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Show 284 ISLAND LIFE. [PAin' II. could only be retained on the steep slopes so long as it w:as protected by the vegetation towh w. h I· t m· great . part o.w ed Its origin. When this was destroyed, the heavy tropical rams soon washed away the soil, and has left a vast expanse of bar~ rock or sterile clay. This irreparable destruction was caused m tl:e first place by goats, which were introduced by the Portu~uese ~n 1513, and increased so rapidly that in 1588 they existed In thousands. These animals are the greatest of all foes to trees, because they eat off the young seedlings, and thus prev~nt the natural restoration of the forest. They were, however, aided by the reckless waste of man. The East India Company took possession of the island in 1651, and about the year 1700 it beO'an to be seen that the forests were fast diminishing, and re~uired some protection. Two of tP.e native trees, redwood a.nd ebony, were good for tanning, and to save trouble the .bark was wastefully stripped from the trunks only, the remamder beinO' left to rot; while in 1709 a large quantity of the rapidly disa;pearing ebony was used to burn lime for building fortifications! By the MSS. records quoted in Mr. Melliss' interesting volume on St. Helena, 1 it is evident that the evil consequences of allowing the trees to be destroyed were clearly foreseen, as the following passages show : " We find the place called the Great \Vood in a flourishing condition, full of young trees, where the hoggs (of which there is a great abundance) do not come to root them up. But the Great Wood is miserably lessened and destroyed within our memories, and is not near the circuit an<.l length it was. But we believe it does not contain now less than fifteen hundred acres of fine woodland and good ground, but no springs of water but what is salt or brackish, which we take to be the reason that that part was not inhabited when the people first chose out their settlements and made plantations; but if wells could be sunk, which the governor says he will attempt when we have more hands, we should then think it the most pleasant and healthiest part of the island. But as to healthiness we don't think it will hold so if the wood that keeps the land warm were destroyed, for then the rains, which are violent 1 St. Helena : a Physical, If'istorical, and Topographical Desc1·iption of the Island, &c. By John Charles Melliss, F.G.S., &c. London: 1875. CHAP. XIV.] ST. HELEN A. 285 here, would carry away the npper soil, and it being a clay marl underneath would produce but little ; as it is, we think in case it ·were enclosed it might be greatly improved" .... "When once this wood is gone the island will soon be ruined " . . . . "We viewed the wood's end which joins the Honourable Company's plantation called the Hutts, but the wood is so destroyed that the beginning of the Great Wood is now a whole mile beyond that place, and all the soil between being washed away, that distance is now entirely barren." (MSS. RecoTds, 1716.) In 1709 the governor reported to the Court of Directors of the East India Company that the timber was rapidly disappearing, and that the goats should be destroyed for the preservation of the ebony wood, and because the island was suffering from droughts. The reply was, "The goats are not to be destroyed, being more valuable than ebony." Thus, through the gross ignorance of those in power, the last opportunity of preserving the peculiar vegetation of St. Helena, and preventing the island from becoming the comparatively rocky desert it now is, was allowed to pass away.l Even in a mere pecuniary point of view the error was a fatal one, for in the next century (in 1810) another governor reports the total destruction of the great forests by the 1 Mr. Marsh in his interesting work entitled, The Earth as Modified by IIurnan Action (p. 51), thus remarks on the effect of browsing quadrupeds in destroying and checking woody vegetation.-" I am convinced that forests would soon cover many parts of the Arabian and African deserts if man and domestic animals, especially the goat and the camel, were banished from them. The hard palate and tongue, and strong teeth and jaws of this latter quadruped enable him to break off and masticate tough and thorny branches as large as the finger. He is particularly fond of tlte smaller twigs, leaves, and seed-pods of the Sont and other acacias, which, like the American robinia, thrive well on dry and sandy soils, and be spares no tree the brancl1es of which are within his reach, except, if I remember right, the tamarisk that produces manna. Young trees sprout plentifully around the springs and along the winter water-courses of the desert, and these are just the halting stations of the caravans and their routes of travel. In the shade of these trees annual grasses and perennial shrubs shoot up, but are mown down by the hungry cattle of the Bedouin as fast as they grow. A few years of undisturbed vegetation would suffice to cover such points with groves, and these would gradually extend themselves over soils where now scarcely any green thing but the bitter colocynth and the poisonous foxglove is ever seen.'' |