A military man writing of it in 1798, draws a comparison between it and Sydney much to the disadvantage of the latter. "The air is soft (he says) and the soil inexpressibly productive. It is a perfect section of paradise. Our officers and their wives were sensibly affected at their departure, and what they regarded as banishment to Sydney."
Another officer writing of it in 1847, says: "It is by nature a paradise adorned with all the choicest gifts of nature—climate, scenery, and vegetable productions; by art and man's policy turned into an earthly hell, disfigured by crime, misery, and despair."
The island had been brought into a high state of cultivation by convict labour. Its roads, buildings, and gardens were in admirable order. But with the establishment of the new régime—a different race with different tasks—much was neglected, a part became decayed and ruinous. The island is now partitioned into blocks of fifty acres, of which each adult male is allowed one, drawn for and decided by lot.
Whale fishing is the favourite and most profitable occupation. From this and the sale of farm produce, which finds a market in Sydney, the inhabitants are furnished with all their needs require. Their wants are few, simple, and easily supplied.
The old convict town with its huge, dilapidated barracks, gaol-officers' quarters, and servants' houses, is situated on the south-east edge of the island, where the little Nepean islet gives sufficient shelter to form a precarious roadstead available in certain winds. The old town is occupied by the Pitcairn islanders—in number about three hundred.
Five miles across the island, on its north-eastern shore, and communicating with it by a fair road, lies the Melanesian Mission estate of a thousand acres. Sloping gently down to a low cliff and a rocky shore, the land is an undulating meadow, broken by ravines, and covered with a thick sward of conch grass or "doubh," said to have been imported from India, whence we drew our chief food supplies so many a year ago. Nothing more beautiful in a state of nature had ever been seen, I thought, when I first cast my admiring eyes on it. Here and there gigantic, graceful pines (Araucaria excelsa) stood in stately groves. Higher up on the flanks of Mount Pitt (a thousand feet above) grow the lemon and guava, cotton and wild tobacco. The island is nine hundred miles from Sydney and thirteen hundred and fifty from Cape Pillar, Tasmania. The Nepean and Phillip Islands lie to the south of the main island.
We were in such a hurry to see the famous island and still more famous islanders, that we omitted a precaution which had been earnestly impressed upon us the day before. This was not to attempt to land unless we had a Pitcairner to steer. When the long swell of the Pacific rolls in upon the shallow beaches of Sydney Bay there is no more dangerous place in the world—the roadstead of Madras hardly excepted—than the boat harbour at Norfolk Island.
Like most sailors, and man-of-war's men in particular, the crew was reckless and confident. For myself, I was a fair hand in a boat, and had mixed in so many cases of touch-and-go, where all hands would have fed the sharks in a few more minutes, that I had lost any sense of caution that I might have originally possessed. As we neared the shore, rising and falling upon the tremendous billows, which told of a scarce passed gale, I felt a sense of exhilaration to which I had been long a stranger. A party of the islanders, seeing a boat leave the ship, had come down to watch our landing, apparently with interest. As we came closer I noticed them talking rapidly to one another, and occasionally waving their arms to one side or the other as if to direct our steering. There were several women in the group, but as we neared the landing my attention was rivetted upon a girl who stood out some distance from the others at the end of a rocky point, which jutted beyond the narrow beach.
I had seen strikingly beautiful faces and faultless forms among the island girls, as all unconscious, they threw themselves into attitudes so graceful and unstudied that a sculptor would have coveted them for models. Among these children of nature, roaming at will through their paradisal isles, the perfection of the human form had doubtless been developed. But there was a subtle charm about this girl, as she stood with bare feet beside the plashing wave,—a statuesque presentment of nobility, courage, and refinement which I had never before recognised in living woman. Tall and slender of frame, she yet possessed the rounded outlines which, in all island women, promise a fuller development in the matured stage of womanhood. Her features were delicately regular; in her large dark eyes there was an expression of strong interest, deepening almost into fear, as she gazed at our incoming boat. She had bent slightly forward, and stood poised on her rock as if waiting for a signal to plunge into the boiling surf. Her complexion was so fair that, but for her attitude, which spoke her a daughter of the sea, one which no mortal born away from the music of the surges could have assumed, I might have taken her for an Englishwoman.
"In the name of all the divine maidens since Nausicaa" (I had not quite forgotten my Odyssey, rusty though was my Greek) "who can she be?" thought I.