File:American forestry (1910-1923) (17958441710).jpg

Title: American forestry
Identifier: americanforestry201914amer (find matches)
Year: 1910-1923 (1910s)
Authors: American Forestry Association
Subjects: Forests and forestry
Publisher: Washington, D. C. : American Forestry Association
Contributing Library: The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden
Digitizing Sponsor: The LuEsther T Mertz Library, the New York Botanical Garden

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876 AMERICAN FORESTRY
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A Native House on the Beach. THERE IS ALMOST A CONTINUOUS SETTLEMENT ALONG THE BEACH FRONT AROUND THE ENTIRE ISLAND, THE HOUSES BEING ERECTED IN GROVES OF COCOANUTS, BREADFRUIT, MANGOES, ORANGES, BANYANS, AND BAMBOO. quent of pearls and divers, blackbirding and piracy, typhoons, wrecks, and all the adventures of beach and lagoon that make up South Sea history. Yet so charming a scene hardly befits such themes. Rainbow colored fish play through the coral along the very seawall at your feet, the placid green lagoon meets a skyline of palms on either hand, and seaward, beyond a tiny palm-covered islet where a queen once had her fortress, the surf rolls creaming on the barrier reef from the blue tropical ocean, rippling in the soft fresh Trades. Behind the town, itself hidden in verdure, green slopes rise quickly to splintered volcanic peaks nearly 8,000 feet high, carved by pre- cipitous valleys with countless flashing waterfalls. Melville wrote that the ineffable repose and beauty of the Tahitian landscape was such that every object struck him like something seen in a dream and he could scarcely believe such scenes had real existence. "Of- ten," said Bougainville, "I thought I was walking in the Garden of Eden." Papeete is the only town, but the fertile level shores of the island are so thickly populated as to form almost a continuous village along the road that skirts the beach for its circumference, of nearly 100 miles. Yet there is prac- tically no open land except in the unin- habited mountains. Houses and vil- lages are beneath endless groves of cocoanuts, breadfruit, mangoes, oranges, banyans and bamboo, with occasional ornamental exotics from other tropical lands. Alligator pears, native "chest- nuts," mummy-apples and bananas, are in almost every dooryard. Except for two small sugar plantations, a few half- hearted cotton patches, and small clearings for taro, yams and other vege- tables, there is no farming as we know it. Copra and vanilla are the island crops.

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