WORLD’S LONELIEST ISLE

Taranaki Daily News, 16 August 1933, Page 10

WORLD’S LONELIEST ISLE

LIVES RISKED FOR FOOD. LONG ROW OF SEABIRD’S EGGS. Twenty years from now, life will be quite impossible on the loneliest island in the world, Tristan da Cunha. There will not be enough food to support the inhabitants. There are now 164 people on the island, 42 of whom are under 14 years of age. This is the verdict of the Rev. A. G. Partridge, commissioner and magistrate of this tiny island in the Southern Atlantic, who was lately in London. ' There are no shops on the island, there is no money, and there is not a wireless receiving set capable of proper reception. For 11 .months of the year the people and their ruler, Mr. Partridge, are cut off from the outside world, doomed to what is virtually life imprisonment. Although the island has a circumference of 21 miles, most of it is mountain, and the people live on a plateau five miles long and a mile and a-half wide. But for. private enterprise and charity they might have perished many times, and nothing would have been known of their fate until the arrival of the next supply ship. Almost the only thing that can be grown on the island is the potato, but even that is scarce on account of the thinness and poor quality of the soil, Mr. Partridge told a Sunday Chronicle representative. All food has to ’be carefully used, and even then the islanders are on the verge of starvation each year before the supply ship arrives. The men take their lives in their hands and row their tiny canvas boat to two islands about 20 miles away, to collect seabirds’ eggs. The islanders would inevitably starve but for these eggs, Mr. Partridge said. The coming of the supply ship is the great event each year, and is eagerly looked forward to by the entire population.

“Dental disease is a disease of civilisation,” said Colonel C. J. Bond, at the British Dental Association’s conference at Leicester recently. He said that the best teeth in the world are those bi the islanders of Tristan da Cunha. These people, he said, never. cleaned their teeth, ate fresh food instead of cooked or tinned food, and had the most dentally perfect teeth in the world.