Rensselaer Union, Volume 9, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 May 1877 — An Invasion of Pitcairn’s Island. [ARTICLE]

An Invasion of Pitcairn’s Island.

Ix that lone spot of Polynesia, amid an archipelago scattered far and wide over the Pacific and celebrated as Pitcairn’s Island, an invasion of an extraordinary character is reported to have taken place. It to a tradition of the sea, of course, that this speck of land, amid a wilderness of ocean, was originally colonized by the surviving mutineers of the Bounty; and there to, probably, historical justification for the statement. But it may be doubted whether any descendants of the mutineers are still to be found there, since, in 1855, 160 of them were removed, upon their own petition, to Norfolk Island. Be this as it may, the place to so solitary, so desolate, and so out of the common track, that we only receive news from it once in every two or three years The latest is to the effect that an army of rats, landed from some wreck or another, recently behaved much as Mr. Browning’s rats did in Hamalintown, swarming over everything, eating up everything, consuming all the flour, and devouring the entire grain crop of a season. The island is seven miles in width; across it they marched, myriad after myriad in one compact array, some of them as large as rabbits—an assertion which might appear exaggerated did we not remember that the French naturalist, M. Gentil, declares that he saw in the sewers of Paris specimens of this vermin “ as large as full-grown tom-cats”—crea-tures, indeed, which full-grown tom-cats refused to fight. With a locust avidity they combined an unlimited ferocity, as the poor Pitcairn Islanders have reason to believe.

In not a few islands, indeed, these castaway creatures escaping from shattered ships, have exterminated their former inhabitants,, rabbits and seabirds, the latter falling a prey to them when young; and in Montevideo travelers assure us they render the dirtier streets dangerous to even human beings after nightfall. Weil, they seem to have made, as the Greek dramatist phrases it, " a fierce, unbidden feast" upon the harvests and stores of Pitcairn’s Island, and it is not surprising that the humanity of a Pacific trader should have been appealed to for a supply of flour. Neither that he should suggest a more frequent “looking in" upon those recluses of the ocean.— London Jtdu>.