The Savage South Seas 



7 



has been. The timber is useful for 

 almost any purpose. The "yaka" might 

 be called the rosewood of the Pacific, if 

 it did not also, in some degree, resemble 

 mahogany. It is a wood of the greatest 

 beauty, being exquisitely marked and 

 veined and taking a high polish. This is 

 a wood that certainly should be known to 

 cabinet-makers, and no doubt will be later 

 on. The "savairabunidamu," a curious 

 dark-red wood, is extraordinarily tough, 

 and can be steamed and bent to almost 

 any shape — a valuable quality. The "bau 

 vundi" is a kind of cedar, very workable 

 and most lasting. A singularly beautiful 

 timber is the "bau ndina," which is deep 

 rose-red in color, tough and firm, and 

 suitable for engravers' use. Besides these, 

 there are more than sixty varieties of 

 other woods, all useful or beautiful and 

 most to be found in great profusion. The 

 quantities available are very large. 



UNCANNY INSECTS 



The wonderful stick insects of Fiji, 

 familiar in all home museums, are found 

 on nearly every cocoanut tree. They are 

 very ill-smelling, and squirt a fetid fluid 

 at one's eyes, if handled. Leaf insects I 

 never saw, except when the natives 

 caught and brought them to me, but all 

 the guava bushes have them, although a 

 white man's eye can seldom distinguish 

 them from their shelter. They are most 

 miraculous and uncanny creatures, ab- 

 solutely leaves endowed with the power 

 of motion, so far as the most scrutinizing 

 eye can see, for even their legs and heads 

 are a precise copy of stalks and small 

 leaflets. 



A certain enterprising man and his 

 wife, who were getting rich very slowly 

 indeed keeping a country store, resolved 

 to try whether the magic bean might 

 not do for them what it had done for 

 others in South America and the West 

 Indies. So, in the face of some actual 

 opposition and continual ridicule, they ex- 

 pended their little capital of 250 pounds 

 on the leasing of eight acres of warm, 

 sheltered valley land and the planting of 

 9,000 cuttings of good Mexican vanilla. 



For three years, with the assistance of 

 one Fijian and occasionally a couple of 

 Indians, the industrious couple kept their 

 plants weeded and tended, and latterly 

 looked to the fertilizing of the flowers — a 

 rather tedious business, done every day 

 by hand, in the earliest hours of the 

 morning ; and at the end of the three 

 years the reward came, for the plants 

 were yielding splendidly and were ex- 

 pected to give about 9,000 pounds of 

 dried beans, bringing an average price 

 of 10 shillings a pound. The fruits of 

 the first season were just coming in when 

 I visited the plantation, and the lucky 

 young couple were counting up their 

 gains, present and future, with joyful 

 hearts. 



SULLEN NEW HEBRIDES 



The New Hebrides are not very far 

 from Australia — only about 1,500 miles 

 northeast of Sydney — and they are by no 

 means an insignificant group, since they 

 extend over seven hundred miles of sea, 

 and some of the islands are sixty and 

 seventy miles long. 



The native population is variously 

 estimated at 60,000 to 100,000, and there 

 are about three hundred French settlers 

 and less than two hundred British and 

 colonials, most of whom are missionaries. 



The islands are extremely beautiful 

 and remarkably fertile. Three crops of 

 maize a year can be raised with little 

 trouble. Coffee is largely grown, and 

 there is none better in the" Pacific. Mil- 

 let, for broom-making, grows readily and 

 pays well. Copra can be produced in the 

 New Hebrides to better advantage than 

 in any of the British Pacific colonies, the 

 Solomons only excepted. Eighty nuts 

 a tree is considered a very good average 

 over the greater part of the South Seas. 

 In the New Hebrides the figures I re- 

 ceived seemed almost beyond belief, but, 

 even allowing for much exaggeration, it 

 seems certain that the average yearly crop 

 of nuts must be quite twice as large as in 

 Fiji, the Cook Islands, or Tonga. I saw 

 more than one tree that had three hun- 

 dred nuts at once upon it (as I was in- 



