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sions, 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. London, 1859.

THE 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

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shores,

Where none contest the fields, the woods, the

streams;

The golden age, where gold disturbs no dreams,

And must be bribed to compass earth again
By other hopes and richer fruits than yours."

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 cir

cumstances 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, though attractive as a picture painted ra- the subsequent voyage in search of these ther from fancy than reality, was not likely misguided men, the fearful wreck of the to produce lasting impressions. The dis-Pandora,' in which a number of them were covery of the Islands of the Pacific furnished no evidence of the existence of a fertile southern continent-the fondlycherished 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 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;

* Byron.

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 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, suf

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*The Task,' book i.

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fering unusual hardships, and sailing, in though behaving in the most friendly manforty-one days, over nearly four thousand ner to Vancouver in 1792-3, had seized miles, has rendered the achievement of the Fair American,' when becalmed near Captain Bligh in the Bounty's' launch one the shores of Hawaii, and thrown the capof the most remarkable voyages on record. tain into the sea. Another island of the Ten years afterwards another voyage, same group was the scene of a similar traas novel in its character and more remark- gedy. Captain Brown, of the Butterable in its results, was made to the South worth,' returning in 1795, to the harbour Sea Islands. This was the voyage of the of Honolulu, on the west side of Oahu, ship Duff,' with thirty English mission- from a warlike expedition, in which he had aries, to convert the natives of Tahiti and assisted the king of the island, fired a sathe other islands to Christianity: one of lute in honour of the victory which had the manifestations of the pious zeal of the been achieved, when the wadding from one nineteenth century, fraught with a promise of his guns entered the cabin-window of very different from that of the crusades of an American sloop and killed her captain. the middle ages. The enterprise, though The English burial service was read at his treated at the time with ridicule by some, interment on the adjacent shore. This the proved the most important of any which inhabitants believed to be a solemn sorcery, had been undertaken in this quarter, for and rifled his grave the same night for the the natives owe to it the chief moral and sake of the winding-sheet in which the social advantages which distinguish their body had been wrapped. Captain Brown present from their original state. The and Captain Gardner of the Prince Le pioneers of religion and civilization have Boo,' were afterwards murdered here by indeed been benefactors to both natives and the natives, who seized their vessels, which foreigners; they have prevented subse- were retaken by their respective crews. quent intercourse from being little else Such were some of the occurrences which than a series of unjustifiable aggressions by marked the first intercourse between these one party, and murderous retaliations by Sandwich Islanders and the English and the other; and while their teaching and Americans; and they serve to show rather example have been a blessing to the bar- vividly the contrast between the contact of barous tribes among which they have civilization and barbarism little more than dwelt, their influence has ensured safety sixty years ago with the polka réunions of and assistance to the Europeans engaged the descendants of these races in the same in the pursuits of science or of commerce. place at the present day.'*

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 inhabitants of the Sandwich Islands,

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The earliest commercial advantages 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, which frequently ended in the destruction of the vessels engaged in the trade, as well as in the murder of their crews. The sandal wood 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

* Hunt's 'Merchant's Magazine,' Feb. 1858.

compelled to collect the sandal wood, while the promised reward was sometimes with held. Another plan was 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 tra ders 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 made their way to the South Sea Islands, and are often found as sociated 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 government 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 perpetuate 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 expeditious 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, which is every year becoming more attractive and important. For the investigation of the different kinds of coral formations this region presents a field of unequalled extent, while for examining the different phenomena of volcanic action it affords opportunities scarcely inferior to those which are presented by Iceland or Sicily. The whole of the Polynesian Islands, with but few exceptions, are either of coralline or volcanic origin, and the agencies by which these formations have been produced, though in themselves most dissimilar, appear from a remote period to have been in contemporaneous action and often immediate contact.

The mountainous islands of the Pacific are nearly all volcanic, and most of them apparently of modern origin. In a few of the islands of the western portion of the southern hemisphere, as among the New Hebrides and the Friendly Islands, earthquakes are common, and there are several active volcanoes; but the most extensive volcanic action is in the North Pacific at the Sandwich Islands. These islands, eight in number, appear to have been formed at different periods. Oahu would seem to be the most ancient; while in Hawaii, the largest of the cluster, the igneous process in which they originate is still in powerful operation, enlarging the dimensions and increasing the elevation of the island. The length and breadth of the entire group cover a surface of more than 6,000 square miles, while the height of some of them reaches the line of perpetual congelation. Yet this vast mass, not only from the highest summit to the level of the sea, but as far below this as any excavations have been made, is constructed of different kinds of lava in various stages of decomposition. There are no signs here of stratified rocks upheaved into their present position by subterranean forces, but the whole consists of fused matter poured out from the vast furnaces around which it has accumulated in its present lofty and stupendous forms. The only exception to this occurs where erupted volcanic matter rests on a fringing coral reef.

The vestiges of volcanic action presented by the island of Maui would, in

sea.

But the most exten

any other part of the world, render it an | territories they inhabit to have been subobject of peculiar attraction. Its fertile, ject to volcanic action throughout all the well-watered, and cultivated base, extends immediate ages between the present time over about 620 square miles, while the and that primeval period, for they derim of its extinct crater on Haleak'ala, its scribe the fires as having burned mai ke highest mountain, was estimated by Com- po mai,' from the state of night until now. modore Wilkes to be 10,200 feet above There is therefore reason to conclude the sea. But, imposing as such an object that volcanoes have existed from a period would elsewhere be, Maui is insignificant anterior to the arrival of the first inhabitcompared with Hawaii, from which it is ants. The earliest account of Kirauea separated only by a narrow strait. This was given, in his 'Polynesian Researches,' latter island covers a space of 4000 square by Mr. Ellis,* who visited it in company miles. Commodore Wilkes gives the with some American missionaries in 1823. altitude of Mouna Kea (or white moun- In 1843 two new craters opened on the tain) as 13,953 feet, and Mouna Roa top of Mouna Roa, and sent forth for the (long mountain) as 13,760 feet above the space of six or eight weeks torrents of 'I can never hope again,' he says, burning lava which formed three different speaking of the latter, to witness such a rivers, five or six miles in breadth, and sublime scene. It was not without some flowed down the sides of the mountain for nervous excitement that I placed my in- twenty or thirty miles towards the sea. strument on the highest point of Mouna These eruptions were accompanied by Roa, within a few feet of its crater. The thunder and lightning, and other atmosvery idea of standing on the summit of pheric convulsions. one of the highest peaks in this vast ocean, in close proximity to a precipice of profound depth, would have been exciting even to a strong man, but the sensation was overpowering to one exhausted by breathing the rarified air, and by toiling over the lava which this huge caldron must have vomited forth in quantities sufficient to form a dome sixty miles in diameter, and nearly three miles in height.'* Kirauea, one of the largest craters in the world, is on the eastern side of this island, about 4000 feet above the sea, and midway between the two highest mountain summits. It is situated in a plain many miles in extent, and sunk 300 feet below walls of volcanic rock, the probable foundations of some fused mountain. The crater is an oval, nine miles in circumference, and from 1000 to 1200 feet deep, the bottom covered with liquid rock, and surrounded by a number of small cone-shaped craters, pouring forth smoke, flame, or lava. Ledges of lava round the inside walls of the crater indicate the height to which the fiery liquid rises in this immense caldron, whence it flows, apparently through a subterranean channel, to the lower levels on the coast, and into the sea, and thus continually extends the circumference of the land.

The ancient cosmogony of the Sandwich Islanders, like that of the New Zealanders and other Polynesians, taught them to regard all things as proceeding from a state of night, and they believe the

sive and appalling eruption which has taken place within the memory of the oldest inhabitants occurred in 1855, when a crater near the summit of Mouna Roa continued for ten months to pour forth burning lava which formed a stream seventy miles in length, from one to five miles wide, and from ten feet to several hundred feet in depth. At times the resistless torrent rolled on to a line of perpendicular rocks that rose along the shore, and for days continued to fall in fiery cascades over the steep precipices into the sea, displacing the water of the ocean for some miles, and destroying numbers of fish, which floated dead on the surface. So inexhaustible is the volcanic force, that the latest accounts bring intelligence of a new eruption in the lava-piled island of Hawaii. Many of the phenomena are still imperfectly understood; and when subjected to enlightened investigation, these regions may yield important additions to the knowledge we possess of the changes effected by this igneous agency in the surface of our globe.

Although the volcanic islands, either when covered with a rich soil of decomposed lava and clothed with luxuriant vegetation, or when furrowed with rugged

*This enlightened and accomplished missionary has since continued his labours for a quarter of a century, and has lately given to the world an aecount of Madagascar, which is not inferior to his admirable Polynesian Researches. An Englishman may well feel proud when such a representative of his race-so mild, so zealous, so upright, and so well informed-is presented to the observa

* United States Exploring Expedition, vol. iv. tion of heathens.

P. 160.

Journal of Geological Society, 1856.

streams from extinct or still burning cra- | that the corals are never in one uniform ters, are the most conspicuous objects in state throughout so vast a region, but that the Pacific, they are small in comparison some parts indicate a state of growth, while with the coralline formations which extend in other parts the signs of decrease are throughout a large portion of its waters. apparent. Much information respecting these truly Several theories of coral formations have wonderful structures may be found in the been propounded at different times by scivoyages of Flinders, Kotzebue, Beechey, entific men. The last, and most generally and FitzRoy. No attempt has been made received, is that of the distinguished natuto calculate the number of reefs and is- ralist Mr. Darwin,* who supposes these lands spread like stars in the firmament stupendous piles to have been reared, acover this ocean. In the eastern part of the cording to one uniform law, by minute maPacific they rise, often in close proximity rine animalcula, which separate the calcato each other, throughout a space of 1000 reous particles from the sea, and therewith miles in length and 600 miles in breadth. build up these wonderful structures. He In the north-western portions they are more conceives that at the commencement of extended, if not equally numerous. They their formation the corals are attached to are generally curved or circular, and often the land like a fringe at or near the surface present singularly beautiful ring-like is of the sea; that in those instances where lands, rising like a natural breakwater from the reef is at a distance from the land, the the ocean depths to a few feet, perhaps, land has subsided; and that, as the land above the level of the sea. They are from has gradually sunk, the corals have built twenty or thirty yards to a mile in width, up the reef to the surface. Wherever a with a surface composed of sparkling white portion of land remaining above the water coral or sand, and surmounted along the is encircled by a reef at a distance from higher parts by the dark foliage of the the land, he believes that the barrier reef graceful cocoa palm, and other tropical rests upon the line of the shore at which verdure, which shade the simple dwellings the corals commenced their work; that of the natives. Many of these rings en- the outer reefs rise perpendicularly; and close a placid lake of varied depth, occa- that the distance of the barrier reefs from sionally diversified by knolls of coral rock the present junction of the sea with the or gem-like miniature islands. The differ- land, marks the inclination of the land inent size of these structures is as remarkable wards or towards the centre, from the line as their number. Some of the smallest in- at which the corals began their operations. clude but a few yards; others encircle a In reference to the circular reefs without space fifty miles in length and thirty wide, any land in the centre, this theory assumes enclosing lagoons twenty fathoms deep; that the whole of the land has sunk bewhile every intermediate size may be found. neath the water which now fills the entire The largest continuous reefs are in the space within the coral walls. In process western Pacific, where, according to Ers- of time breaches occur in these ramparts kine, a reef surrounds, with the exception through which the ocean currents force of short distances, the whole Coast of New their way, and breaking down other parts Caledonia, which is 200 miles long and 25 of the reef, carry off the fragments until miles broad. This reef, which rises from the whole is dispersed. Mr. Darwin's retwo to twenty miles from the shore, pre-putation as a profound and sagacious stusents numerous openings for shipping. It encloses the Isle of Pines to the south-east, and stretches for 150 miles to the northwest, thus presenting two parallel lines united at each end, and extending nearly 400 miles. According to Flinders, the great barrier reef which fronts the north-east of Australia, and is from twenty to fifty miles from the coast, stretches over a distance of nearly 1000 miles. Mr. Williams concurs in the opinion of Commodore Wilkes, that 'the coral islands are undergoing dissolution.' This may be the case among the reefs in the neighbourhood of the Fijis, from which Mr. Williams derives his experience, but it is not apparent in many other parts of the Pacific. The probability is

dent of nature is so well established, that his conclusions have been received with that general confidence to which they are justly entitled; and, though his theory may not apply to all the phenomena, it is much more satisfactory than any other, and is the nearest approach yet made to the elucidation of this branch of science.

One of the difficulties which his explanation fails to remove arises from the large spaces of comparatively deep water which occasionally exist between the outer or barrier reef and the shore, in parts where there are no rivers or other apparent cause to interrupt the operations of the corals.

* On the Distribution of Coral Reefs.

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