On Mangaia

Treasure Trove On Mangaia

From Our Own Correspondent

Mangaia, Cl.

ONE of the advantages of local time lag—we still live in the past—has been, that certain “non-Polynesian” museum treasures still lie awaiting the arrival of some European with a passion for antiques.

This writer has acquired, during his residence here:— Two of the original “Berliner” gramo phone records, issued 1908, and still in playing order; a ship’s watch-lantern of solid brass, immensely strong and former property of the famous Captain Bully Hayes (the lantern is now in a NZ museum); a two-century-old copy of “Culpeper’s Herbal” (a medical work that must have come from Cook’s own ship.

The natives say it was acquired on board a “papaa-ship like a garden” in pre-mis sion days. This might be Cook’s ship, or ‘‘Breadfruit Bligh’s”).

Many other .relics, old horse pistols, etc., lie hidden in native homes, and these are kept hidden. Our people have a curious tendency to hold on tight to old-fashioned European items of this kind, while not in any way valuing or appreciating them in a historic sense.

One sees also many anachronisms in the machinery line. Old sewing machines, of earliest vintage, rust out the last of their days. In time, the dismembered frames of some of these will undoubtedly appear under pots and kettles, acting as grate-bars. Old gun barrels, of the “muzzle-loader” variety, also function in this way.

Outside a cliff-village house, a great iron “try-pot” of whaling days, that was used as a water tank till it decayed lies upturned. This has one side flattened, to allow the pots to be stowed in pairs on the whaler’s deck.

But oddly enqugh our once numerous fleet of fairly modern carts and buggies has not survived. The last one recently broke down. To this writer’s observation, a fine market is open, now, to some firm of wheelwrights.

USA papers please copy!

Mrs. Gustave Wetzell, of Western Samoa, died in the Apia Hospital on January 11, at the age of 67. She was the widow of Clemens Wetzell, one of the pioneer cocoa-planters of the Territory, and the sister of the late O. F. Nelson.

After her husband died, in 1915, she con tinued to manage their Siusega planta tion.