TRISTAN DA CUNHA

Evening Post, Volume CIII, Issue 74, 29 March 1922, Page 9

TRISTAN DA CUNHA

ISLAND OF LOST IMPORTANCE.

The old salt oi sailing ship days must be amazed that only now, after a year's search., has a ship been found to take to Tristan da Cunha the clergyman-school-master and his wife who have ottered to work- there far three years, 'uaya the Manchester Guardian. Tristan has always been 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 tor sailing ships rounding the Cape and for whalers; and its people had some chance to trade their poultry, sheep, and potatoes for the cloth, flour, tea, sugar, and soap which they crave, and to 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 of 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, alow." But 1 cling, to it they do, in the same spirit that 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left there to checkmate attempts to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena, beg to be allowed to stay when their comrades were withdrawn.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 began. It has had some hard blows. In '85 all the grown men on the island except four'were drowned by the capsizing of a boat; but the'women and the younger generation I'emained, and the numbers grew 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 count. But that too has been ended, as. an economy, and for a year it has baffled the efforts of wellclisposed shipowners to'find a boat that' Would enable the Eev. H. M. Kogers 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 a passage from the Cape' to the River Plate to call at Tristan. The kindly service will bring extraordinary happiness to the loneliest civilised community in the world.