34 THE CORAL LANDS OF THE PACIFIC. 



when the whole affair was over. He had urged it with much 

 persistence on some of those present, from whom he had wrung 

 but an unwilling acquiescence in its performance, and who 

 would fain have avoided any overt admission that they had 

 accepted a stranger for their master. The fact of this reluct- 

 ance justified Cacobau in having insisted on the importance of 

 the acknowledgment. None were at last absent whose pre- 

 sence was of the slightest consequence, and the significance 

 in the eyes of the native population of the public act of 

 homage rendered not only, as on my arrival, by Cacobau 

 himself on behalf of others, but by all the assembled chiefs, 

 can hardly be overrated. 



' Cacobau declined to wear at this ceremony the vast train of 

 tappa in which it was formerly his custom to appear on state 

 occasions, saying that " the time for such things was past," 

 and appeared, as did nearly all the other chiefs, in a long 

 sulu, of many folds of chief's tappa, a light-brown with 

 black spots, reaching nearly to the feet, almost the only ex- 

 ceptions to this costume being that of some of the native 

 magistrates, and some of the chiefs from the Lau Islands, who 

 wore black tappa, and the native ministers, who were for the 

 most part dressed entirely in white.' 



CHAPTER V. 



THE CANNIBAL OUTBREAK OF 1876. 



THUS with every mark of respect and submission by both 

 whites and natives was the British Government established in 

 Fiji. There was still, however, in the highlands of Viti Levu a 

 force of cannibals, ready and anxious to rush down on the un- 



