In an Unknown Prision Land by George Griffith

New Caledonia is essentially a land of contrasts, both in scenery and climate, and when I had left the sunny hills and plains and the silver-sanded, palm-fringed bays of the Isle of Pines some fifty miles behind me, I found myself in a region of enormous forests, clothing the slopes of rugged mountains running sheer down to the sea from the clouds which rarely broke above them.

There were no white beaches here, only boulder-strewn shores, which were literally, as well as in the metaphorical sense, iron-bound. Not only the rocks and the boulders, but the very sands of the shore themselves were of iron, sometimes pure, but, as a rule, containing from eighty-five to ninety per cent. of the metal.