Tristan da Cunha’s graveyard was not a picture to dazzle the sight. I thought it very dilapidated. Some few of the graves were indicated by crazy crosses, but the large majority were hardly to be distinguished from the surrounding earth. One, it is true, had a wooden slab at the head. The grave of John Glass, however, a native of Kelso, and the first settler—the Robinson Crusoe of the place—was dignified by a marble memorial stone. Other nameless graves were defined meagrely by square-cut blocks.
Tristan da Cunha boasts a good water supply, for it lies in a region of much cloud, and many small streams, born in the higher lands of the interior, flow noisily through the little settlement. Through the ages these streams have cut deep gorges in the rock and look like miniature cañons. All around are boulders, washed down from the hills by the torrential rains that lave the island in the wet seasons; and some of the houses are built crudely of these boulders, which lie ready to hand. The problem of acquiring a house here is a simple one. You carry a few stones to a selected site, pile them together, say the result is a house; a house it is within the meaning of the Act, and as there are no destructive critics to say, “It’s like a house, but is it a house? Where’s your visitors’ bathroom and the lounge hall?”
Not that all the houses are so ambitiously built—small stones from the beach serve as building materials in many cases; but, even so, Robinson Crusoe would have envied these islanders their dwelling-places. Lying as the island does right in the track of storms, indoor embellishments are easily obtained. If you live there and have the desire to make an ornate home for yourself, you wait until the next ship is wrecked and collect such timbers as come ashore; with these you panel your pied-à-terre and look down tolerantly on your less fortunate neighbours.
It is whispered that the prayer of the really ambitious Tristan da Cunha bride before marriage is: “God bless father, God bless mother, God send a mail steamer ashore before my wedding-day!”
But, crude though some of the homesteads are, each one boasts its kail-yard at its front door, its extent marked out by a fragmentary paling. There is good soil, and in skilled hands the land could be made lucratively fruitful.
Locomotion is two or three hundred years behind the times. The strident “honk-honk” of the motor horn is unheard in the land. The name of Ford is unknown. I believe there are so-called savages in Moroccan deserts who fully appreciate the subtleties of the latest Ford car story; but the simple people of Tristan da Cunha have never seen a Ford. Could anything convey a more perfect impression of their remoteness?
When an islander desires to transport himself or his belongings from one point to another he employs a rough wooden cart with solid wheels, rough-hewn from virgin timber, and drawn by placid oxen. There is no lack of livestock. They number their kine by the score and their sheep by the ten-score. Donkeys are there and dogs, cats in abundance, and thrifty, succulent geese.
Women and children dress quaintly in an old-fashioned way, wearing long, loose garments that would either drive a Parisian modiste crazy or else make her famous as the creator of a new mode. All of them wear vivid red or yellow handkerchiefs tied about their heads, according to the fashion established by the buccaneers of the Spanish Main in 1680 or thereabouts.
Talking to one of the inhabitants, whose name was Henry Green—a dark-complexioned man, whose short, curly black hair gave a hint of African blood—I learnt that the worst months on the island were August and September.