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12. The Ogasawara-jima, Muninto or Bonin Islands together with the "Kazan (Kasan) Retto" or the "Volcanic Chain" *).
The first three names describe a group of small islets, which on maps are about 800 km SSE. of Yokohama *1) "Islas del Arzobispoó de Bonin", Boletin de la Sociedad Geográfica de Madrid 1878. |
between 26° 30' N. and 27° 45' N., as well as at 142° 16 1/2' E. (Port Lloyd). The first relates to the Japanese Ogasawara, who is said to have discovered them in 1593; the second one was given to them because they were previously uninhabited, Muninto = islands (to), without (mu), people (nin). It is from this Japanese name, apparently as a corruption, that the common name Bonin Islands derives. The Spanish ‹Islas del Arzobispo› (Islands of the Archbishop, meaning that of Manila) is older than these names. It comes from the Spanish navigator Rui Lopez de Vallalobes, who discovered and named both the Islas Volcanes and the Muninto group from Manila in 1543. The 20 islets of this archipelago cover an area of 69,4 square kilometers and 4519 inhabitants. (late 1898). They fall into three groups the southernmost of which was rediscovered in 1823 by the captain of a North American whaler and named the Coffin Islands in his honor. However, we owe our closer knowledge of the archipelago to the English Captain Beechey, who discovered the two northern groups on June 9, 1827 with the warship 'Blossom', which have since been distinguished as the Beechey and Parry Islands. The largest of the middle or Beechey group was called by him Peel Island, and its good harbor Port Lloyd. A copper plate which he nailed to a tree trunk here and which was later found bears the following inscription: "H. M. S. Blossom, Captain Beechey, R.N. took possession of this group of Islands in the name and on behalf of His Majesty King George, the 14th June 1827." — In 1830, at the instigation of the English Consul of the Sandwich Islands, the first colonists came to the Bonin Islands, a mixed company of an Englishman, an Italian, a Dane, and five men and ten women from the Sandwich Islands. Whalers sometimes later landed and left some of their men here; but the English government paid no further attention to this remote little colony. When Consul Robertson of Yokohama paid her a visit in 1875, he found a party of 64 people, consisting of English, French, American, Spanish, South Sea Islanders, negroes, two Japanese women and bastards. Among them was only one, an Englishman named Webb, who could read and write. England had already dropped its claims to the island in 1861, when Japan asserted a prior property right thereon. In modern times, like all the volcanic islands south of the Sagaminada, the group was subordinate to Tokyo-fu, organized and brought into regular communication with it. |
Hand in hand with this went the replacement of the English names. japanese. Thus the southernmost or Coffin Group is now called Haha-jima (mother island) after its largest island. In the earlier Beechey group, Peel Island and with it the group were named Chichi-jima (Father Island), and in a similar way the northernmost or Parry group was named Muko-jima (Sons-in-law Islands) after its largest island, Muko. The most important elevations, mountains 300-360 m high, are found on Haha-jima. The archipelago has been visited many times from Japan in recent decades; but no one has advanced our knowledge of its nature anywhere near to so much as Professors O. Warburg and S. Yoshiwara. Warburg's attention was primarily devoted to phytogeographical studies. Just as the explorer advancing southwards on the large Japanese islands perceives the gradual transition of the vegetation to the subtropical and tropical character, from the leaf-changing deciduous forest to the evergreen, so Warburg followed the change on the long series of islands that he got to know from Yokosuka to the southernmost limbs of the Japanese Empire. He could not only account for the change in the dominant species, but above all to state the increasing poverty of species in general and of peculiar forms in particular, an experience that every plant expert makes when visiting smaller oceanic islands that lie far from the mainland. On Ogasawara he was able to increase the number of previously known native phanerogams from 80 to about 200 species, among which, however, hardly 15 should be original local residents. This flora lacks all the character traits of the Japanese. It features fan palms and other tropical forms. Much poorer is the terrestrial fauna, for which the flying dog is the only native mammal. On the other hand, the marine fauna has a tropical character and a great wealth of species. Their tortoises are also numerous. Warburg speaks with great appreciation of the diligence and care with which the immigrant Japanese cultivate their small fields, on which they cultivate sugar cane, taro, sweet potatoes and other crops, and compares their villages with the miserable huts and their neglected surroundings, which characterize the rest of the whites and Polynesians who formerly ended up here. Under Japanese rule, even in the previously deserted archipelago, there was no longer any room for the dolce far niente of her earlier life. |
In the geological section it was already emphasized on p. 64 that the large volcanic Fuji fissure begins in the north on the Sea of ??Japan with the Miokosan group and ends in the tropics with the Mariana Islands below 16° N. Its two southernmost Japanese members are the Bonin and Volcano Islands *). The latter, small masses of andesite rising steeply and high out of the sea, lie southwest of Haha-jima between latitudes 24° 16' and 25° 26' N., 141° 12' and 141° 30' E North in turn discovered and named by Lopez de Villalobes in 1543 **). The largest and best-known is the middle one, the 195 m high Iwo-jima (Sulphur Island, Spanish Isla Azufre ó Fortuna), north of it Kita Iwo-jima (North Iwo-Jima) rises to 768 m, finally in a southerly direction, not far from the 24th parallel, Minami-Iwo-jima (the southern sulfur island, Spanish Volcan de S. Augustin and Volcan Sur ó de San Dionisio) with 921 m height. Warburg visited the middle or actual Sulfur Island, and makes interesting statements not only about the poor flora, but also about some Japanese who had been swept here with their boat during a typhoon, where they had lived four years and now found their salvation. According to Yoshiwara, the Ogasawara Islands are typical submarine volcanoes, formed from trachytuff and trachytic lava and mainly from augite-andesite. There are also numerous banks of liparite and serpentine. Some of these rocks were already known from there; but Yoshiwara, during his four-week stay in the two southern groups of the archipelago, demonstrated the nature of their occurrence and many other things more precisely. The greatest success of his study trip, however, is the discovery of the Eocene formation with characteristic nummulites, which have not yet been detected anywhere in the Japanese Empire. In various places he found tuff beds 30-40 feet thick, a few hundred feet, and in one case even more than 600 feet above sea level, filled with nummulites, also with numerous species of marine mussels and snail shells. Upon later examination of the * Through the latter, Japan has become Germany's harmless neighbor in Oceania. |
"coin stones" they turned out to be identical to two species long known from Java, the Nummulites baguelensis Verbeek and N. javanus Verb. These surprising facts are undoubtedly of high scientific value. Yoshiwara's discovery should provide the starting point and stimulus for many more geological ventures into volcanic regions of the Pacific, and shed more light on the tremendous changes which they have undergone in the course of incalculable times. — |
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Source.
Johann Justus Rein.
This transcription was made from the volume at Google Books.
Last updated by Tom Tyler, Denver, CO, USA, Jul 13, 2023
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