A SHIP FOR TRISTAN.

Auckland Star, Volume LIII, Issue 78, 1 April 1922, Page 17

A SHIP FOR TRISTAN.

The old salt of sailing ship days must be amazed that only now, after a year's search, has a ship bee;: found to take to Tristan da I'unha tiie clergymanschoolmaster unjl bin wife who have offered to work there for three years, says the "Manchester Guardian." Tristan has always be. n a desperately lonely isle, 'but in the old days its history was bustling in comparison with its latter fate. It could at least reckon on visits from several ships a year, for it was a useful port of call for sailing ships rounding the Cape and for whalers; and its people had some chance to trade their poultry, sheep aud potatoes for the cloth, flour, tea. sugar aud soap which they crave,*and lo learn a little of the world without. But with the passing of the sailing ship and the decline of whaling Tristan has become a place ot almost legendary seclusion. It is hard to understand how its people—they are only a hundred or so in number—can cling to a home so "remote, unfriended, solitary, slow.'' But cling to it they do. in the same spirit tiiat made its founders, three men of a British garrison left there to checkmate attempts to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, beg to be allowed to stay when their comrades were withdrawn. They got their wish, took wives from St. Helena, and so this queerest of colonies begaji. It has had some'hard blows. In 1885 all the growu men on the island except four wendrowned by the capsizing of a boat, but the women and the younser generation remained, and the numbers, jrrow- again. Before the war the Admiralty made a pet of sorts of Tristan, and the annual visit of a ship of the navy had begun to seem the one last link with the world on which the island could fount. But that too has ended, as an economy. and for a year it has baffled tho efforts oi well-disposed shipowners to find a boat that would enable the Rev. H. M. Rogers and his wife to give the islanders the help and service they have lacked for years. A Japanese company, the Osaka. is to be thanked for offering to deflect one of its liners on .-i pa.»sa_e from the Cape to Tristan. The kindly service will bring extraordinary happine.-_ to the loneliest civilised community in the world.