The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1906-01-27
A Girl Robinson Crusoe


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How long she was in the water she
does not know: it could not have been
| long. She was aroused by being hurl-
| ed upon sand. She felt the wave that
had cast her up drag her back into the
| sea and after a short, despairing strug-
| gle reached land and threw herself, ex-
| hausted, upon the sand.
| When she awakened it was dark.
| She felt something warm upon her
| face, and, starting up in alarm, found
| Mons, her pet lion, licking her face.
| The lion had been cast ashore, and, al
| though one of his legs was badly hurt.
he was still alive, and together the
exhausted girl and the crippled lion
lay down and slept.
That was the first night of 553 that
the young girl and the lion lived on
the speck of land in the center of the
vast ocean.
Liela did not know then or until she
was rescued, where she was, but the
little speck in the sea upon which they
had been cast was one of the minute
islands northward of the BeIlona reefs,
towards the Chesterfield islands, and
home the girl could see palm trees on
another island southwark.
MAKES HERSELF HOME ON
ISLAND.
Like Crusoe, the girl made the ex-
animation the day after she was cast
ashore, and in less than an hour had
learned the worst. She still hoped that
IA nd hn5. faY he ,crJ1k
perhaps it had been cast away also,
possibly on the speck of land to the
Southwark. Some driftwood, a few
bits of rigging from the lost vessel a
chicken coop filled with dead fowls, a
few tattered bits of sails, and two
large tins of sea biscuit were all that
the girl found on the beach during her
tour around the island, and every bit
of this she dragged up the beach, be-
yond the reach of the waves, that were
still breaking high.
Her first work was to plant a piece
of driftwod on the highest point of
the island and float a distress signal
from it.
Then, selecting a spot in the wind
twisted grove of palm trees near the
edge of the pond, she started to build
a shelter. She had no tools, and for
days she labored, using a piece of
board for a shovel and her hands, and
eventually she managed to erect a sort
of hut by planting the pieces of drift
wood from the wreck upright and pill
ing sand and stones against the out
side. Over this she stretched the larg-
est piece of sail. and she and Mons had
home. There she carried every |
thing that drifted ashore.
For days she was on the verge of
despair. Alone in the middle of a great
ocean, practically without food or
shelter. her only companion a lion cub, |
the girl gave herself over TO a fit of
hopelessness. But after a week of liv-
ing on the drowned fowls and sea bis |
cult Liela suddenly aroused herself and |
determined to live Young, strong, |
athletic, full of life, she rallied from (,
the shock and the despair and set to |
work
Her first care was for food, and she !
began to set snares for turtles, and /
from the cordage that had come ashore !
she began to knot together a seine with |
which to catch fish in the lagoon be- /
tween the island and the reef.
Also from her scant supply of pins /
and hairpins she fashioned little hooks !
that she set to catch gulls.