Was Ocean Island
p. 38 · Read in the full issue
A Ramp?
Allegation That Natives Were Defrauded
THE following is from The New Age— A a vigorously-edited journal published in London to advocate Douglas Credit principles. The reference, of course, is to Ocean Island.
The Guano Ramp Again
“Old readers will remember two or three occasions when we have alluded to the Gilbert Islands scandal and to Mr.
T. C. T. Potts’s dogged perseverance in exposing it. The scandal consisted in the connivance of the Colonial Office in 1901 in the leasing by a private company from the natives of the right to dig up and export guano deposits worth millions of pounds for a lump sum of £3OO to be paid in £5O annual instalments for six years.
After that there was to be a royalty of 6d a ton, but this was to be paid to the British Exchequer, “The company’s first year of working produced a profit of £85,000. In 1908 the profit was £307,000. During the whole period the natives have gone through some hard times, and Mr. Potts’s con tention has been, and is, that they should get back at least a portion of what was swindled out? of them.
“The occasion of our present reference to the subject is the receipt from him of of a copy of a letter which he has sent to the Prime Minister, Mr. Baldwin.
While his narrative does not bear directly on Social-Credit objectives it contains many authentic data suitable for anno tating Social-Credit theses. It draws a picture of the transference of the natives’ ‘real credit’ to the control of manipu lators of ‘financial credit,’ and then tells how these manipulators afterwards sold out to the Government, thereby re-trans ferring the ‘real credit’ to the control of the creators of financial credit behind the Government.”
Mr. Clifford Gessler, who accompanied the Bishop Museum’s expedition into the South Seas in the yacht Islander in 1934, has recently had his book “Road My Body Goes” published in New York by Reynal and Hitchcock. The volume deals with his observations and experi ences on Tepuka Maruia, one of the Tuamotu Islands, where he stayed for a considerable time. Mr. Gessler was formerly literary editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.