An Ocean-Bound Home

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Oct 29, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 41.

An Ocean-Bound Home.

PROBABLY the remotest and loneliest spot on earth is the little island of Tristan d'Acunha. This speck of an island, which is only seven miles long and six wide, lies almost midway between Africa and South America, and a thousand miles south of the equator.

When Napoleon was imprisoned on St. Helena, it was thought that the loneliest place in the world had been assigned to him as a prison. But St. Helena is fourteen hundred miles nearer a continent than is Tristan d'Acunha. Many hundreds of miles of ocean lie between it and the smallest island nearest to it. Tristan, in short, is a tiny oasis in a boundless wilderness of water, go from it in which direction you will.

It is a rocky and cliff-girt little isle, with a solitary mountain a thousand feet high rearing itself from the midst. Weeks and sometimes even months elapse without so much as the film of a ship's sail being espied in the distance from its shores.

Yet on this lonely speck of rock and earth, there lives a bright, cheerful, thrifty Christian community which is, seemingly, quite happy in its isolation from all the rest of the world. There are about a hundred inhabitants, all Englishmen and English women. The oldest inhabitant is a man of seventy-eight, who was wrecked on the island fifty years ago, and has ever since dwelt there, and has become the patriarch of the little company.

An English captain, returning from a long voyage, in the course of which he anchored at Tristan, has recently given a very interesting account of the community. Those who compose it are one and all farmers, cattle-raisers, and shepherds. In the valleys of the island are fertile fields, where potatoes mainly are grown. On the slopes were grazing some seven hundred head of cattle and as many sheep. The food of the people consists for the most part of beef, mutton, fowls, potatoes, and fish.

As to the dwellings, they are described as being kept very clean and tidy, as we might expect from English people, and the people themselves are healthy, robust, and long-lived. They have some whaling-boats, and are very adventurous in their sea-roaming after whales. They sometimes row as far as twenty miles out to sea to intercept a passing ship.

It is often the case that that region is assailed by mighty tempests of wind, while the island is subjected at times to what are called the "rollers"—huge masses of high-raised water which fairly inundate the lofty shores.

Tristan used formerly to produce many fruits and vegetables which can no longer be grown there. The reason of this is that the island is overrun by rats, which escaped from a ship that anchored there, and which the people have never been able to exterminate.

The people have preserved the customs of their English native land. In the center of the settlement stands the little English church, to which all the inhabitants repair on Sunday mornings. Thus the church bells of England, and the prayer and praise of the home churches, find a faint echo across the leagues of ocean which stretch between the motherland and the lonely rock of the Southern seas.

The people of Tristan, solitary as their island is, steadfastly refuse to leave it. They look upon it as their home; to some it is their native land. The ships which now and then touch upon its shores in vain offer to bring them back to the haunts of civilization. They have grown to love their loneliness, and to be content with a lot which is strange and pathetic indeed.—Youth's Companion.