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I went from Basora to Ormus, down the gulf of Persia, in a ship made of boards sewed together with cayro, which is a thread made of the husks of coco-nuts, and having certain canes, or leaves, or straw, sewed upon the seams between the boards, so that these vessels leak very much.
Then, sixteen years ago, Christmas Island was taken up by a London firm engaged in the South Sea Island trade under a lease from the Colonial Office; this firm at once sent there a number of native labourers from Manhiki, an island in the South Pacific. These, under the charge of a white man, were set to work planting coco-nuts and diving for pearl shell in the lagoon.
The island, so Niâbon told me, had not been inhabited for a great number of years, though it was occasionally visited by natives for the purpose of collecting the ripe coco-nuts, and turning them into oil, and sometimes the white traders, living on Apaian, would stop there when they were on their way to Tarawa and Maiana Lagoons. "Why such a name?" I asked.
A good tree in full bearing should produce 120 coco-nuts in a season; so that a very small grove is quite sufficient to maintain a respectable family in decency and comfort. Ah, what a mistake the English climate made when it left off its primitive warmth of the tertiary period, and got chilled by the ice and snow of the Glacial Epoch down to its present misty and dreary wheat-growing condition!
Arbuthnot was full of the big, beloved life that lay before him. Of the wife and children whom he had not seen for four years. Of his home near Sydney. Of the Solomon Islands, where he spent the few healthy months of the year growing coco-nuts for copra and developing a pearl fishery. A glorious, free existence, said he. And real men to work with.
His hopes rise and fall on a diet of oysters and coco-nuts. On July 22nd he hails with delight "a tin box of pears and condensed milk" which drift on to the reef. These have been in the water for weeks "but some are good." He writes thankfully "the milk is grand." The diary described his life during the next few months "in a sort of way."
They were a horrible-looking lot, for they were quite naked and the lips of all were stained a deep red from the juice of the betel-nut, and their dull reddish-brown bodies were daubed over with yellow and white stripes. This party had perhaps meant to surprise the captain and his men as they were getting the coco-nuts, for, finding them gone, they at once rushed out of the grove in pursuit.
"Then all we have to do is to make a ring of our men round the kopje there, and drive the baboons into the court here. From the court we could turn them into one of the passages between the walls, stop up the ends, and capture the lot." "To eat?" I said sarcastically. "Eat, man? No; to drill, and teach them to forage for us, just as the Malays teach the monkeys to pick coco-nuts for them."
In any case, wherever it happens to strike, the young coco-nut sends up at first a fine rosette of big spreading leaves, not raised as afterwards on a tall stem, but springing direct from the ground in a wide circle, something like a very big and graceful fern. In this early stage nothing can be more beautiful or more essentially tropical in appearance than a plantation of young coco-nuts.
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