Guam grows in great abundance yams and sweet potatoes; also corn, bananas, and cocoanuts. Fish are plentiful; the island is prolific of swine; and there is some game, as deer goats turkeys and ducks.

Since the decline of piracy as a profession, the Sulus have devoted more attention to agriculture. The land is held by the nobles, under a kind of Mohammedan single tax principle, the government taking all. The people are ground down by oppression, many of them being held as slaves. The nobleman is always armed with a kris, or peculiarly shaped sword, and a blowpipe, the latter the national weapon, a hollow tube of palm, through which darts are blown. The blowpipe is used mostly for birds and other game; or if for men the darts are poisoned. The people live chiefly on rice and fish; favorite dishes are chicken and eggs cooked in cocoanut oil, and square cakes of sago mixed with fish and citron juice. Fruits thrive abundantly, chief among them being the mango, durian, custard-apple, and the plum called bolona. Bread-fruit is an important product, and cinnamon, ginger, and the chocolate bean are everywhere prolific. Cacao trees introduced by the Germans are proving successful.

Extensive beds of valuable pearl shells have been found on the west coast of New Caledonia, and a company formed in Paris with a capital of a million francs to exploit the beds, under a concession covering 130 miles. Commercial-agent Wolff thus writes of it in August, 1898: "New Caledonia will soon, it is probable, play an important role in the production of pearl shells and pearls. The varieties of shells discovered are, first, the avicula margaritifera, containing a large number of pearls; second, the meleagrina margaritifera, which furnishes a very beautiful white pearl, similar to those found in Tahiti and Gambier; third, a variety commonly called epaule de mouton, of which the mother-of-pearl is magnificent, with many-colored reflections; fourth, still another variety of flat oyster, called jambonneau. The pearl is abundant, generally white and of a beautiful water. Frequently pink, yellow, gray, and black pearls are found, and large numbers are often found in the same shell. One is cited as containing the fabulous number of 256. To give a just idea of the riches of these seas, a little boat of one and a half tons, furnished, in the year 1897, the enormous quantity of 10

kilograms, 23 pounds, of pearls. Up to the present time, and in consequence of the difficulty of procuring divers, the waters have not been sounded to a greater depth than 2 meters, 6 feet, 7 inches. New apparatus and larger capital will give a great impetus to this industry, permitting soundings of 8, 10, 15, 20, and 25 meters, at which depth the large shells are found."

The pepper of the Straits settlements, which grows in bunches of 20 or 30 on a spike, is picked before the berry is ripe; and dried in the sun or on iron plates and marketed in bags.

Australia possesses vast areas of grazing lands and exports largely of wool. Besides mines and minerals, there are present valuable hard woods, which are now an article of commerce, and sent to the United States and Great Britain for street-paving and furniture. Late droughts in New South Wales reduced the sheep flocks of the colony from 66,000,000 to 46,000,000 sheep, besides losses of 300,000 horses and 150,000 cattle. Wheat and flour are rising into prominence, and instead of importing from the United States, as was done in 1896, to the value of $3,400,000, it is expected that Sydney will soon have wheat and flour for exportation. At Newcastle, New South Wales, are some twenty collieries, each with an acreage of coal-bearing land, owned or leased, of from 1,225 to 9,000 acres. New Zealand has some rich agricultural country, besides her mineral and grazing lands. The gold fields are assuming large proportions under the influence of English capital. Wages in Australia are for farm hands and servants per month with board $12 to $20; artisans per day, $2 to $3. Sheep-raising is among the chief industries of New Zealand, and wool is largely exported from all the Australasian colonies.

The soil of the Hawaiian islands, though as a rule rich, requires fertilization in the absence of rotation of crops. The sugar crop of 1897 from 56 plantations reached 251,126 tons, notwithstanding the dry season. The cultivation of coffee is increasing, though not characterized thus far by many large plantations. Oranges grow wild in the mountain cañons, and are not extensively cultivated in orchard. It is somewhat strange that these islands are so poor for certain fruits, as peaches, plums, apricots, and apples, the production of which

so far as undertaken has not proved successful. Grapes and figs are always in market, and the mango is greatly relied upon.

Tropical and semi-tropical products are as necessary to northern civilization as northern products. We need the cotton, sugar, rice, coffee, tea, cocoa, silk, drugs, and spices of the south nearly or quite as much as the grain, meat, and vegetables of the north. As population increases and the tastes and requirements of civilization become yet more arbitrary and pronounced, tropical products will become more and more necessities, and fertile tropical lands, which are quite limited in area, will increase correspondingly in value.

Henceforth Cuba, commercially and doubtless politically as well, will always be American. The $50,000,000 American capital invested there before the war will be increased to many hundred millions. A little larger than the state of New York, the possibilities are great; but only 2,000,000 of the 28,000,000 acres are cultivated, 9,000,000 being waste and 17,000,000 virgin forest. The usual annual product of $85,000,000 can be increased ten fold. Sugar and tobacco are not only the chief industries, but comprise nearly all the business of the island, exports usually reaching some $80,000,000 a year, say $70,000,000 sugar and $10,000,000 tobacco; though fruit lumber and iron ore are likewise produced. Three-fourths of the $2,000,000 fruit exports are bananas. In the forests are some sixty varieties of valuable woods, hardwood and dyewoods, as ebony, lignum vitæ, and mahogany. There are also medicinal and textile plants. From the iron mines near Santiago, owned by Americans, $700,000 worth of ore is exported. There are other mines of iron and other metals, and new discoveries to be made in unexplored parts. Prior to 1868 Cuba exported $7,000,000 worth of coffee annually; but the wars of the Spaniards and insurgents ruined the industry. So with cocoa. Guano might be mentioned, and also fish, of which latter commodity some one soberly claims to have counted up 785 varieties.

In regard to coffee, of which the United States consumes 700,000,000 pounds per annum, the plantations of Cuba have been in the main destroyed, while the industry has received a decided impetus in the Hawaiian islands. The product of Porto Rico is 50,000,000 pounds a year; Cuba used to raise nearly twice as much. Of the 2,500,000 tons of sugar con

sumed every year in the United States, the newly acquired. islands have been furnishing about one-quarter of the amount.

With the opening of the year 1899, commerce in Cuba and Porto Rico was fairly progressing. The blockades were raised, the Spaniards had taken their departure, and all was as if there were no Spain, no Weylers, and no rebels. Plantations were put in order, sugar-makers set up their factories, railroads were built, and the seeds of wealth and prosperity were planted on every side.

The United States imports annually 25,000,000 pounds of leaf tobacco, three-fourths of which formerly came from Cuba, besides receiving 40 per cent of the 200,000,000 cigars and 50,000,000 packages of cigarettes annually sent forth from that island. The Philippines export 350,000,000 pounds of leaf tobacco, and 150,000,000 cigars, comparatively small portions of which formerly went to the United States. Cattle-raising in Porto Rico is a promising industry; also dairy farming, and poultry sheep and swine growing. There are present good clays for burning, and from which pottery and tiles are made.

Organized industry, in the form of trusts and combinations, will rule agriculture commerce and manufactures here as elsewhere, instance the North American Commercial company, incorporated with a capital stock of $14,000,000 for the purchase and development of 20,000 acres of land in Porto Rico and Cuba. This is a specimen of twentieth century farming, and as with many other like companies on the Atlantic and on the Pacific, agricultural, mining, and commercial, it was organized for legitimate purposes. Coffee plantations come first under consideration in Porto Rico; they are held at from $75 to $200 an acre, and pay a profit of from 15 to 25 per cent. Next are sugar and tobacco, the former less attractive as an industry, and the latter more so, for the moment, on account of the troubles in Cuba. The foreign trade of Porto Rico in 1896 was $36,624,000, and the exports exceeded the imports. The largest share of Porto Rico trade has hitherto fallen to Spain, being about ten millions a year, the United States ranking next at seven millions. Tropical products comprise the exports, and textile fabrics, fish, flour, rice, and pork are the chief imports. Clipperton island is yielding important results in guano, Japanese labor being chiefly employed in handling the deposits.

CHAPTER XVIII

CLIMATES OF THE PACIFIC

THE currents most affecting the climates upon and around the Pacific ocean are the trade winds of the southern hemisphere, and the Japan current of the north. Like the gulf stream of the Atlantic, by whose influence alone the British isles are made habitable for man, the Japan current warms the islands and shores of Alaska, and governs temperature and rainfall all the way down the American coast to the middle of Lower California.

To Europeans coming to the New World nature presents herself on a grander scale than any to which they have been accustomed. The air is clearer, heat and cold intenser, and colors brighter. The mountains are higher, the plains broader, the lakes deeper, the rivers larger, and vegetation more redundant. The lands at first occupied by the Spaniards ley within the tropics, having high interior mountains, and plateaus raised within miasmatic borders into cool ethereal heights, whereon the aboriginal civilizations first awoke to consciousness.

Into the bay of Bengal flows the warm equatorial current, thence passing through the strait of Malacca into the JavaChina sea, volcanic basin, in which the water is warmed upon the surface by the sun, and at the bottom by the earth's internal heat; thence passing along the Asiatic shore to Bering sea and the Aleutian isles, it sweeps round to the American coast, which it descends toward the equator. This is the great river of the Pacific, the kuro-siwo, or black river, as the Japanese call it, the gulf stream of the Pacific, and the counterpart of the gulf stream of the Atlantic. These are the great arteries of ocean, and the analogy between them is striking in every particular. The kuro-siwo brings from the coast of Asia to the Aleuts, whose islands are treeless, trunks of the