296 



ISLAND LIFE 



PART II 



chose out their settlements and made plantations ; but if 

 wells could be sunk, which the governor says he will 

 attempt when we have more hands, we should then think 

 it the most pleasant and healthiest part of the island. 

 But as to healthiness, we don't think it will hold so if the 

 wood that keeps the land warm were destroyed, for then 

 the rains, which are violent here, would carry away the 

 upper soil, and it being a clay marl underneath would 

 produce but little ; as it is, we think in case it were 

 enclosed it might be greatly improved When 

 once this wood is gone the island will soon be ruined " . . . . 

 " We viewed the wood's end which joins the Honourable 

 Company's plantation called the Hutts, but the wood is so 

 destroyed that the beginning of the Great Wood is now a 

 whole mile beyond that place, and all the soil between being 

 washed away, that distance is now entirely barren." (MSS. 

 records, 1716.) In 1709 the governor reported to the 

 Court of Directors of the East India Company that the 

 timber was rapidly disappearing, and that the goats should 

 be destroyed for the preservation of the ebony wood, and 

 because the island was suffering from droughts. The reply 

 was, The goats are not to be destroyed, being more 

 valuable than ebony." Thus, through the gross ignorance 

 of those in power, the last opportunity of preserving the 

 peculiar vegetation of St. Helena, and preventing the 

 island from becoming the comparatively rocky desert it 

 now is, was allowed to pass away.^ Even in a mere 



^ Mr. Marsh in his interesting work entitled The Earth as Modified by 

 Human Action (p. 51), thus remarks on the effect of browsing quadrupeds 

 in destroying and checking woody vegetation. — "I am convinced that 

 forests would soon cover many parts of the Arabian and African deserts 

 if man and domestic animals, especially the goat and the camel, were 

 banished from them. The hard palate and tongue, and strong teeth and 

 jaws of this latter quadruped enable him to break olf and masticate tough 

 and thorny branches as large as the finger. He is particularly fond of the 

 smaller twigs, leaves, and seed-pods of the Sont and other acacias, which, 

 like the American robinia, thrive well on dry and sandy soils, and he 

 spares no tree the branches of which are within his reach, except, if I 

 remember right, the tamarisk that produces manna. Young trees sprout 

 plentifully around the springs and along the winter water-courses of the 

 desert, and these are just the halting stations of the caravans and their 

 routes of travel. In the shade of these trees annual grasses and perennial 

 shrubs shoot up, but are mown down by the hungry cattle of the Bedouin 



