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of the pacific islands.
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The island is of volcanic formation, and appears like several peaks or a range of mountains standing up out of the sea. The highest point is about 1,000 feet above sea level, and the coastline is very rugged and precipitous. The island is about six miles long, and three across in the widest part. The village, called Adamstown, is situated on the north side. There are 33 houses, built of weather-boards, with thatched roofs, within a radius of less than a mile. For their water supply the people depend on a spring in a valley about 300 feet above the village. The water is brought down in open 'flues,' made from palm trunks, for half a mile, and run into a large vat, from which house-holds draw their supplies. The island produces an abundance of food in return for very little labour. The sweet potato and the bulb taro are the principal crops. Then there are water taro, yam manioca, and arrowroot as the root crops. Pumpkins, water-melons, and rock-melons grow to perfection, and the French-bean and cow-pea do well. There are nine different kinds of banana and some of the finest oranges that the world can produce. I wish that we could send you some. Then there are pineapple, passion fruit, custard apples, snow fruit, mango, alligator pears, and breadfruit.
The island is of historic interest as the oldest British colony in the southern hemisphere after Sydney and Norfolk Island. The mutineers of the 'Bounty,' from whom the present inhabitants are descended, settled there in 1790. The island was uninhabited when they reached it, but they were not the first to dwell on it. Stone axes, stone pillars, and figures like those of Easter Island, and skeletons, with pearl mussels placed beneath their heads, have been found on Pitcairn. Like the mystery of Easter Island, the problem of how (it may be long before the keels of Magellan's ships furrowed the waters of the Pacific) these people came to inhabit this speck of land so lost in the blue immensites of ocean that it had but one species of land bird, a small tree creeper, when it was rediscovered, will perhaps never be solved. Why they vanished from the island is another mystery to which there is no key. The second colonisation was due to the presence on the "Bounty" of a book describing the voyage of H.M.S. sloop "Swallow" in the Pacific under Phillip Carteret. In 1767 Carteret visited Pitcairn, which he named after the mid-shipman who first sighted it. To escape the long arm of the English law, which did, in fact, afterwards reach out to Tahiti and pluck thence some of their fellow-mutineers, Fletcher Christian and eight others sailed to Pitcairn in the 'Bounty' in 1790, taking with them six Polynesian men and a dozen women. They ran the 'Bounty' ashore, and burnt her, and their retreat remained unknown to the outside world for 18 years. In 1808 the American whaler 'Topaz' touched at Pitcairn, and her captain was, to his intense surprise, hailed in English by some youths in a canoe, the half-caste sons of the mutineers. Of the mutineers themselves but one remained, Alexander Smith, who took, for some obscure reason, the name of John Adams. Indeed, of the 15 men who landed on Pitcairn in 1790 all but Adams were dead in 1800, and with one exception they died a violent death. "Drink and the devil had done for the rest," as the pirate's song in "Treasure Island" runs. Their "drink," by the way, was a spirit, said to resemble whisky, which a Scot named McCoy contrived to extract from the root of the tea-tree. The dangerous secret seems to have died with McCoy.
Towards the middle of the 19th century Pitcairn became almost a regular place of call for many vessels of the immense fleet of American whalers which overran the South Pacific. In 1844, for instance, 49 whalers, of which 46
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