bring them each a wife from St. Helena. He did his best and brought five
coloured women--one a widow with four children. Of these marriages only
one, I believe, turned out happily. A daughter of this marriage was Betty
Cotton, our landlady. She was the eldest of seven daughters, and had five
brothers. Her father, Alexander Cotton, was born at Hull, and was an old
man-of-war's man, and for three years had guarded Napoleon at Longwood,
St. Helena. Thomas Hill Swain, another of the five, came from Sussex and
served in the _Theseus_ under Nelson. He married the widow, and used to
tell his children, of whom there were four daughters living on the island
when we were there, that he was the sailor who caught Nelson when he fell
at Trafalgar. This old man was vigorous to the last. At the age of one
hundred and eight he was chopping wood, when a splinter flying into his
eye caused his death. The result, of course, of these marriages was a
coloured race. Some of the children are still very dark in appearance, but
the colour is gradually dying out.

Another well-known islander, Peter William Green, came nearly twenty years
later. He was a Dutch sailor, a native of Katwijk, on the North Sea, whose
ship in trying to steal the islanders' sea elephant oil got in too close
and was wrecked. He settled down and married one of the four daughters of
the widow, and became eventually headman and marriage officer. Queen
Victoria sent him a framed picture of herself, which, unfortunately, has
been taken away to the Cape. He died in 1902 at the age of ninety-four.

In the next decade came Rogers and Hagan from America; and in the early
nineties the two Italian sailors Repetto and Lavarello of Comogli, who
were shipwrecked.

I believe the population has never numbered more than one hundred and
nine. At the time of our arrival it was seventy-one, of whom only ten had