Page:Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute - Volume 1 (2nd ed.).djvu/111

Rh although one of our passengers told me he had been in bodily fear of them all day, and his enjoyment had thus been very unnecessarily marred. Rats are very numerous. It is curious that when our coal ship first went there they were troubled with mosquitoes, though none were found on shore. They were, in fact, taken there in the ship, and have now disappeared. There is an abundance of fish, some very beautiful, especially the parrot and gold and silver fish; good mullet and some other kinds are readily procurable; of sharks, plenty.

The taro root, the chief support of the inhabitants, grows abundantly, but requires attention to its culture, as it will not grow without plenty of water. We left a quantity of English vegetable seeds, and we hope they will do well. Water-melons are plentiful and cheap; bananas grow well and are very good; oranges are produced, but of very poor quality ; pine-apples also very inferior. The sugar-cane likewise grows well, and there were cocoa-nuts formerly on the island, but a blight destroyed them all some years ago. I could not ascertain if they throve well; but I believe the cocoa-nut tree is a great discerner of latitude, and will not flourish out of the tropics. Our representative told me he was very successful with his cabbages; tolerably so with maize; less so with his potatoes, doubtless owing, as he said, “to his ignorance of gardening.”

Coal of a very inferior quality has been found in the interior: the natives use it occasionally for cooking, &c., but it is useless for steam purposes.

The land is generally covered with thick scrub and fern, showing here and there clear spaces of a kind of coarse grass which grows five or six feet high. There are a few beautiful flowering shrubs, and whilst the tree- and smaller ferns abound, trees of tolerable size are found in the northern part of the island, but only small ones near the harbour. The cultivation is limited because the requirements are so small; still, vegetation is most luxuriant, and the soil appeared to me of the richest kind. True, the level ground is comparatively of small extent, but there are many hundreds of acres which might readily be cultivated.

Religion.—Captain McKellar, our representative there, in one of his letters to me, says, “They are good Protestants, and firm haters of the French, or the ‘ Wee-wees’ as they call them, and only await the arrival of a British ship of war to surrender their island to England. However, the French have been beforehand, and will stick to their protectorate, as they term it, but which in plain English means taking what they like and compelling the natives to work without paying for either. They have a king and half a dozen chiefs, but with little authority—in short, they live like one happy family, or did so before the French came.”

In the “Ruahine” we were at Rapa two days nearly—the second of