My Crowded Solitude

On a mighty blaze on a mighty tree are cut two initials and a date. The
initials are mine, the date is when I began an eight years' lonely
residence among the most backward race of people in the whole of the
tropical South Pacific, which is a place where backward peoples abound.

This experience was mine primarily because in the midst of an adventurous
South Seas wandering the urge came upon me to settle awhile. It was not
that I was weary of the South Seas, for I loved them. Nor was it that I
was weary of adventuring, for youth was mine, and to my particular kind
of youth adventuring was Life. It was merely that I was weary of
adventuring in many places and desired greatly to adventure in one place
for a change.

But for long I saw no means of satisfying this urge. There was always
something--usually financial--to hinder me. Indeed, the number and force
of circumstances apparently especially designed to prevent a wandering
young man giving up his wandering was astonishing. Then one day I came
again to Thursday Island, the place of pearls and pearl-shell which sits
astride the strait that makes of New Guinea and Australia two separate
lands, and encountered a man with a proposal which suited me exactly.

It was that we should establish a coconut plantation at Cape York--that
is to say, at Australia's uttermost north, the apex of that tremendous
and almost completely unknown peninsula which, after half a thousand
miles of paralleling the mighty Barrier Reef, thrusts up amid the islands
of Torres Strait and towards New Guinea like a pointing finger.

This great land, it appeared, had a peculiarity all its own. It was a
South Sea land without coconut palms--insignia of a South Sea land. You
could sail its shore for days, said my friend, for weeks if you liked,
and never once see a palm.

In one place only were there a few, planted by a man named Jardine. The
beaches were edged instead by jungle and open forest and tall indigenous
grasses. He'd seen them often enough--he'd been much up and down that
coast--and every time it had somehow seemed strange. As you went along
you kept looking ahead for the green of clustered palms, for sight of
tall boles all bent with the wind. It didn't seem right that there
shouldn't be any, for you were sailing all the while a land washed by the
waters of the Coral Sea and fanned by trade-winds and inhabited by
natives--a land with all the features of a true part of the tropical
Pacific, except the most outstanding.