FANNING ISLAND.

Colonist, Volume LVI, Issue 13573, 14 September 1914, Page 2

FANNING ISLAND.

Up to about ten years ago Fanning Island was the property of a British family named Greig, who established a trade in copra and guano. A law dispute arose over the title to the place, and at length it was sold to a syndicate in which the late Mr. Humphrey Berkeley, of Fiji, was largely interested, for £25,000, and was resold by the syndicate to an English company, the site of the cable- station remaining the property of the Imperial Government. It was Admiral Richards, an old-time commander of the Royal Navy ships in the Pacific, who added it to the Empire; he hoisted tho British flag there in 1859- Its name comes from an American navigator of ,more than a. century ago, one Captain Fanning, whose name is also given on some maps to the scattered trio of islands of which Fanning forms o&e; the others are Palmyra and Washton Island. Fanning Island is a nar-

row, flattened ring of land, wholly coral, about thirty miles in circumference, with a length of ten or twelve miles, and it is practically one great forest of coconuts. Most of the score or so of white people who live en this tropic dot are employed at tho cable station. There are besides about two hundred Natives, who are brought from other islands, chiefly the Gilbert Group, to work on the coconut plantations. The heat of tho sun is great on Fanning, for it is only three hundred miles north of the Equator, but the members of the cable staff, some of whom are New Zealanders, are housed in buildings constructed with special care for the health and comfort of their occupants. Either a steamer from Vancouver or the cable steamer Iris, which has her headquarters at Auckland, will have to be sent to pick up and splice the cut ends of tho cable; and no doubt also the naval authorities will now give special attention to the elusive German cruiser which has thus given a rather startling proof of her capability for mischief.— "Lyttelton Times."