Lost Ships And Lonely Seas

forecastle had a Robinson Crusoe, hairy and brown and tattoed, who could spin strange yarns of years serenely passed among the untutored natives of the Indian Ocean or the South Seas. Now and then one of them had lived in more solitary fashion on some remote, unpeopled strand, a hermit cast up by the sea, and was actually contented because he had freed himself of the tyranny of bosses and wages and trousers and all the other shackles of civilization. Alas! there are no more realms like these. The wireless mast lifts above the palm-trees, and the steamer whistle blows to recall the tourists from the beaches where the trade-winds sweep. There are still some very lonely places on the watery globe, however, and one of them is the tiny group of threevolcanic islands in the South Atlantic which is known as Tristan da Cunha. These bleak rocks lie two thousand miles west of the Cape of Good Hope and four thousand miles to the northeast of Cape Horn. They loom abruptly from a tempestuous ocean, which lashes the stark, black cliffs, and there are no harbors, only an occasional fringe of beach a few yards wide. Tristan, the largest of the group, lifts a snow- clad peak almost eight thousand feet above the sea as a warning to mariners to steer wide of the cruel reefs. It has a small plateau where green things grow, and living streams and cascades of fresh water. The islands were discovered as early as 1506 by the Portuguese admiral, Tristan da Cunha, and in later years ...