A ROMANTIC STORY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVI, Issue 198, 19 February 1914, Page 5

A ROMANTIC STORY.

THE PITCAIRXS. A romantic island story will be closed by the transfer of Norfolk Island to tlie Commonwealth of Australia, a step which has just been decided upon by the Federal Government. It is fifty-seven years since a British transport conveyed the descendants of the Bounty mutineers to Norfolk Island from Pitcairn Island four thousand miles away, a lonely spot which had become too restricted a home for the two hundred people who had sprung from the British Tahitian unions. Norfolk was abandoned as a penal settlement in 1850, and it was then that the Crown transferred It as a free gift to the Pitcairn community, who received not only tie island, comprising fifteen square miles of fertile land, but also all the substantial buildings, including cottages, barracks, mills and work-shops constructed by prison labor. The gardens were stocked with seed, the fields with grain, and the farms with sheej., cattle, horses, pigs and poultry. Tha simple Pitcairners, on landing from their remote rock in the far east of the Pacific, were amazed at the riches given over to them, and the island became a very different place from what it had been during the preceding halfcentury, when it was fitly known as "the liell of the Pacific." It grew into an idyllic Arcadia, with only the prisons and barracks and grave-stones to remind the owners that it had once been the scene of the most outrageous crimes and the most shocking tyranny and cruelty in the southern seas. Of late years it has had some of its romantic freshness rubbed oft", many who are not descendants of the Pitcairners having settled there. But the old historic names, the Quintals, the Adamses, the Christians, the Fletchers and the Youngs predominate, and the olive skin and the soft intonation of tongue which indicate the strain of tke ancient Tahitian bl»od still survive. The Norfolk men, such as arc often seen in Island vessels trading in and out of Auckland, are real sons of the sea. They are born boat-handlers, as is fitting in a people whose home is bounded by the .surf, and as whaleboat men they are as daring as ever were the plucky whale-catchers of Tory Channel and Kaikoura,