The Tragedy of Bleak

An Island Princess.

The Tragedy of Bleak Campbell Island.

Written for The Pacific Islands Monthly hy Arthur J. Yogan, F.R.G.s.

FOR thousands of miles across the Western Pacific run the geological finger-posts, formed of isolated elevations of granitic and basaltic rocks. They have a north-easterly and south-westerly trend which, according to the great geologists, Woolnougb and Guppy, indicate that a land connec tion once obtained from China and Formosa, through New Guinea and New Caledonia, with New Zealand and the South Polar lands. Biologists gen erally confirm this view.

But our subject lies in a little island about 700 miles south of that best laid out city in Oceania, Dunedin —a cold, cold direction, the memory of which always makes the writer shiver; but which produces the finest specimens of Scottish humanity, perhaps, that the world has yet rejoiced in. Campbell Is land is chiefly famous for two things: the grave of a French princess, and for a patch of real Highland heather.

A few years after the Battle of Waterloo, when George IV., of undig nified memory, was on the British throne, some Scottish hot-heads, under a certain Prince whose name I need not recall, laid deep plots. They were aided by a French princess, whom he had promised to make his queen if all went according to schedule —a little habit of his apparently, as many a Northern story tells! He had rescued her from the French revolutionaries.

Just when the day had come for the long-prepared-for attack, the usual traitor “gave the whole plot away.”

The Prince was led away to durance vile; and the poor Princess was dragged from her castle and flung into prison. History has never satisfactorily accounted for the Prince’s end; but having “lost his head’’ at the start of the affair, he probably did so at its climax.

The beautiful Princess, it was de cided, could not be executed; and she was ex-patriated to a lonely and ter rible island just discovered, where no one was ever likely again to fore gather with her in plotting the down fall of the Royal wielder of the British sceptre.

In wind-swept Perseverance Harbour, on bleak Campbell Island, a substantial hut was built for her; and around it the poor lady planted sprigs of Scotch heather, which she had smuggled out amidst her meagre baggage. She did not live a year after her arrival, ap parently, but pined away and died on the inhospitable and desert temnant of storm-beaten rock.

When some sealers visited the place a year or so later, her skeleton was found lying on the rough boards of the shelter; and, still clenched in the poor withered hand, that once had been the toast of “bright Bordeau,” was a bunch of still fragrant heather, that her part ing breath had saluted and her fading thoughts had glorified with thoughts “o’ bonnie Scotland.”

There her mortal remains are lying to this day, surrounded by the sacred heather her own hand had planted; and the occasional visitor notes, with

something that may be superstition, or may be a just recognition of a power outside mere mundane matters, that on this one spot alone, out of the about 50,000 acres of knee-deep tussocky grass, is any of this plant to be dis covered. It has never spread; and within the encircling patch may still be seen the marks of the excavation on

the hillside where the hut stood, and where the bareheaded sailors, amidst the howling gale, lowered the fragile remnants of what had once been so exquisite a creature into its lonely, rock-bound grave, over which the sea birds sounded their shrill requiem as they swept from one surging sea-front to another.