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Updated: May 17, 2025
Fiji was indebted for Mr Hunt to the Christian liberality of a lady Mrs Brackenbury, of Raithbury Hall, Lincolnshire, who offered to pay all the expenses of his outfit and passage, and 50 pounds a year for three years, provided the committee would send another missionary, and thus raise the number to seven.
After describing an interview with an American captain, he continues: 'Reports are rife of a semi-legalised slave-trading between the South Sea Islands and New Caledonia and the white settlers in Fiji. I have made a little move in the matter. I am told that Government sanctions natives being brought upon agreement to work for pay, &c., and passage home in two years.
The knowledge, moreover, of the fact that the fever was slowly but surely killing me, and that there was no prospect of my being relieved by my employers and sent elsewhere for I had neither money, friends, nor influence was an additional factor towards sending me into such a morbid condition of mind that I had often contemplated the idea weak and ill as I was of leaving the island alone in my whaleboat, and setting sail for Fiji or Samoa, more than a thousand miles distant.
In China, for instance, a young man will not introduce into conversation, a topic which has not already been touched upon by his elders. On the Fiji Islands, a woman does not talk to her mother-in-law, and among the Sioux, a young man does not talk at all unless someone else addresses him.
They decided to go on, to the Fiji islands, wait there a fortnight for the next ship, and then sail for home. They couldn't foresee that they wouldn't see a homeward-bound ship again for six weeks, and that no word could come to them from the children, and no word go from them to the children in all that time.
How can we supply teachers at the rate of one for every fifteen or twenty people? And there are some 6,000 or 7,000 islanders already on the Fiji plantations, and I suppose as many in Queensland. 'Some one knowing several languages, and continually itinerating from one plantation to another, might do something; but I don't think a native clergyman could do that.
These vessels, frail and unwieldy as they appear, are navigated in the face of the trade wind between two and three hundred miles, the Tongans making voyages to Fiji and also to Samoa. We were told that six years are required to build one. The sail, formed of matting, is triangular, spread on a long yard.
He said that he had escaped most of it by getting inside the coral reef round Vanua Levu, but even during the short time he had been out in the storm, he had had to throw the greater part of his cargo overboard. From the way he spoke, he had evidently been drinking, possibly trying to forget his lost cargo. Before I left Fiji I heard that the Lurline had gone to her last berth.
The inhabitants of the Fiji Islands use a similar pillow for the same object of preventing their elaborately-dressed hair from being disarranged.
I knew Gibson to be a plucky fellow, but when it transpired that neither he nor the others possessed money beyond what the voyage would cost them, and that what they intended to do when they arrived at the Fiji Islands was to be left to chance, the proposed expedition assumed a different complexion. The Judge denounced it as sheer madness, specially for a man to take his wife to such a place.
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