The Abbeville press and banner. [volume] (Abbeville, S.C.) 1869-1924, 1921-04-18
STILL ISLANDS OF MYSTERY

tropics of Cancer and Capricorn
and the 130th parallel east and west
lie the islands of the South Seas
Some of them are mapped, but
many of them r so small, in the
vastness of the ocean, that they can
not be designated on maps, even by
a pinpriek.
Like the stars reflected in the still
lagoons of their atolls, the South
Sea islands have never been count
ed. Geographers estimate their num-
Der at some twenty SIX hundred.
But mariners blown off the usual
routes, still come upon uncharted Is
lets. Many islands, discovered only
to be lost again, lie in the desert
spaces Of the Pacific-or perhaps
they are mirages that have never
taken form ave in the beauty
struck eyes of the seamen who
charted them.
For they are islands of mystery
these islands of the South Seas-of
mystery and beauty. Some of them
are rugged, volcanic masses, with
soaring mountains and cliff-girded
fords. Darwin saw in these islands
the peaks Of a submerged continent
or land bridge by which, cons ago,
men and animals crossed from
hemisphere to hemisphere. The peo-
pies of the islands bear out this
theory.
They are fit settings for romance
and adventure, these lovely and ter
rible islands and from time of the
great navigators of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, who
were the first Of the western world
to anchor in their coral locked har-
bors, they have spelled romance and
adventure to Westerners. Tied to
the routine of an industrial world,
many a man sends his mind to YAM
der among the beautiful savages of
Polynesia, who live still, so the fable
goes, in that golden age in which all
desires are good ana toll is yet un-
known; among the m~an-eating head
hunting blacks of MelansIa, a ter
rible and grotsque and as unreal as
the demons of the Middle Ages;
among the shades of the white men
who have come and gone over the
brilliant sea. The very spirits-ex-
plorers, adventures of good and ill
repute, many a Missionary to whom
a tablet on a hore now bears wit.
ness Of martyrdom, and many an ar
fist, adventuring after beauty, who
has sought to make immortal the
dying peoples Of the islands
For they all seem marked for
death. The islands were happily
populous when the first white men
settled tere. But year by year the
populations have dwindled. The
white man brought death. The first
settlers were deserters from ships
and escaped ~convicts from the penal
settlements of Australia. Then came
traders and whalers, reckless men
and many of them evil. They
brought to the islands the vices Of
the white man and his diseases.
Then came the recruiters, who
''shanghiaed" the blacks for en-
forced labor in Australia.
And the missionaries came. And
the majority of the islanders who
came under missionary influence
gave v e the healthful custom of
oiling their bodies as a protection
against wet and chill and put on
clothes.
Pneumonia and tuberculosis have
carried them off by the hundreds.
They struggle little against death,
for they live now in an alien civil
cation in which the wars and dances
that made life zestful of old have
little part. Though here and there a
new lease on life seems to have been
taken by an island population for
the most part the old race continues
to die and a new population drifts
slowly in-half breeds, Chinese,
Malays, Indians and a handful of
governing whites.