of scenery clothed with vivid and luxuriant green down to the water's edge; past glistening coral islands, on whose outer edges pale green billows broke on the white sandy beaches, boiling and seething as they dashed against a row of ugly "nigger heads," as the rocks were called, dotted here and there.

Landward is the almost unbroken wall of submerged reefs where the big niggerhead corals send their solid bulks up to within a fathom or two of the surface.

A tussock (clump of plant material), found on the tundra.

These plants fill the interstices between the grasses and tiny shrubs that make the outer, fuller form of the niggerhead.

Responsible in large part for the difficulties of movement to which the geologists referred were tussocks, still known as “niggerheads” in the 1930s. The “niggerhead,” according to Bob Marshall, “among the gifts of nature, ranks as the most cursed.[…]”