Volume 14 Australasia - dana ward's homepage

54 AUSTEAI.ASIAoa the banks of Rodrigues, have completely disappeared, driven away or exterminatedby the reckless way the fishery was conducted. About the year 1760, asmany as thirty thousand were conveyed in eighteen months to Mauritius.Although visited from time to time by the Portuguese and Dutch, Rodrigueswas not permanently occupied till 1691, when the Protestant refugee, Le Guat,resided here for over two years with seven companions. Before the abolition ofslavery, a considerable Negro j)opulation was employed on the plantations ; butsince then large numbers of the emancipated hands have withdrawn to Mauritius,distant about 880 miles. In 1843 the population had thus fallen to about twohundred and fifty souls, but since then it has again increased, mainly by thearrival of blacks, who find employment in clearing and reclaiming the land onthe slopes of the hills.There are only two small centres of population, Port Mathitrin on the coast,and Gabriel in the interior, near Mount Limon (1,320 feet), culminating point ofthe island. On the southern slope are seen, at variovis elevations, old corallinebeaches pierced with caves. In one of these grottoes were discovered the remainsof the jWcsc^; /(//«, or " solitary," and of other birds belonging to extinct species.During the Napoleonic wars, Rodrigues enjoyed considerable strategic importance.After its seizure by the English, it was made the raUying-point of theexpeditions organised in India against Mauritius, and thus contributed to thereduction of all the Mascarenhas Islands.The Keeling Islands.Beyond Rodrigues no lands are met in the direction of the Eastern Archipelagofor a distance of some 2,300 miles, the expanse of waters being first broken bythe small circular group of the Keeling Islands, so named from the Englishnavigator who discovered them in 1609. They are also known as the CocosIslands, from the cocoanut palms lending a fringe of bright verdure to theselow-lying islets.Although lying about 600 miles from the Sunda Strait, the Keeling Archipelagohad its origin, probably, in the same terrestrial movements that gave riseto the Asiatic islands, for it exactly faces the fissure now separating Java fromSumatra, and is disposed in a line with the volcanic islets in the middle of thestrait.Hence it may be assumed that the Keelings rest on an igneous foundationupheaved from the bed of the ocean. At little over a mile from the entrance tothe atoll, Fitzroy failed to touch the bottom with a line over 1,000 fathomslong, so that the submerged slopes of the plateau must be inclined at an angleof little less than forty-five degrees. This atoll, visited by Darwin during thevoyage of the Beagle, in 1836, has become in geographical literature one of themost frequently quoted examples in favour of the great naturalist's ingenioustheory of subsidence and ujjheaval of the marine bed. According to this view,the circular group of islets may be regarded as the embattlemeuts of the lofty