Thousand Islands

“ The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. ”

“ The total length of all these islands is about a hundred and thirty miles, and the area is [Pg 130] computed at fifteen hundred and sixty square miles. These estimates, we were informed, had lately been very nearly corroborated by actual government survey. The population of the islands will not vary much from twenty thousand. The entire occupation of the people is fishing, curing the fish, and shipping them southward. Some of the shrewdest persons engaged in this business accumulate moderate fortunes in a few years, when they naturally seek some more genial home upon the main-land. ”

“ The island contains a large population. By the Statesman’s Year Book, I find that the area of these islands is a little less than a thousand square miles, and the population about two hundred and fifty thousand. The grape disease, of which I have spoken before, extended to the Western Islands; and since that time the wine-trade has been very small. The principal production is oranges. The wine from this island was called Pico-Madeira; and it is still manufactured to some extent.
[312] “St. George is thirty miles long, and five wide; and has a peak four thousand feet high in the centre. ”

“ The second, eight leagues at farthest from this great island. But all this part is an extensive Archipelago of little isles; which, on account of their number, were called the Thousand Isles, by admiral Roggewein, who passed through them in 1722. Then in what manner does this Cape Mabo, which is in the neighbourhood of Gilolo, belong to New Guinea? Where shall we place it, if (as there is so much reason to believe) all New Guinea itself is a heap of great islands? the various channels between which are as yet unknown. It must certainly belong to the westmost of these considerable isles. ”

“ These are coral islands, slowly raised, but continuous, created by the daily work of polypi. Then this new island will be joined later on to the neighboring groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia, and from thence to the Marquesas.
One day, when I was suggesting this theory to Captain Nemo, he replied coldly:
"The earth does not want new continents, but new men." ”

“ They are inhabited by many people, as we shall now relate.
Islands of Velas, or Ladrones. These islands lie in twelve degrees of latitude. Opinions differ as to the distance in leagues between them and the port of Acapulco, for up to the present no one has been enabled to ascertain it with certainty, by navigation from east to west, and no one has been able to measure the degrees. Some assert the distance of this voyage to be one thousand seven hundred leagues, others one thousand eight hundred. ”

“ Meanwhile, continuously swept along by the Nautilus, where we lived in near isolation, we raised the Tuamotu Islands on December 11, that old “dangerous group” associated with the French global navigator Commander Bougainville; it stretches from Ducie Island to Lazareff Island over an area of 500 leagues from the east-southeast to the west-northwest, between latitude 13 degrees 30’ and 23 degrees 50’ south, and between longitude 125 degrees 30’ and 151 degrees 30’ west. ”

“ Each justice of the peace shall receive a salary of one thousand dollars per year, and shall charge and collect in all civil suits tried before him the fees provided for justices of the peace in the Code of Civil Procedure. All fees so charged and collected by him during each month shall he paid by him on the first day of the succeeding month to the city assessor and collector. ”

“ The group lies between the south end of New Ireland and the north end of the great Bougainville Island in the Solomon Archipelago, and consists of six low, well-wooded and fertile islands, enclosed within a barrier reef, forming a noble atoll, almost circular in shape. All the islands are thickly populated at the present day by natives, who are peaceable enough, and engage in bêche-de-mer and pearl-shell fishing. ”

“ In the eyes of those to whom the past furnishes a perspective more fascinating even than the promise of the future, the little isle adjacent, which is itself a finely marked basaltic cone, rising over a thousand feet high and well called “Holy Island,” is even more worthy of the visits of the reflecting scholar. It holds an attraction even greater, in human interest, at least, than the wonders of geology, or the numerous witnesses to antiquity in the form of upreared stones. ”

“ Any person who shall violate the provisions of this section shall be punished by a fine of not less than five hundred pesos nor more than five thousand pesos, or by imprisonment for not less than three months nor more than five years, or by both such fine and imprisonment, in the discretion of the court: Provided, however, that nothing in this section contained shall be construed to authorize the Governor-General to permit the use or display of any flag, banner, emblem, or device whose use, display, or exposition to public view is prohibited by the preceding sections of this Act. ”

“ The Governor-General is hereby authorized and directed to subscribe for and purchase on behalf of the Government of the Philippine Islands, whenever the financial situation of the Government permits it, seventy thousand shares of the capital stock of the Manila Railroad Company of the Philippine Islands, of the par value of fourteen million pesos. ”

“ That the same name should be carried farther afield and applied to a remote island of the Atlantic Ocean is quite in accordance with the natural course of things and the general experience of mankind. No doubt the name Man might be derived from other sources, but the chances are in this instance that the Irish people whose navigators found Brazil Island (or imagined it, if you please) did the same favor for the crescent-shaped “Man,” quite overriding for a hundred years any preceding or competing titles. ”

“ But with its imposing groves of oak, its golden wealth of orange-trees, its odorous lanes of oleander.
its broad grazing-meadows yellow-starred with wild camomile, Grande Isle remains the prettiest island of the Gulf; and its loveliness is exceptional. For the bleakness of Grand Terre is reiterated by most of the other islands,—Caillou, Cassetete, Calumet, Wine Island, the twin Timbaliers, Gull Island, and the many islets haunted by the gray pelican,—all of which are little more than sand-bars covered with wiry grasses, prairie-cane, and scrub-timber. ”

“ After much disturbance of mariners’ and cartographers’ minds not only the phantom island but its legacy, the supposed line of breakers and dangers, vanished altogether from the records. There is no “Buss” to be found on maps after about the middle of the nineteenth century, though the preceding hundred years had been prolific in them. Probably we must suppose a later date for the cessation of current mention of the sunken land of that name, in recognition of what, according to belief, once had been but existed (above water) no longer. ”

“ This is not the place to enlarge on the Helluland, Markland, and Vinland of the Norsemen beginning with the eleventh century, as this theme has been dealt with elsewhere.312 But they were often thought of as islands, as shown by the notice of Adam of Bremen. Perhaps there was never any great clearness of conception as to extent or form. But in a general way they may be identified respectively with northern Labrador, Newfoundland, and the warmer parts of the Atlantic coast. Great Iceland, or White Men’s Land, seems also to have been understood as what we should now call America. ”

“ Far away from any other land, in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, there is a little island, a mere speck in the sea, for it is not six miles across at its widest point. A passing ship might leave this tiny island unnoticed, save for the lofty cliffs and precipices which guard its shores, running down to the white waves, ever curling and breaking at their feet. ”

“ It does appear strange that an assemblage of islands, which, large and small, amounting to about 12,000 in number, equal in territory to any continent, and so populous, for the inhabitants, including the more northern islands, are estimated at fifty millions, should have hitherto been unnoticed, and, at all events, have not attracted the attention of our government. ”

“ After the fleet had sailed for fifty days in the same course between nine and ten degrees, a degree more or less, we reached land, which proved to be an island inhabited by poor and naked fishermen. This island was about four leagues in circumference, and had a population of about two hundred men. ”

“ Now, was there any such great island and populous magnificent kingdom in mid-Atlantic or anywhere in the Atlantic Ocean about 11,400 years ago? If not absolutely impossible, it seems at least very unlikely. ”

“ Neither province shall expend in this preliminary work a sum exceeding one thousand dollars. The engineer or engineers selected shall consult with the provincial supervisors of the two provinces and shall make a report to the provincial board of each province, which shall transmit the same with its recommendation, through the Military Governor, to the Commission for further enabling legislation. ”

“ That little island, which is nearly circular, is about 25,000 toises in diameter, and is situated in 2° 18′ S. lat., and 145° 46′ E. long. It is extremely populous; for we saw about three hundred of its inhabitants.
The white appearance of several places of the island, where fractures discovered the strata, gave me reason to believe, that its base is of a calcareous nature, like the greater part of the South Sea islands. ”

“ The sum of two thousand six hundred and seventeen dollars and ninety-six cents ($2,617.96) in the money of the United States is hereby appropriated out of any funds in the Insular Treasury, not otherwise appropriated, for the purpose of paying Fred W. Atkinson superintendent of public instruction in the Philippine Islands, for services rendered and expenses incurred by him under direction of the Commission preliminary to assuming formally the duties of his office in the Islands, for the period from May 5 to September 1, 1900. ”

“ Two English vessels are approaching the island. At first the crews do not see it, but as evening draws on, the look-out man in the larger ship gives the signal that he has caught sight of land. “Land ho, land!” passes from mouth to mouth among the sailors. What land can it be? No island, no rock even, is marked on the chart, and the officers gather on deck to look over the darkening sea toward that darker point where the new land lies. ”

“ Yet it was not a mere rock, inaccessible and barren; for when once a boat has safely won its way through the breakers, and the sailor has climbed the rocks 95 which, steep above steep, stand like a wall before him, he is rewarded by the sight of lovely valleys, of forests of fruit-bearing palms, and of green, fresh-springing plants: a little fairy land, a new paradise seems hidden here from the eye and the foot of man.
It is called Pitcairn’s Island, and was discovered more than a hundred years ago by a passing ship. ”

“ To the eastward there are five islands, the largest of which from its resemblance to the Lion's Mount at the Cape of Good Hope I called Sir Roger Curtis's Island, who then commanded on that Station. It is high and inaccessible on the north-west side and covered with small bushes at the top. Two other islands like haycocks, only higher and more perpendicular, standing a considerable distance from each other, the largest of which bore us south-east 1/4 south distant 16 or 17 miles and the other south-east by east about 10 miles. ”

“ It lies nearer the Continent or Main, than most of the other considerable American Isles; which Islands, as it were, guard it from the violence of the Winds, and great Atlantic Ocean, and render it fitter for the produce of the Manufacture and Trade of those parts, than any of them. ”

“ Sometimes a passing ship would leave one or more of her crew, who were ill, that they might be restored by the vegetables and fruits, the pure air and clear water of the island.
It happened once, nearly ninety years after the first discovery, that an English crew landed for refreshment, and wandering about the island approached the little church. They believed themselves the only human beings on the island, and were therefore greatly surprised to hear a voice singing within the church. ”

“ Unless we accept this explanation, we must assume an uncanny, almost an inspired, gift of conjecture in some one who, without basis, could imagine and depict the only array of great islands in the Atlantic. Certainly the outlines of Cuba, Jamaica, Florida, and one of the Bahamas will very well bear comparison with Scandinavia or the Hebrides and the Orkneys as given on maps of equal or even later date. Some glaring errors are to be expected in such work, as notoriously occurred in the sixteenth-century treatment of Newfoundland and Labrador. ”

“ As to Atlantic regions, the earliest instance other than Norse may be the “Insula de Legname” of certain fourteenth- and fifteenth-century portolan charts,198 evidently given by some Genoese or other Italian navigator to Madeira, the latter name being a translation of the former, substituted by the Portuguese199 after their rediscovery. Thus we might say that this island was the original western Markland, but for the fact that certain Greenland Norsemen had affixed the name long before to a region much farther west. ”