{"product_id":"2940013703186","title":"My Crowded Solitude","description":"On a mighty blaze on a mighty tree are cut two initials and a date. The\u003cbr\u003einitials are mine, the date is when I began an eight years' lonely\u003cbr\u003eresidence among the most backward race of people in the whole of the\u003cbr\u003etropical South Pacific, which is a place where backward peoples abound.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis experience was mine primarily because in the midst of an adventurous\u003cbr\u003eSouth Seas wandering the urge came upon me to settle awhile. It was not\u003cbr\u003ethat I was weary of the South Seas, for I loved them. Nor was it that I\u003cbr\u003ewas weary of adventuring, for youth was mine, and to my particular kind\u003cbr\u003eof youth adventuring was Life. It was merely that I was weary of\u003cbr\u003eadventuring in many places and desired greatly to adventure in one place\u003cbr\u003efor a change.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut for long I saw no means of satisfying this urge. There was always\u003cbr\u003esomething--usually financial--to hinder me. Indeed, the number and force\u003cbr\u003eof circumstances apparently especially designed to prevent a wandering\u003cbr\u003eyoung man giving up his wandering was astonishing. Then one day I came\u003cbr\u003eagain to Thursday Island, the place of pearls and pearl-shell which sits\u003cbr\u003eastride the strait that makes of New Guinea and Australia two separate\u003cbr\u003elands, and encountered a man with a proposal which suited me exactly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was that we should establish a coconut plantation at Cape York--that\u003cbr\u003eis to say, at Australia's uttermost north, the apex of that tremendous\u003cbr\u003eand almost completely unknown peninsula which, after half a thousand\u003cbr\u003emiles of paralleling the mighty Barrier Reef, thrusts up amid the islands\u003cbr\u003eof Torres Strait and towards New Guinea like a pointing finger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis great land, it appeared, had a peculiarity all its own. It was a\u003cbr\u003eSouth Sea land without coconut palms--insignia of a South Sea land. You\u003cbr\u003ecould sail its shore for days, said my friend, for weeks if you liked,\u003cbr\u003eand never once see a palm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn one place only were there a few, planted by a man named Jardine. The\u003cbr\u003ebeaches were edged instead by jungle and open forest and tall indigenous\u003cbr\u003egrasses. He'd seen them often enough--he'd been much up and down that\u003cbr\u003ecoast--and every time it had somehow seemed strange. As you went along\u003cbr\u003eyou kept looking ahead for the green of clustered palms, for sight of\u003cbr\u003etall boles all bent with the wind. It didn't seem right that there\u003cbr\u003eshouldn't be any, for you were sailing all the while a land washed by the\u003cbr\u003ewaters of the Coral Sea and fanned by trade-winds and inhabited by\u003cbr\u003enatives--a land with all the features of a true part of the tropical\u003cbr\u003ePacific, except the most outstanding.","brand":"WDS Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47073755627760,"sku":"2940013703186","price":2.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940013703186","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}