ISLE OF PINES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25717, 13 December 1944, Page 8

ISLE OF PINES

PACIFIC POSSESSION NOUMEA, Nov. 22. Curiosity about a grenade they found in a box left behind by Allied troops on the Isle of Pines, 50 souin of New Caledonia, caused the death of a native boy, son of a local chief,, and the wounding of two others. Trying to find out what was inside, they first hit the top of the grenade with a brick, and then when nothing happened they hurled ft at a coconut tree. This time it exploded. Informed by radio, two French doctors were flown to the island anfi brought the two wounded lads back to Noumea Hospital. Recently, by courtesy of the New Caledonian Island commander, Bri-gadier-general William I. Rose, I visited the Isle of Pines, 50 miles south cf New Caledonia, with a French botanist, M. Virot. to collect plants for the University of Harvard. This little island is noteworthy for its beautiful orchids which dominate the heath-covercd plateau like kangaroo paws dominatecertain parts of the Darling Ranges of Western Australia. Strange-shaped coral platforms along the coast are the home of a species of true tobacco, Nicotiana fragrans, which is not found anywhere else in the world—not even in New Caledonia.

Apart from the official Resident, who is an ex-French naval rating, another Frenchman exploiting timber, including the strange Cook pine, and the one or two priests at the mission who rigidly dominate life in the eight native settlements, the island has no white inhabitants and is seldom visited. Yet in early days it was about the most profitable haunt of Australian sandalwood traders, including such famous characters as Towns, Paddon, and Underwood. Many a crew was here massacred and .eaten, for the people, then more numerous than to-day, were notorious cannibals, regularly raiding across to Caledonia for women and human flesh. They were the finest canoe builders in these seas. I made a day’s trip along the coast in one of their large outrigger canoes,, which could outrace many a yacht. Outside the reef where the wind is steady and strong they do 15 knots. The French have a legend that ari English man-of-war was sent to the Isle of Pines in 1853 to declare it a British possession, but that the captain dallied so long that he allowed them—the French—to beat him to it by a day. They say that as a result the English captain shot himself when he got back to Sydney. A British man-of-war was certainly making an unhurried hydrographical survey in the neighbourhood when the French hoisted their flag, but there is no valid evidence that they were there to take dossession, and if the captain did shoot himself on his return I suspect it was for reasons of a much more personal nature than failure to take possession of the Isle of Pines. The story seems to be rather the invention of an old Jesuit writer whose book, “Marines and Missionaries,” gives a very onesided account of early happenings in New Caledonia.