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They are solid, truncated pyramidal columns, generally about twenty feet high and ten feet square at the base. The monuments on Tinian were seen by M. Arago, who accompanied Bougainville. According to his description they form two long colonnades, the two rows being thirty feet apart, and seeming to have once been connected by something like roofing.
Agoignan, an island with a very rocky coast, presented from a distance an arid and barren appearance, but is in reality thickly clothed with trees even to the summit of its highest mountains. Rota is a regular jungle, an almost impenetrable mass of brushwood, above which rise thickets of rimas, tamarind, fig, and palm trees. Tinian, too, presents anything but an agreeable appearance.
How happy would Lord Anson have been, and what hardships he would have avoided, if he had known that there was a group of islands half way between America and Tinian, where all his wants could have been effectually supplied; and in describing which the elegant historian of that voyage would have presented his reader with a more agreeable picture than I have been able to draw in this chapter."
We occupied the same bed, and he would be sure to keep me awake until almost light, telling me stories of the natives of the Island of Tinian, and other places he had visited in his travels. At last I could not help being interested in what he said, and by degrees I felt the greatest desire to go to sea. I owned a sailboat called the Ariel, and worth about seventy-five dollars.
The author of these papers, being a mariner, suggests that they are “landmarks or relics of ancient copper-colored voyagers of the Polynesian race during their great migrations.” Remarkable structures of this kind are found on Tapituea, one of the Kingsmill islands, and on Tinian, one of the Ladrones, where, also, remarkable Cyclopean structures are found.
Beyond Rota the proas reached Tinian, where the arid plains recalled to the travellers the desolate coasts of the land of Endracht, testifying to the considerable changes that must have taken place there since the time when Lord Anson described the place as a terrestrial Paradise.
Of this interesting information use will be made when the subject is presently resumed, but first some notice must be taken of an excursion to the islands Rota and Tinian, the latter of which had already become known to us through the narratives of former travellers.
The Marianne archipelago was discovered by Magellan on the 6th March, 1521, and at first received the name of Islas de las velas latinas, the Isles of the lateen sails, but subsequently that of the Ladrones, or the Robbers. If one may trust Pigafetta, the illustrious admiral saw no islands but Tinian, Saypan, and Agoignan.
In Tinian, Kusaie, and also in Ponape, in the Carolines, there are ruins, including, in the latter island, a court three hundred feet long with walls ten yards high, some of the monoliths being twenty-five feet long and eight feet thick. On Tongataboo are larger rocks, forty feet high, which were quarried elsewhere and shipped to that coral island.
And perhaps the other and nobler Charlotte of the Wahlverwandtschaften would not have detained us so long with her moss hut, her terrace, her park prospect, if Julie had not had her elysium, where the sweet freshness of the air, the cool shadows, the shining verdure, flowers diffusing fragrance and colour, water running with soft whisper, and the song of a thousand birds, reminded the returned traveller of Tinian and Juan Fernandez.
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