CHAr. XIV.] 



ST. HELENA. 



285 



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 Com- 

 pany'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 be- 

 coming the comparatively rocky desert it now is, was allowed to 

 pass away.^ Even in a mere pecuniary point of view the error 

 was a fatal one, for in the next century (in 1810) another gover- 

 nor reports the total destruction of the great forests by the 



1 Mr. Marsh in his interesting work entitledj 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 ofE 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 

 as fast as they grow. A few years of undisturbed vegetation would suffice 

 to cover such points with groves, and these would gradually extend them- 

 selves over soils where now scarcely any green thing but the bitter 

 colocynth and the poisonous foxglove is ever seen." 



