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As he expected, after rising a few feet from the ground, his eyes encountered the solemn blue line of the sea, not half a mile distant. He descended and commenced a systematic search. Men had been here. Was there a house? Would he suddenly encounter some hermit Malay or Chinaman? At the foot of the main cliff was a cluster of fruit-bearing trees, plantains, areca-nuts, and cocoa-palms.
There are many cocoa-palms bearing fruit of pleasant taste from which is made wine and common oil, which is a very healing remedy for wounds; and other wild palms of the forests that do not yield cocoa-nuts, but serve as wood, and from whose bark is made bonote, a tow for rigging and cables, and also for calking ships.
At about the same time, though in a different manner, Kooamua established a forest law. It was observed the cocoa-palms were suffering, for the plucking of green nuts impoverishes and at last endangers the tree. Now Kooamua could tapu the reef, which was public property, but he could not tapu other people's palms; and the expedient adopted was interesting.
Pirate's Bay, the second after the lighthouse, is a fairy scene under a fine sky; with its truly African tricolor, its blue waters reflecting air, its dwarf cliffs of laterite bespread with vivid leek-green, and its arc of golden yellow sand, upon which the feathery tops of the cocoa-palms look like pins planted in the ground.
The first that issued forth we caught in our cups, as the sugar-water is most delicious to drink; and it seemed as if our little people, particularly Mary and Luisa, would never say `enough. Harry, too, was as fond of it as they; and was heard to declare that the sugar-maple was the finest tree of the forest, and quite a match for either bread-fruits, oranges, or cocoa-palms.
His house, with three others, a godown on very high stilts, and a mound of graves whitened by the petals of the Frangipani, with a great many cocoa-nut and other trees, was surrounded, as Malay dwellings often are, by a high fence, within which was another inclosing a neat, sanded level, under cocoa-palms, on which his "private residence" and those of his wives stand.
Maxwell and I landed in Province Wellesley, under the magnificent casuarina trees which droop in mournful grace over the sandy shore. The somberness of the interminable groves of cocoa-palms on the one side of the Strait, the brightness of the sun-kissed peaks on the other, and the deep shadows on the amber water, were all beautiful. Truly in the tropics "the outgoings of the morning rejoice."
The women ran in from all directions, but remained very quietly at the doors of their dwellings to see us pass, and quite forgot to conceal their faces while they did so. In these parts, there are whole woods of cocoa-palms. This tree is properly a native of India, where it attains a height of eighty feet, and bears fruit in its sixth year.
It is intensely tropical; there are mangrove swamps, and fringes of cocoa-palms, and banana-groves, date, sago, and travelers' palms, tree-ferns, india-rubber, mango, custard-apple, jack-fruit, durion, lime, pomegranate, pine-apples, and orchids, and all kinds of strangling and parrot-blossomed trailers.
For a long while I came as far as this shooting, and went no farther. There was no sign of any path beyond, and the cocoa-palms in the front of the foot of the valley were the last this way. For the whole "eye" of the island, as natives call the windward end, lay desert.
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