Hazr.—On the Island of Rapa. 81 
although one of our passengers told me he had been in bodily fear of them 
all day, and his enjoyment had thus been very unnecessarily marred. Rats 
are very numerous. It is curious that when our coal ship first went there 
they were troubled with mosquitoes, though none were found on shore. 
They were, in fact, taken there in the ship, and have now disappeared. 
There is an abundance of fish, some very beautiful, especially the parrot 
and gold and silver fish; good mullet and some other kinds are readily 
procurable ; of sharks, plenty. 
The taro root, the chief support of the inhabitants, grows abundantly, 
but requires attention to its culture, as it will not grow without plenty of 
water. We left a quantity of English vegetable seeds, and we hope they 
will do well. Water-melons are plentiful and cheap; bananas grow well and 
are very good ; oranges are produced, but of very poor quality ; pine-apples 
also very inferior. The sugar-cane likewise grows well, and there were 
cocoa-nuts formerly on the island, but a blight destroyed them all some 
years ago. I could not ascertain if they throve well; but I believe the 
cocoa-nut tree is a great discerner of latitude, and will not flourish out 
of the tropies. Our representative told me he was very suecessful with his 
cabbages ; tolerably so with maize; less so with his potatoes, doubtless owing, 
as he said, “ to his ignorance of gardening." 
Coal of a very inferior quality has been found in the interior : the natives 
use it occasionally for cooking, &c., but it is useless for steam purposes. 
The land is generally covered with thick scrub and fern, showing here 
and there clear spaces of a kind of coarse grass which grows five or six feet 
high. There are a few beautiful flowering shrubs, and whilst the tree- and 
smaller ferns abound, trees of tolerable size are found in the northern part 
of the island, but only small ones near the harbour. The cultivation is 
limited because the requirements are so small; still, vegetation is most 
luxuriant, and the soil appeared to me of the richest kind. True, the level 
ground is comparatively of small extent, but there are many hundreds of 
acres which might readily be cultivated. 
Religion ——Captain McKellar, our representative there, in one of his 
letters to me, says, * They are good Protestants, and firm haters of the 
French, or the ‘ Wee-wees’ as they call them, and only await the arrival of 
a British ship of war to surrender their island to England. However, the 
French have been beforehand, and will stick to their protectorate, as they 
term it, but which in plain English means taking what they like and com- 
pelling the natives to work without paying for either. They have a king 
and half a dozen chiefs, but with little authority—in short, they live like 
one happy family, or did so before the French came." 
In the * Ruahine" we were at Rapa two days nearly—the second of 
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