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greatly encouraged by letters which he and his wife had received from many parts of the globe These told how the writers had been cheered and strengthened amidst the temptations and home-sickness incidental to life in the East. To know that he had helped his fellows was to him a sufficient reward.
During the evening a fine musical programme was rendered by Mrs. Joughin, the Misses Baker, Mr. White, and the Rev. R. Ellison, Mr Peel acting as accompanist. After "Auld Lang Syne" had been sung the meeting closed with the Benediction.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PRATAS.
A MISUNDERSTOOD QUESTION MADE CLEAR.
(Specially written for the Hongkong Daily Press).
Most persons yet remain in ignorance of the portents and intents of the Sino-Japanese wrangle over the atoll of Pratas, of whose now oherished existence both Governments were, quite up to the very near present, most unseem. ly ignorant.
Anyone reading the reports daily emanating from Chinese and Japanese newspaper sources would imagine that the question of right and title to the atoll were of all-absorbing international importance; whereas when one comes to weigh and analyse the pros and cons of the matter, it resolves itself into nothing less than an unseem. ly commercial brawl-and, at that, one not of the cleanest description.
To put together, as one who knows, and knows authoritatively, the piecemeal history of the dispute from its inception to its present acute stage, is not a hard task; and I give here, therefore, a general digest of the facts which have led up to the appointment of the present Commission.
When Western science taught Japanese chemists educated abroad that there were other and more valuable aids to the fertilization of their poor and overworked grain-lands than the bean-cake of North China, the fish refuse from the cod and herring-oil industries of the Hokkaido, and the more pestilential human product of their cities, towns and villages, whose use still disgusts the visitor to Japan, those rapatriated students naturally came to recognise the utility of bird manure or guano and the substrata of phosphate rock, which, in islands of true coral formation, invariably underlie such deposits.
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THE HONGKONG WEEKLY PRESS. AND | somewhere north of Amoy. Later in the same typhoon season the members of similar fowling expedition had their vessel smashed up during a cyclone, and being marooned upon the Pratas, were, I think, upon news of their fate becoming known, brought off the island by Osaka Shosen Kaisha steamer, officially sent to effect their rescue.
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Thus, neither of the ill-fated expeditious put evidence of lengthy residence in, or proprietorship of the atoll, sufficient to entitle, them to a consideration of their claims.
When they were sent back to Formosa, however, from which island they had originally set out, the richness of the atoll became noised abroad through the medium of the Japanese press in South Formosa, the various newspapers of which having heard the seamen's yarns, combined in an earnest exhortation to all and sundry to emigrate southwards and partake of the fortunes which awaited them upon Pratas Island.
Not then, however, and not till considerably later did the personality of Mr. Nishizawa, the Japanese claimant in the present case, begin to loom up. Long before the potential wealth of the island finally roused the commercial desires of Mr. Nishizawa, a scheme for its exploitation had been laid, by the first Englishman to visit it (outside of its original naval surveyors and shipwrecked sailors), before one or two influential houses in this Colony of Hongkong, who pooh-poohed the idea of its value. The same individual also approached the British Foreign Office with a request for the annexation of the atoll to the Crown dominions, but was met with a refusal, the explanation of the Foreign Office being that, after searching investigation that department had concluded that the island undoubtedly belonged to China, and that, therefore, no question of its annexation could be entertained." In the meantime it is practically certain from files of the Japanese vernacular press of Formosa, which may still be referred to, that the Government of that island had lent a willing ear to the stories which had been circulated concerning the Pratas and its wealth, and was more or less encouraging its exploita tion.
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The argument of the Japanese central Government in its reply to China's official pro- test to Nishizawa's occupation, laid stress upon the fact that no official recognition had been taken by Japan of that claimant's possession of the atoll, yet strangely enough the Taihoku corres- pondant of a Hongkong paper could scarcely have maliciously invented the statement contained in a letter to his paper written in mid-July of 1908 to the effect that on the 13th of July, Until, I suggest, ten years ago, adven- 'Mr. Nishizawa, accompanied by officials and turous Japanese fowlers from Kyushu and experts (number specified) of the Formosa Satsuma had sailed in their junks through the Government, left Keelung for the Pratas on Loochoos the Gotos, the Volcano Islands and one of Mr. Nishizawa's steamers with the object those of the Bashi Group, busily despoiling the of making an exhaustive survey of the place." various islets of their feathered inhabitants for This hardly reads like official abstention from the sake of their wings, which have a selling interference in the "grab." Furthermore, for value of about three or four cents a pair in some little time previous to this, the name of southern Japan. The result naturally arrived the atoll as it was printed in the Japanese press that these rough navigators gradually decimated had, with some intent, appeared as Nishizawa- those groups,
if not exactly of" the goose which jima (Nishizawa's Island) in place of Pratas. lays the golden egg," then of the gannet which Now Pratas is a small coral atoll, one mile drops something equally valuable.
and a half in length and three-quarters of a Thus they went further afield in their depreda-mile wide, which lies at the mouth of a horse tions, and only last Summer, it will be remembered, a party of Japanese bird-hunters was rescued by a Brazilian training-ship as far south as Wake's Island, just as their provisions and water had petered out, and were brought on to Hongkong. How much further afield than that they have gone, and upon what nation's preserves they have not yet poached remains to be discovered and announced to astonished Colonial governments. The Pratas Shoal lying isolated, as it does, roughly 172 nautical miles from Hongkong in a direct line to the northernmost point of the Island of Luzon, was, naturally, as the nesting- place and pied-a-terre of an enormous number- of sea-fowl, sooner or later bound to attract the attention of these Japanese "birders," so that it came to pass that, in the Summer of 1906, the crew of an adventurous junk, after playing havoc among the feathered tribes of the atoll-it is reported that they killed over 2,000 birds in three days-were blown off their happy hunting-ground by a typhoon, which carried their craft before it up the. Formosa Channel, and landed the party in safety
shoe-shaped and wreck-strewn reef twelve miles in length and about ten miles across at the horns. It is only 40 feet high at its greatest altitude and of sparse vegetation, and two pine- trees of stunted and melancholy growth crown its summit.
[July 24, 1909.
the catches of fish which they made in the great lagoon. How many tens of generations have so done one may not surmise, but under the name of Tung Shan the atoll has been indelibly fused in the fishing traditions of Kwantung.
To such a place, then, came the Nishizawa expedition of July, 1908, with officials and experts, and with water, old Decauville light rails and trucks, and with coolies, pickaxes and shovels; and there ever since the Japanese have dug the phosphates, trawled the lagoon and slaughtered the birds, and according to the Chinese complaint completely ousted and driven off the island's real owners with harshness and, it is alleged, with at least some show of brutality.
The state of affairs set up by these conflicting claims has necessitated the appointment of the present Sino-Japanese Commission regarding the Pratas.
With regard to the value of the phosphates found upon the atoll, some experts havO suggested them to be of greater commercial value than those of Christmas Island, but the writer is prepared to state from his own knowledge that these deposits hold . physical combination which can but add to the manufacturer's difficulty of turning them by process into a useful commercial fertilizer. Roughly speaking they might in their native condition be worth six dollars a ton delivered at the Japanese nitric acid factories of Osaka and Tokyo.
That the Chinese are now keenly alive to the value of their possessions in these latitudes which the bruises and grievances of a few fishermen have served to make clear to them is very certain, and anti-Japanese Kwantung has needed no guiding hand to show her how to make a theatrical diplomatic use of an anti. climax to the boycott troubles arising from the Tatau Maru incident.
Nishizawa's claim for compensation for loss of his trade has been roughly estimated at Taals 500,000, whilst the Chinese official counter- claim was originally stated to be 3,000,000 yen.
The decision as to which claim shall be successful lies in the hands of the Sino-Japanese Commission now proceeding to the Naboth's Vineyard in dispute.
In conclusion, I have it upon the best authority that Hongkong assayers have not for years kept their noses more assiduously, if not exactly to their grindstones, then to their pestles and mortars, than they are doing at present, under the necessity of analysing the super-scrapings of desert islands from all points of the China Sea. In this direction there is a suitable rush for the spoil.
FREE TOWING,
An inquiry was conducted at the Harbour Office yesterday by the Harbour-master (Hon. Basil Taylor), into the charge preferred against Chung Tsim by Messrs. hewan, Tomes and Co., of having used the launch Ilha de Dom Joas for towing sampans and other small craft to the typhoon shelter at Causeway Bay without the owners' authority and when "the launch was urgently wanted at 3 p.m. on the 20th inst. in the waters of the Colony.
Mr. Alex. Gordon spoke to seeing the launch towing about ten sampans to shelter.
The defendant said he was taking a lighter from Deep Water Bay to Causeway Bay and the sampans hooked on. He told the crew of the lighter to clear them away, but as as one unhooked others hooked on. He did not take the numbers of the sampans. They all cast off, however, when he drew abreast of Taim-
tsa-tsui.
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One of the crew stated that the coxswain told him to order the sampans to cast off, and he did so.
The case was adjourned sine dis.
Until the arrival of the Japanese there existed upon the atoll a small shrine erected with loving care from wreckage and kept in repair by the toil-hardened hands of the Cantonese fishermen. There was in evidence, too, a reservoir-which held the sole water supply of the atoll-in the shape of some ill-fated ship's tank which had been laboriously dragged close to the summit.
The Chinese merchants in the South Pacific It is a fact worthy of notice that neither shrine nor tank exist any longer. The Japanese and Islands, it is said, are about to open a large Loochooans sent down from Formosa brought Chinese Commercial Bank and have already their water with them in saké tubs. Still it is subscribed ten million dollars capital for the Their representative, Taotai Li, not impertinent to ask where is the shrine and purpose. what has become of the Chinamen's water tank? recently arrived in Tientsin with a view to Upon this bleak and storm-lashed forty-foot-getting the co-operation of the merchants in high square mile or two of coral, successive China, and has been entertained by the president generations of fishermen from Hongkong and of Tientsin Chamber of Commerce, who has Canton had hunted the turtle in the summer, and also invited the local influential merchants to had at other times and seasons salted and dried meet him to discuss the matter.
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