ALONE ON THE "ISLE OF SKULLS."

Otago Witness, Issue 2008, 18 August 1892, Page 39

ALONE ON THE "ISLE OF SKULLS."

On the lonely, wind-swept island of San Nicolas, 80 miles off the coast of Ventura county, California, where, as far back aa the memory oE man runs, hundreds of white skeletons have dotted the valleys and hillsides, local archjeologists are now busy gathering the relics of a strange extinct race. The island is 10 miles long 'and oval in shape, beicg four miles across at the widest part. Strange utensils of sandstone and steatite are found there among the human bones, and the island and its erstwhile inhabitants have a history so curiou3 that it is difficult of comprehension.

In 1835 the priests of Santa Barbara learning that there were but sixteen of the strange Indian race then living there, determined to rescue them from the island. They went over in a sloop and succeeded, as they thought, in getting all on board. At the last moment an Indian woman returned for her child, and one of the frequent storms of the channel islands springing up, the sloop was driven away without her. The sloop went on tbe rocks of Point Conception and all on board were lost.

Sixteen years later Captain George Nidever and two men went from the coast on a sloop to hunt otter off San Nicolas. On landing they were like Crusoe, astonished to discover human footprints in the sand. They caw no one, however, and a storm compelled them to put to sea.

It was two years thereafter that the adventurous captain, revolving in his mind the tight of the footprints in the uncanny island, determined to go and discover and bricg over the lonely woman of ■whom he had vaguely heard. Men accompanied him, and at length they saw on the surf-beaten shore a woman with long tawny hair, dressed in a queer garb of coloured birdskirs, and scraping with a bone kEife the blubber from a seal. _ They surrounded and approached her stealthily, and although suddenly confronted she did not appear in the least afraid, but smiled, and then falling on her knees', prayed to the sun, The wild woman offered do ob,«

jection when by signs she was made to understand that she waa to go with them in tho boat.

They reached Santa Barbara across the rough sea, and the first thing the Indian wornau saw waa Dr S. L. Shaw, now 80 years old, and yet living there, riding a hor3o. She had never seen or heard of any object like it, and thought the man and horse were one, and she knelt on the shore and offered her devotions to it. Two weeks afterwards the last inhabitant of rock-ribbed, tempest-tossed San Nicolas died from eating food to which she was unaccustomed, furnished by her rescuers, and the curtain fell on her race for ever.

Wild dogs had eaten her child. Her dress of blue and red feathers, a wonderful creation of barbaric hands, were sent to the Pope of Rome. Relic hunters have gathered mortars, pestles, toy steatite, canoes, and other curious things there for some years past, and shipped them to various Eastern and European museums. Skeletons and parts of skeletons have also been collected in large numbers, but to-day the bones of thousands of Indians aro scattered about there. Some lie face down, indicating that they have fallen in battle. There are so many human relics there that San Nicolas is known as the " Isle of Skulls."

" The lonely island, whose highest part is but 1040 ft above the sea," said a resident ot Ventura, " is noted for the high artistic class of many of its relic. Hid the woman rescued, then 52 years old, not died, a story passing strange would no doubt have been told of the race so long hemmed in by the waste of waters about. As it is, much of the story is shrouded in mystery for ever"