OCEAN ISLAND MYSTERY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2295, 28 June 1921, Page 1

OCEAN ISLAND MYSTERY.

PUZZLE OF MIGHTY RUINS,

Japanese scientists have made a-, remarkable discovery in the Caroline Islands of the Pacific. They have discovered in the volcanic island of Ponape titanic architectural remains, and they say that the work was the work of Japanese.centuries ago. Scholars in England, if not in Japan, knew that there were such remains in the Caroline Group, but' the achievements were never till now attributed to the Japanese.

The islands were discovered by the Portuguese nearly 400 years ago, taken in 1680 by'the Spaniards, and sold by them in 1899 to the Germans, from whom the Japanese have now taken them over, under the Peace Treaty. We have heard much of late of the mysterious gigantic sculptures of Easter Islands, and the mystery is yet unsolved; but this puzzle of the Carolines is greater still. For the Japanese report that the architectural work on Ponape is of the most prodigious character. * There is a castle there, they say, that must have taken thousands of men years io build in an age when there were no other stone buildings within hundreds of miles. They tell ns of ruins 1,000 feet in length, and 100 feet wide, within whose massive walls the sea ebbs and tlows through what were once magnificent gardens. Without is the” tropical jungle; within a veritable Venice of the Pacific.

This mystery will have to he cleared up. How came such tremendous works there? How did the islands derive what must have been a teeming population? Whence did those people acquire their art, and wlmt became of them ? We shall bo anxious to hear more about the suggestion that the population was Japanese. That, at any rate, is an entirely new theory. And it is all'highly romantic.