Fritz and Eric wished to go ashore the moment the anchor plunged into
the water and the chain cable grated through the hawse hole; but,
darkness setting in almost immediately after sunset, as is usual in such
southerly latitudes, their landing had to be postponed until the next
morning, when the skipper told them they would have plenty of time to
inspect the little ocean colony of Tristan d'Acunha--that is, should not
a westerly-wind set in, bringing with it a heavy swell, as it invariably
did; for, this would cause them "to cut and run from their anchorage in
a jiffy," if they did not desire to lay the ship's bones on the rocks by
Herald Point, which he, "for one," he said, had no intention of doing.
However, the wind still remained in the same quarter, blowing steadily
from the south-east, which made it calm where the _Pilot's Bride_ was
lying--Captain Brown from previous experience knowing the safest berth
to take up--so she did not have to shift her berth. When morning broke,
too, the brothers had a better view of the place than on the evening
before; for then, only a hasty peep at it could be obtained before it
was hidden by night.
The small bay in which the ship was moored opened to the westward; and,
on the right, a slope of rough pasture land, about a quarter of a mile
in width, ran up from the beach to an almost precipitous wall of rock, a
thousand feet or more in height--although a sort of misty vapour hung
over it, which prevented Fritz from gauging its right altitude. On the
left-hand side, the wall of rock came sheer down into the sea, leaving
only a few yards of narrow shingle, on which the surf noisily broke. A
stream leaped down from the high ground, nearly opposite the vessel, and
the low fall with which it tumbled into the bay at this point indicated
that there would be found the best landing-place, an opinion which
Captain Brown confirmed as soon as he came on deck.
"I guess, though," said the skipper, pointing out a red flag which Fritz
could notice just being hoisted on one of the cottage chimneys in the
distance, "we needn't hurry 'bout launchin' a boat, fur some o' them
islanders are comin' off to pay us a visit an' will take you ashore.
Thet's their signal for communicatin' with any vessel thet calls in
here. Run up our ensign, Mr Dort," he added to Eric, who stood at his
station on the lee side of the mizzen mast; "an' tell 'em to fire the
gun forrud, jest to give 'em a kinder sort o' salute, you know. Uncle
Sam likes to do the civil, the same as other men-o'-war when they goes
to foreign ports!"
These orders were obeyed; and no sooner were the "Stars and Stripes" run
up to the masthead and the report of the little gun on the topgallant
fo'c's'le heard reverberating through the distant mountain tops--the
sound of the discharge being caught up and echoed between the narrow
arms of the bay--than a smart whale-boat, pulled by eight men and with a
white-bearded, venerable-looking individual seated in the stern-sheets,
was seen coming out from the very spot which Fritz had determined to be
the landing-place.
They were soon alongside the _Pilot's Bride_; when the old man--who
introduced himself as Green, the oldest inhabitant of the island and
with whom Captain Brown had already had an acquaintance of some years'
duration--cordially invited Fritz to land, the skipper having explained
that he wished to see the place and hear all about it. He told the
brothers aside, however, that perhaps they'd better not mention their
intention of settling on Inaccessible Island, for the inhabitants of
Tristan, who sent expeditions every year on sealing excursions there,
might not like to hear this news.
While on their way to the shore with the old man and four of the
islanders--the other Tristaners remaining on board the ship to select
certain articles they required from her stores and arrange for the
barter of fresh meat and potatoes with Captain Brown in exchange--Fritz
observed that, some distance out from the land, there was a sort of
natural breakwater, composed of the long, flat leaves of a giant species
of seaweed which grew up from the bottom, where its roots extended to
the depth of fifteen fathoms. This, old Green pointed out, prevented
the rollers, when the wind was from the westward, from breaking too
violently on the shore, between which and the floating weed was a belt
of calm water, as undisturbed as the surface of a mountain tarn.
The landing-place was of fine black sand, showing the volcanic character
of the mountain peak above, which Green said was over eight thousand
feet high and had an extinct crater on the top; and, when Fritz and his
brother had jumped out of the boat, they proceeded up to the little
settlement of the islanders, which was called "Edinburgh" out of
compliment to his Royal Highness Prince Alfred, who had visited the
place when cruising in HMS _Galatea_, just four years before their
landing.
The village consisted of some dozen cottages or so, roughly built of
square blocks of hewn stone dovetailed into each other, without mortar,
and thatched with tussock-grass. The houses were scattered about, each
in its own little garden, enclosed by walls of loosely piled stones
about four feet high; but, as it was now the early spring of Tristan,
these had very little growing in them. One of the enclosures, Fritz
noticed, had a lot of marigolds in flower, another, several dwarf
strawberry plants just budding, while a third was filled with young
onions; but the majority displayed only the same coarse, long tussock-
grass with which the cottages were thatched.
When the brothers came to examine the houses more closely, they were
particularly struck with the neatness with which they were constructed
and the extreme labour that must have been expended on them.
Apart from the difficulty of procuring wood, which they could only get
from stray whaling ships, the islanders are obliged to build their
dwellings of stone, in order to prevent their being demolished by the
fierce and frequent hurricanes that assail the isolated little spot,
exposed as it is to all the rude blustering blasts that career over the
expanse of the Atlantic. The cottages are, therefore, put together with
a dark-brown, soft sort of stone, which is hewn out in great blocks from
the cliffs above the settlement and afterwards shaped with great
accuracy and care with the axe. Many of these masses of stone are
upwards of a ton in weight; but, still, they are cut so as to lock into
one another in a double row to form the main wall, which is some
eighteen inches thick, with smaller pieces of stone, selected with equal
care as to their fitting, placed in between. There is no lime on the
island, so that the blocks are put together on the cyclopean plan,
without cement. They are also raised into their places in the same
primitive fashion, strong spars being used for inclined planes, up which
these monoliths are pushed by manual labour in a similar way to that
described in the old hieroglyphics of the Nineveh marbles. With all
these precautions as to strength, however, the sou'-westers blow with
such fierceness into the little bay where the colony is situated, that
many of these massive buildings, Green said, were constantly blown down,
the huge blocks being tumbled about like pieces of cork!
The roofs were thatched with the long grass that Fritz had seen growing
in the gardens and with which he had later on a closer and more painful
acquaintance, the tussock fibres being fastened inside to light poles
that were attached to rafters placed horizontally, while the ridges
outside were covered with bands of green turf, firmly fixed on.
As for the colony, which numbered some eighty souls in all, it consisted
of fifteen families, who possessed from five to six hundred head of
cattle and about an equal supply of sheep, with lots of pigs and
poultry, each family having its own stock in the same way that each
cultivated its own garden; but, there was a common grazing ground, where
also large quantities of potatoes were raised--the trade of the island
being principally with the American whalers, who take supplies of fresh
meat and vegetables, for which they barter manufactured goods, household
stuffs, and "notions."
During their visit, Fritz and Eric were hospitably entertained by the
old man Green at his cottage, which had three large rooms and was the
best in the place; and the roast pig which furnished the main dish of
the banquet was all the more toothsome, by reason of the long time the
brothers had been at sea and so deprived of fresh meat and those good
things of the land, to which they had grown somewhat accustomed during
their stay at the comfortable shanty on Narraganset Bay under Mrs
Brown's auspices.
Indirectly, too, Fritz found out a great deal about Inaccessible Island;
and, the more he heard, the more firmly rooted became his determination
to settle there. The seals, old Green said, were numerous enough; but,
he added that the islanders were only able to pay a short visit in
December every year, and so lost considerable chances of taking more of
them.
"Aha," thought Fritz, "we'll be there altogether, and so will have
opportunities for taking them all the year round. Tristaners, my good
people, look out for your sealskins and oil in future; we, crusoes, are
going into the business wholesale!"
When the brothers were rowed back to the ship in the evening--having
spent the entire day on the island in noticing what would be most useful
to themselves subsequently for the new life they were about to adopt--
the other Tristaners who had remained on board choosing goods returned
to the shore, promising to send the value of the articles they had
selected in beef and potatoes on the following morning. Before turning
in for the night, however, Captain Brown gave Fritz to read a newspaper
extract which he had posted into his logbook. This detailed the early
history of the little colony, and the gist of it was as follows:--
Although discovered as early as the year 1506 by d'Acunha, the first
comparatively modern navigator who visited the island was the captain of
an American ship--the _Industry_, a whaler sailing from Philadelphia--
who remained at Tristan from August, 1790, to April, 1791, his people
pitching their tents on almost the precise spot now occupied by the
settlement. At the time of this vessel's visit, it was mentioned that
there was plenty of wood of a small growth excellent for firewood; but
this Fritz noticed was not the case when he inspected the place during
the day, hardly anything but slight brush being apparent beyond the
tussock-grass. The American captain also stated that the amount of sea
animals of all kinds on the island--whales, seals, and penguins--was
almost inexhaustible, his party having procured over six thousand
sealskins during their stay of seven months, besides killing more whales
than they could find room for the oil from them in their ship! This,
too, had become altered during the years which had elapsed, the seals
getting scarcer at Tristan now, through the wholesale war carried on
against them by the islanders, who latterly, with the exception of the
visits they paid to Inaccessible Island and Nightingale Islet--according
to old Green's account--had almost abandoned the pursuit for sheer want
of sport.
The next mention of Tristan d'Acunha, as related in the printed
chronicle Fritz read, was in the year after the American captain's
sojourn there, when two British ships of war, the _Lion_ and
_Hindostan_, which were probably East Indiamen, with the English embassy
to China on board, anchored off the north side of the island under the
cliff of the mountain peak; but, a sudden squall coming on, these
vessels had to leave without investigating the place thoroughly,
although their commanders described it as being uninhabited at that
time.
Nine years later, the captain of another ship that called there found
three Americans settled on the island, preparing sealskins and boiling
down oil. Goats and pigs had been set adrift by some of the earlier
visitors, as well as vegetables planted, and these colonists appeared to
be in a very flourishing condition, declaring themselves perfectly
contented to pass their lives there. One of the men, indeed, had drawn
up a proclamation, stating that he was the king of the country, a title
which the others acknowledged; and the three, the monarch and his two
subjects, had cleared about fifty acres of land, which they had sown
with various things, including coffee-trees and sugar-canes; but,
whether this plantation turned out unsuccessful, or from some other
notion, the "king" and his colleagues abandoned the settlement--the
place remaining deserted until the year 1817, when, during Napoleon
Buonaparte's captivity at Saint Helena, the island was formally taken
possession of by the English Government, a guard of soldiers being
especially drafted thither for its protection, selected from the Cape of
Good Hope garrison.
This was, undoubtedly, the foundation of the present colony; for,
although the military picket was withdrawn in the following year, a
corporal of artillery with his wife and two brother soldiers, who
expressed a desire to remain on the island, stayed behind. Since then,
Tristan has always been inhabited--the original little colony of four
souls having formed the nucleus of the present settlement of over
eighty, men joining it at various times from passing whalers, while
women were imported from the Cape when wives were wanted. From the fact
of these latter being mostly Hottentots, the complexion of the younger
men, Fritz noticed, was somewhat darker than that of Europeans. This
explained what the skipper meant, on first telling him about the island,
when he said the inhabitants were "mulattoes"; although Fritz thought
them only of a brunette tinge, for they were of much lighter hue than
many Spaniards and Italians whom he had met on the Continent.
Glass, the ex-artilleryman and original founder of the English
settlement, was a Scotchman, born at Kelso. He seems to have been a man
of great principle and energy, these qualities gaining for him the
complete confidence of the little community over which his authority was
quite of a patriarchal character. For thirty-seven years he maintained
his position as leader, representing the colony in all its transactions
with passing ships and showing himself just and honest in his dealings.
The islanders had always been English-speaking, and having strong
British sympathies, "Governor Glass," as he was styled, received
permission from one of the naval officers visiting the island to hoist
the red ensign, as a signal to vessels going by. This slight official
recognition was all the notice that the settlement has received from
England ever since its establishment--that is, beyond the sending out of
a chaplain there by the "Religious Tract Society," who remained for five
years and when leaving spoke of the members of the little settlement as
being so highly moral that they did not require any spiritual
ministration, "there not being a vice in the colony to contend with!"
To this latter statement, Fritz found the skipper had appended an
eccentric footnote:-- "'Cos why, there ain't no rum handier than the
Cape, the little to be got from the whalers visiting the spot--an' they
have little enough from me, you bet!--being speedily guzzled down by the
old birds, an' the young uns never gettin' a taste o' the pizen!"
On Glass's death, he was succeeded in the leadership of the colony by
Green, the next oldest man, who now lived in the house of the late
founder of the settlement and hoisted the English ensign in his turn.
Green was a venerable-looking man, with a long white beard, and seemed,
from what Fritz could gather in his different conversations with the
islanders, to have successfully followed in his predecessor's footsteps.
Since the Duke of Edinburgh's visit in the _Galatea_, many other stray
men-of-war have occasionally called to see how the islanders were
getting on; but the principal trading communication they have has always
been with American whalers, some round dozen of which call at Tristan
yearly for the purposes of barter.
"An' I guess it's a downright shame," said Captain Brown, when
mentioning this latter fact to Fritz, "thet they don't fly the star-
spangled banner instead o' thet there rag of a British ensign! If it
weren't for us whalers, they'd starve fur want of wood to warm
themselves in winter; an', who'd buy their beef an' mutton an' fixins,
if we didn't call in, hey?"
"That's a conundrum, and I give it up," answered Fritz with a laugh.
"Ah, you're a sly coon," said the skipper, sailing away to his cabin.
"I guess it's 'bout time to bunk in, mister, so I'm off. Good-night!"
"Good-night!" returned Fritz, shutting up the log book and going his way
likewise to the small state room set apart for the use of himself and
his brother, where he found Eric asleep and snoring away soundly, the
tramping about ashore having completely tired out the lad.