An Introduction

Norfolk Island—a thousand miles east of Australia and a little lower on the map than Brisbane—is one of the most interesting and romantic islands in the world, brimming over with history from the moment of its dis covery by an English naval survey ship in 1789.

Intersected by long, deep valleys, in which we grow our bananas for export, crowned on every crest by tall dark pine-trees that seem, beneath the stars, to tower into heaven, it seems a great deal larger than its seven miles by four, because of its amazing road mileage and the fact that one can spend a long day getting from one end of the island to the other.

A hundred years and more ago those seventy miles of road were cut and graded by convicts, used like cattle, and driven in teams.

That era passed, and in 1856, by special decree of Good Queen Victoria, the island was deeded for ever to the descendants of the famous Bounty Mutineers. The latter had been discovered living in happiness and peace, but under frightfully overcrowded conditions, on tiny Pitcairn Island, then remote from all the world, but now lying right in the track of all shipping between New Zealand and the Panama Canal.

For many years, the Pitcairn Islanders (as they are still called) lived on Norfolk Island, in an isolation almost as complete as on Pit cairn, except that whalers, American for the most part, put in, in the whaling season, for wood, water and beef, killed and salted from the wild cattle left behind from convict days.

Gradually, however, civilisation seeped in; an overseas administrator took the place of their own appointed head, and acted under instructions from Australia; a parson, a doc tor, a schoolmaster came: and settlers of all classes, and from all parts of the world, ar rived to take up land and cultivate the ourishing banana and the fruitful passion vine which, here, grows to perfection and bears marvellously.