“White is the strand,
    But green the land,
    Red the rocks stand
    Round Heligoland.”

Heligoland is the quaintest little spot imaginable, shaped like an isosceles triangle with the apex pointing northwards.  The area of the whole island is only three-fourths of a square mile; it is barely a mile long, and at its widest only 500 yards broad.  It is divided into Underland and Overland; the former a patch of shore on the sheltered side of the island, covered with the neatest little toy streets and houses.  In its neatness and smallness it is rather like a Japanese town, and has its little theatre and its little Kurhaus complete.  There are actually a few trees in the Underland.  Above it, the red ramparts of rock rise like a wall to the Overland, only to be reached by an endless flight of steps.  On the green tableland of the Overland, the houses nestle and huddle together for shelter on the leeward side of the island, the prevailing winds being westerly.  The whole population let lodgings, simply appointed, but beautifully neat and clean, as one would expect amongst a seafaring population.  There are a few patches of cabbages and potatoes trying to grow in spite of the gales, and all the rest is green turf.  There is not one tree on the wind-swept Overland.  I heard nothing but German and Frisian talked around me, and the only signs of British occupation were the Union Jack flying in front of Government House (surely the most modest edifice ever dignified with that title), and a notice-board in front of the powder-magazine on the northern point of the island.  This notice-board was inscribed, “V.R.  Trespassers will be prosecuted,” which at once gave a homelike feeling, and made one realise that it was British soil on which one was standing.

The island had only been ceded to us in 1814, and we handed it over to Germany in 1890, so our tenure was too brief for us to have struck root deeply into the soil.  Heligoland was a splendid recruiting ground for the Royal Navy, for the islanders were a hardy race of seafarers, and made ideal material for bluejackets.  There was not a horse or cow on the island, ewes supplying all the milk.  As sheep’s milk has an unappetising green tinge about it, it took a day or two to get used to this unfamiliar-looking fluid.  There being no fresh water on Heligoland, the rain water from the roofs was all caught and stored in tanks.  On that rainswept rock I cannot conceive it likely that the water supply would ever fail.  Some-how the idea was prevalent in England that Heligoland was undermined by rabbits.  There was not one single rabbit on the island, for even rabbits find it hard to burrow into solid rock.

Professor Gatke’s books on the migrations of birds are well known.  Heligoland lies in the track of migrating birds, and Dr. Gatke had established himself there for some years to observe them, and there was a really wonderful ornithological museum close to the lighthouse.  The Heligoland lighthouse is a very powerful one, and every single one of these stuffed birds had committed suicide against the thick glass of the lantern.  The lighthouse keepers told me that during the migratory periods, they sometimes found as many as a hundred dead birds on the external gallery of the light in the morning, all of whom had killed themselves against the light.