18 A NATURALIST ON DESERT ISLANDS. 



a few of these trees will provide you with every possible 

 thing you can require — with fibre to make mats with ; 

 shell to burn as fuel or to use as water-vessels, cups or 

 ladles ; with leaves to use as thatch for your house or as 

 mats, screens and baskets ; when the wood of the trunk 

 or the mid-rib of the leaf (fifteen to sixteen feet long) can 

 be used in making the walls of your dwelling ; when you 

 can make rope out of the fibrous tissue of the young 

 stem, or walking sticks out of the central parts of the 

 mature tree ; when you can get enough oil to swim in 

 from the flesh of the nut itself, and soap from the oil mixed 

 with the ash derived from the burnt husks ; when you 

 can have at your command an alcoholic drink made from 

 the juice of the wounded spathe, or a vinegar from this 

 when it has turned sour ; when you can make a salad 

 of the central shoot when quite young, or at times 

 an agreeable pickle ; when, besides eating the nut in its 

 ripe state, you can eat it in its young and tender unripe 

 state, or in its over-ripe state when it has begun to sprout, 

 and to fill the whole of the interior of the shell with a 

 very eatable sponge-like mass ; when you can drink its 

 so-called milk (which God forbid) ; and when in a word 

 you can make it do almost anything but talk ? 



We have often wondered how it came about that since 

 the days of the buccaneers such a " tight" little island as 

 Swan Island should have been left in lonely soHtude, 

 absolutely untroubled and ignored by man until quite 

 recent times. For, after all, here was seven hundred 

 acres or so of good, fertile and well-timbered land, which 

 would grow anything for the asking — a little sea-girt 

 property with no fences to keep up, no land-taxes to pay, 

 no title-deeds to bother over, and with a chmate which is 

 almost perfect, aU going begging, simply waiting for the 

 first man to come along and set his foot upon it, stick up 

 his national flag and say, " This is my land." 



Swan Island has no written history ; but as far as I 

 have been able to discover, the first men who ever laid 

 a claim to it since the days of the buccaneers were English- 



V 



