After the lapse of four or five years they frequently return to their old fields and resume their cultivation, if in the interim the jungle has grown well, and they have not been anticipated by others, for there is no pretence of appropriation other than Possessory, and if, therefore, another party have preceded them, or, if the slow growth of the jungle give no sufficient promise of a good stratum of ashes for the land when cleared by fire, they move on to another site, new or old.
"The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies"
Robert Gordon Latham
Here was a mining engineer selling a Possessory right to the Paymaster for the sum of one hundred dollars; while he, a banker, was spending a hundred dollars a day in what had proved so far to be dead work.
"Shadow Mountain"
Dane Coolidge
Be it known, however, that, notwithstanding these enactments, the Possessory title is not lost to the owner, but he is compelled to relinquish all rights and usufruct for three years.
"The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes"
Tomás de Comyn Fedor Jagor Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow Charles Wilkes