SUNDAY ISLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 50, 28 February 1931, Page 8

SUNDAY ISLAND.

Another chapter in the chequered story of Sunday Island, in the Kermadeos, may be about to be opened. There is a society, with a Dr. Roes, of Brisbane, as president, which has for its object settlement on the island. The society is buying land there and intends to settle a number of families. The known history of settlers' endeavours on the island goes "back nearly a century, and it is coloured with the high lights of tragedy. Nearly every effort to make a success of life on this Juan Fernandez of ours has ended in failure. The people who held out longest were the Bell family, who went there about half a century ago and whose occupation of the island undoubtedly prevented a German warship from hoisting her flag at Denliam Bay. The first known settler to occupy Sunday Island was a Captain Re id, who had a Maori wife, a niece of the celebrated Rangiliaeata. With a dozen natives, his wife's slaves, he produced food on the island as supplies for the numerous whaleships cruising in these waters, and he was comfortably situated when volcanic eruptions compelled him to abandon the place and return to New Zealand. The island, like so many others in the great South Sea, was anybody's for the taking in those days, and a succession of adventurous men with Polynesian wives tried their hands at making it a permanent home. A trader from Samoa had settled there when one of the Peruvian slaving vessels which roved the South Pacific seventy years ago landed about two hundred stolen natives who were suffering from smallpox or some other epidemic. The kidnapping barque, after putting the islanders on shore at Denham Bay, sailed off to collect another lot of forced labour for Callao, and left the sick people to die. The trader's Samoan wife and some of hie children caught the disease and died, too, and he was fortunate to be alive himself to leave the island of horror when the first whaleship called. All later efforts—except the Bells'—to make a home on Rangitahua, as the ancient Maori navigators named the island, ended in failure. Forty years ago the schooner Dunedin took a party of enthusiastic small farmers and their families from Auckland to the island, where they were to enjoy the ideal life and grow vegetables and fruit for the New Zealand market. Two or three disastrous seasons and the plague of rats quite cured them of their hankering for romantic island existence. A few years ago two New Zealand men settled there, intending to try out the place for sheep farming and crop growing, but the death of one of the partners from an accidental injury disposed of that attempt. The latest reported scheme, with families to farm the island, seems to resemble the attempt of forty years ago which ended in disillusionment and failure. It is to be hoped that the promoter knows all about the previous endeavours, and that he is prepared to grapple with the hordes of rats which ate all the growing crops that were to fill the schooners for market. Also, he should know something about Sunday Island's volcanic fits, which have so discouraged pioneers of the past. Those eager to maroon themselves on that island of dubious fame would do well to make some inquiry into its record before embarking on the venture. A beautiful island of fertile soil and agreeable climate, a vacant seeming garden of Eden, is a powerful lure on first sight. But there was a snake iu Eden; and there are rats and other deterrents to happiness on r—JjQ.