Is USA Buying Trochus?

Need of a South Pacific Button Industry

From a Special Correspondent ABOUT 23 sacks of trochus from the Hienghene region (east coast) of New Caledonia were recently seized on arrival at Noumea for being below the minimum size. Such fishing is in excusable because enforced wartime in activity has resulted in the many hun dreds of miles of reef round the island being particularly well stocked with shell which is well above the required mini mum.

USA is apparently paying a handsome price for this shell which pre-war used to go to Japan. But what Noumea needs and what Sydney industrialists might be well advised to investigate is a button factory in Noumea to treat local «hell and export the meat to the Orient. (Ed. Note: This indicates a different state of affairs to that reported from the New Guinea Territories in July. It was stated then that, while pearl-shell was in great demand, it was extremely diffi cult to dispose of trochus, the explana tion being, apparently, that the button industries in Japan and Czecho-Slovakia had been destroyed during the war.

Many NG traders had (in July) accumu lated large stocks of trochus but were at that time, unable to find a market for ’it.) A US ship recently landed, in Noumea, the US mission which will search for the bodies of men of the American Forces reported missing in the Pacific. The graves of two US fliers have been found in the bush by two young French Scouts, who notified the US Consul. They contain the bodies of the pilot and the observer of a small plane which crashed at Mont Mou in the Chaine Centrale about May, 1942—the first plane lost on the island.

The two Scouts led a party to the spot where the bodies were exhumed and taken on board to join the remains of six other dead from other Pacific Islands.