Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/221

Rh the "Line Islands," from their position with respect to the equator. In spite of their general unproductiveness, the number of cocoanut-trees is so large that there is a considerable export of copra. One English and three German firms have nearly the whole business in their hands. There is one American firm also, but its transactions must be much less extensive than those of the English, and of at least two of the German houses. All are represented by resident traders. At Majuro Messrs.Henderson and MacFarlane have a very complete and extensive head-station. At Jaluit the German firms of Hernsheim and Company, and the South Sea Company, the latter at the time of my visit under the style of Capelle and Company, have large head-stations for this part of Oceania.

The contrast between Kusaie and Ponapi in the Carolines and the low atolls of the Marshall, Gilbert, and Ellice groups, is striking and agreeable. Both of the former are called by our sailors "high islands," a designation which is soon appreciated by any one who has cruised among the groups mentioned. Kusaie is densely wooded and picturesque. Its soil is very fertile. The people, who only amount to between three and four hundred, are all Christians, having been converted by the American missionaries, who have an important station on the island. The American missionaries are fond of giving to the petty chiefs of the tribes with whom they come in contact the absurd title of king. Tokusa, the chief of Kusaie, which name includes all the islets near as well as the main island of Ualan, is accordingly called king, though his subjects are so few. He speaks English well, and is very intelligent and well-mannered. The natives are straight-haired and rather light-colored. They paint their canoes a dull red, with a pigment made of an ochreous earth found in two caves on Ualan. Their houses are large, with high-pitched roofs and elevated gables. Most of them now wear some article of European dress, but the garb of the country is a broad sash woven of the fiber of an inedible banana, frequently dyed black except at the ends, where there are some bright colored bars, which make it resemble the silk scarfs of the Roman peasantry.

On the little Island of Lelé, on which the natives live, there are some interesting ruins, which appear to be those of a fortress with Cyclopean walls of large irregular blocks of basalt, twenty-five to thirty feet thick. There are also canals and artificial harbors. The natives can give no account of them, though King Tokusa told me that he believed they had been constructed by his ancestors. In the splendid Island of Ponapi, the inhabitants of which are more barbarous than those of Kusaie, there are even more remarkable ruins. Four-sided platforms stand out of the water, and are composed of layers of hexagonal basaltic prisms, like those of the Giant's Causeway, transversely superimposed one on another, the prisms of a layer being at right angles to those of the one above or below it. These platforms