TRISTAN OVERRUN BY RATS

Evening Star, Issue 22514, 5 December 1936, Page 7

TRISTAN OVERRUN BY RATS

The inhabitants of that desolate little island in the South Atlantic, Tristan da Cunha, apparently have empirebuilding ambitions. Rats have again attacked their crops, and famine is staring them in the face. Now they have sent a party of young men on a pioneering expedition to another. desolate island 10 miles away, where they will attempt to grow wheat. If these young men are successful the islanders will form a branch of their colony there.

These plans have been revealed by members of the crew of the freighter Hannala, which called at the island on the voyage from Buenos Aires to Japan, calling at South African ports. The Harmala called at Tristan to see if the inhabitants needed anything. Members of the Harmala crew were told that the island had become overrun with rats from'a wreck many years ago, and few crops besides potatoes were grown on the island. The rats destroyed a large proportion of these. island to which the youthful pjcnecrs have gone is equally barren; as Tristan, but ft is hoped that they wffl be able to cultivate wheat.* '

Tristan da Cunha inhabitants an t Hardy and fearless lot. The day that the Harmala called the sea was perilous, according to one of the ship’s crew, and the boat in which the islanders approached _ the vessel was first level with the ship’s rails, and the nest moment 23ft below in the ocean trough. “ Men who came out to us in their small boats in a, sea like that could go anywhere,” said one member of the Harmala’s crew.— * South African News Letter.’