Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/216

212 cordially and kindly received by the magistrate and school teacher, John Stewart Bruce, Esq., who for more than twenty years has lived alone among the natives laboring to fit them to meet the oncoming of civilization. Throughout our stay on Maër Island, the constant kindness and excellent advice of Mr. Bruce was indispensable to the success of our studies, and incidents exhibiting his rare personal charm and high character we shall always recall as the happiest of our memories.

Through the kind permission of the government, we were allowed to occupy the courthouse and the jail for laboratory quarters.

The courthouse was an airy, cheerful one-roomed concrete building which the natives under the leadership and instruction of Mr. Bruce had succeeded in erecting after four years of the most strenuous and concerted effort in the history of the island.

The jail, on the other hand, was a flimsy hut of pandanus thatch, but it served admirably as a storehouse for our apparatus and supplies.

As may be imagined, our visit put an end to the orderly administration of island justice. Deferred jail sentences were henceforth the only sort that could be enforced upon wife-beaters and other disturbers of the serenity of the island, but an even more dreadful punishment was quickly devised by the chief, or Mamoose, who condemned malefactors to work for us.

This punishment, however, soon lost its sting in proportion as the fame of the achievements of Jimmie, our cook, became spread abroad. Four cups of strong coffee, five fish balls, a large piece of turtle meat, four bananas and a yam constituted an average 5:30 "breakfast" for our native assistants, so it may be imagined that starvation was not the rule of our camp.

The impression should not arise, however, that our native servants were reprobates, for those whom we chose were good and faithful. Indeed, we employed the same men who had served Professor Haddon, whose accounts have made the anthropological and geological aspects of the islands so well known.

Fortunately one of our party could claim the honor of Professor Haddon's personal friendship, an "open sesame" to the Islander's highest consideration, but despite the initial respect thus inspired, the natives soon decided that we of the scientific staff were all hopeless but quite harmless lunatics who were being taken around the world under the guidance of our engineer, Mr. Mills. Indeed the wonderful behavior of the launch and the miraculous achievements of "Johnmills" who could "saw iron" were soon immortalized in song and will doubtless remain as a revered tradition of the island.

Maër Island is an extinct volcano which in its active days burst through the old limestone floor of the wide Barrier Reef plateau which