The Government Officials Told Him That If He
Would Clear The Land And Till It For Thirty Years He Would Be Given
A Title For It.
Immediately he set to work.
And never was there such work. Nobody
farmed that high up. The land was covered with matted jungle and
overrun by wild pigs and countless rats. The view of Papeete and
the sea was magnificent, but the outlook was not encouraging. He
spent weeks in building a road in order to make the plantation
accessible. The pigs and the rats ate up whatever he planted as
fast as it sprouted. He shot the pigs and trapped the rats. Of the
latter, in two weeks he caught fifteen hundred. Everything had to
be carried up on his back. He usually did his packhorse work at
night.
Gradually he began to win out. A grass-walled house was built. On
the fertile, volcanic soil he had wrested from the jungle and jungle
beasts were growing five hundred cocoanut trees, five hundred papaia
trees, three hundred mango trees, many breadfruit trees and
alligator-pear trees, to say nothing of vines, bushes, and
vegetables. He developed the drip of the hills in the canyons and
worked out an efficient irrigation scheme, ditching the water from
canyon to canyon and paralleling the ditches at different altitudes.
His narrow canyons became botanical gardens. The arid shoulders of
the hills, where formerly the blazing sun had parched the jungle and
beaten it close to earth, blossomed into trees and shrubs and
flowers.
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