ART. VI.-1. Journal of a Cruise among the Islands of the Western Pacific, including the Feejees, and others inhabited by the Polynesian Negro Races, in H.M.S. Havannah.' By John Elphinstone Erskine, Capt. R.N. London, 1853. 6 2. Fiji, and the Fijians: the Islands, their Inhabitants, and Mission History. By Thomas Williams and James Calcraft, late Missionaries in Fiji. London, 1858. 3. Lettre concernant l'Etat actuel de Tahiti, adressée à Sa Majesté Impériale Napoléon III. Par Alexander Salmon. London, 1858. 4. La Nouvelle-Calédonia; Voyages, Missions, Mœurs, Colonisation, 1774-1854. Par C. Brainne. Paris, 1854. 5. What is Fiji, the Sovereignty of which is offered to Her Majesty? By William Arthur, A.M., Member of the Royal Asiatic Society, Fellow of the Ethnological Society, &c. 1859. THES London, HE part of the world to which these works refer demands just now no small degree of public attention. The islands of the Pacific Ocean are historically interesting, especially as regards the period of our early intercourse with them. They have furnished a larger addition to our commerce than might have been expected, while they have afforded means for the advancement of science in some of its most attractive departments; but their geographical position, and the progress of those events which are so rapidly changing the relations of different parts of the world towards each other, have given to them, in the present day, a degree of political importance which they never before possessed. Viewed under the latter aspect, the occurrences of the last twenty years have drawn to them an amount of attention scarcely less than that which, nearly a century ago, followed their discovery. It is true that the contemplation of happy shores, * 'Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams; The golden age, where gold disturbs no dreams,' though attractive as a picture painted rather from fancy than reality, was not likely to produce lasting impressions. The discovery of the Islands of the Pacific furnished no evidence of the existence of a fertile southern continent-the fondly-cherished hope of many an ardent spirit in that age; afforded no signs of any hidden treasures of precious metal; no field whence commerce could draw the wealth it sought; and the new-found lands appeared likely in a short time to be forgotten by the • Вугоп. majority majority of the persons who had been so charmed at the outset. These feelings of indifference found expression in the language of Cowper, who, picturing the distant islander as waiting for a repetition of the visits of his European friends, says— "Expect it not; we found no bait To tempt us to thy country; And must be bribed to compass earth again To others these discoveries appeared not destitute of promise. To them it seemed that in 'so vast a field there would be room to acquire fresh knowledge for centuries to come, coasts to survey, countries to explore, inhabitants to describe, and perhaps to render more happy.' Recent events have shown that this opinion was to some extent correct; and though the occasions on which public attention was recalled to these remote regions were but few, the circumstances which roused attention were of no ordinary kind. The first of these circumstances was the voyage of the ship 'Bounty,' which was sent out in 1787, by King George III., at the request of a number of West India merchants in London, to transport plants of the bread-fruit tree from Tahiti to the British West India colonies. Returning from Tahiti, with a thousand plants, the quarrels on board caused a mutiny, which ended in the captain being cast adrift in a boat near the Friendly Islands. The mutineers returned to Tahiti, obtained a supply of live stock and poultry, persuaded a number of men and women to accompany them, and finally reached Pitcairn's Island, where they burned the ship, and sought concealment in that small and uninhabited spot. The life of unrestrained indulgence which for nearly six months the Europeans had spent at Tahiti, the mutiny which so speedily followed their departure, the subsequent voyage in search of these misguided men, the fearful wreck of the Pandora,' in which a number of them were being brought as prisoners to England, the trial and acquittal of some, and the public execution of others after narrowly escaping a watery grave, the tragical end of most of their comrades in their solitary island home, the unexpected discovery, twenty years afterwards, of their descendants in a state of peculiar simplicity and innocence, and their recent removal to the fertile and beautiful shores of Norfolk Island, render the mutiny of the 'Bounty' more like a tale of romance, or a chapter in the history of the buccaneers of earlier days, than *The Task,' book i. a part a part of the modern naval annals of our country. The passage again of the commander of the Bounty' and his companions, eighteen in number, in a small boat twenty-three feet in length, over a wide and, at that time, rarely traversed sea, suffering unusual hardships, and sailing, in forty-one days, over nearly four thousand miles, has rendered the achievement of Captain Bligh in the Bounty's' launch one of the most remarkable voyages on record. Ten years afterwards another voyage, as novel in its character and more remarkable in its results, was made to the South Sea Islands. This was the voyage of the ship Duff,' with thirty English missionaries, to convert the natives of Tahiti and the other islands to Christianity: one of the manifestations of the pious zeal of the nineteenth century, fraught with a promise very different from that of the crusades of the middle ages. The enterprise, though treated at the time with ridicule by some, proved the most important of any which had been undertaken in this quarter, for the natives owe to it the chief moral and social advantages which distinguish their present from their original state. The pioneers of religion and civilization have indeed been benefactors to both natives and foreigners; they have prevented subsequent intercourse from being little else than a series of unjustifiable aggressions by one party, and murderous retaliations by the other; and while their teaching and example have been a blessing to the barbarous tribes among which they have dwelt, their influence has ensured safety and assistance to the Europeans engaged in the pursuits of science or of commerce. The presence of the missionaries protected all vessels touching at Tahiti and the adjacent islands; but after the missionaries had been driven away by the civil wars in the island, the first ship that arrived was seized by the natives. The disastrous termination of the original mission to the misnamed Friendly Islands, where four of the little band were killed by the natives and the rest obliged to fly for their lives, was followed by the destruction, in 1816, of a large vessel, the Port au Prince,' and the massacre of the captain and the chief part of the crew. The good understanding which had marked the earlier intercourse between the islanders and their visitors, had been succeeded by hostility, which frequently ended in sanguinary conflicts. This state of feeling had arisen on the one hand from the eagerness of the natives after fire-arms and articles of iron, and on the other from the plunder and violence of which foreigners were often guilty. To such an extent did the antagonism prevail, that in a short time no unarmed vessel was safe amongst the islands. The The inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands, though behaving in the most friendly manner to Vancouver in 1792-3, had seized the 'Fair American,' when becalmed near the shores of Hawaii, and thrown the Captain into the sea. Another island of the same group was the scene of a similar tragedy. Captain Brown, of the Butterworth,' returning, in 1795, to the harbour of Honolulu, on the west side of Oahu, from a warlike expedition, in which he had assisted the king of the island, fired a salute in honour of the victory which had been achieved, when the wadding from one of his guns entered the cabin-window of an American sloop and killed her captain. The English burial service was read at his interment on the adjacent shore. This the inhabitants believed to be a solemn sorcery, and rifled his grave the same night for the sake of the winding-sheet in which the body had been wrapped. Captain Brown and Captain Gardner, of the Prince Le Boo,' were afterwards murdered here by the natives, who seized their vessels, which were retaken by their respective crews. 'Such were some of the occurrences which marked the first intercourse between these Sandwich Islanders and the English and Americans; and they serve to show rather vividly the contrast between the contact of civilization and barbarism little more than sixty years ago with the polka réunions of the descendants of these races in the same place at the present day.'* The earliest commercial advantage resulting from the discovery of the South Sea Islands was the means of refreshment which they furnished for English and American ships engaged in the sperm-whale fishery in the Pacific. The pearl-oyster being found among the low coral islands of Eastern Polynesia, and the Bech-le-Mer, as well as the fragrant sandal-wood so highly esteemed by the Chinese, being also discovered in these and other islands of the same ocean, a number of vessels of small tonnage, chiefly from New South Wales, were sent in search of these products. In the pearl-shell fisheries a number of natives were employed as divers; and the ill-treatment they received from the Europeans occasioned fierce quarrels, whichfrequently ended in the destruction of the vessels engaged in the trade, as well as in the murder of their crews. The sandalwood traffic was carried on in a manner still more iniquitous, and bore a far greater resemblance to a system of piracy than to legitimate commerce. The ships were armed, and the inhabitants were compelled to collect the sandal-wood, while the promised reward was sometimes withheld. Another plan was * Hunt's 'Merchant's Magazine,' Feb. 1858. Vol. 106.-No. 211. to to take gangs of armed natives from other islands to cut the wood, while the natives of the islands where it was found were treated with barbarous cruelty. The insatiate cupidity and fierce brutality of many of these traders necessarily produced frightful retaliations; and a commerce that might have been advantageous to both parties was often only a series of acts of rapine and bloodshed. Entire tribes were almost annihilated. The vessels employed generally sailed from New South Wales; but, as much secrecy was maintained, the extent to which the traffic was carried on, as well as the mode in which it was conducted, appears for a long time to have been only known to the persons immediately engaged. A change for the better has now happily commenced. Immense injury has been inflicted on the natives by a number of escaped convicts from New South Wales, who, by the forcible seizure of boats and other means, have at different times inade their way to the South Sea Islands, and are often found associated with deserters from European or American vessels. These men, formidable from their possession of fire-arms, have often surpassed in fiendish cruelty the most savage of the tribes with which they have mingled. The murderous collisions between the natives and foreigners, and the frequency with which the men belonging to small trading vessels were cut off, led to the visits which have for many years past been made at intervals to the islands by armed governinent vessels. The object was to punish offenders and to protect our commerce, by teaching the natives to dread our power; though, in some instances, little was at first attempted beyond appearing at islands where a white man had been ill-treated, and demanding, heedless of the provocation which might have been given, the life of the culprit. Not unfrequently the villages were burnt, and the people-innocent and guilty-fired upon indiscriminately. Proceedings such as these could only pepetuate the evil by calling into action the vindictive feelings and the cunning of the savage, and inducing him to take fearful vengeance, at whatever risk, on the next white men who might fall into his power. The almost incredible number of small low coral islands and reefs, which spread like a net-work over large portions of the Pacific, renders the navigation of these parts extremely perilous, and has caused the loss of many vessels. To diminish these dangers, several surveying expeditions have been sent thither. They have been accompanied, in most instances, by men of scientific eminence, and large additions have been made to various branches of knowledge, more particularly to physical geography, |