i2 9 o AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



was left undisturbed by any foreign visitors, unless, perhaps, when from time to time the 

 primitive stillness of its quiet bays was rippled by the restless keel of some enterprising 

 French or English navigator who might have put in there for water or to refit. Later 

 on, as the vague and irregular reports that reached civilization from these sources began to 

 take definite shape, far-seeing people in Europe learned to look on these distant lands as 

 offering a field for their spirit of enterprise. In this way the French missionaries came, 

 and earnest men with no personal ends to serve pioneered the advance of civilization 

 among the island tribes, as De la Salle and Marquette did along the banks of the 

 Mississippi and St. Lawrence. Nearly eighty years passed away from the date of the 

 discovery before the existence of New Caledonia was officially recognized. The incident 

 that led to this is characteristic of the story of the South Seas. The French frigate 

 . Ufinciii, under tiie command of Comte d'Harcourt, touched at one of these havens in 

 1851, as so many unrecorded visitors had before him. A boat was sent ashore to 

 reconnoitre. The crew strayed into an ambush of the natives, and were massacred to a 

 man. This tragic event directed the French official mind to the island lying unclaimed 

 by any civilized power, yet full of possibilities to the enterprising colonist who might 

 courageously elect to make his home there. The Emperor Napoleon III. lost no time 

 in taking the necessary steps towards proclaiming the Island a French possession, and 

 the tricolour was formally hoisted by Admiral Febvrier-Despointes, in the name of his 

 imperial master, and without opposition on the part of the aboriginal inhabitants, on the 

 24th of September, 1853. From this date the history of New Caledonia as a French colony 

 begins. The Pine Islands, some few miles to the south, were annexed in the same 

 way the next year ; and though the natives, beginning to realize that their freedom of 

 action was slipping away from them, shewed some opposition to the rule under which 

 their possessions had passed, French authority gradually made itself felt, and the work 

 of annexation went on as it has always done when urged by civilized new-comers 

 against a savage people. So far as the influx of European settlers was concerned, 

 progress for the first ten years continued slow and unpromising enough, but a new 

 state of things was inaugurated when, in 1864, the Emperor decreed the establishment of 

 a convict settlement at New Caledonia. Just at the time the question of the treatment 

 of criminals in France was under debate. Cayenne, which for many years had been the 

 destination of French dcportes, had earned such a terrible reputation as the grave of 

 transported offenders, and the rate of mortality from fever there was so high that 

 sentence of exile had become synonymous in the public mind with sentence of death. 

 The galleys of Toulon had long been the scene .of such vice and misery among the 

 formats there as to outrage the public sentiment of the country. It was felt that circum- 

 stances and the results of official inquiry imperatively demanded some change in the 

 administration of the penal department, and, in the difficulty that presented itself, the 

 project of deporting criminals to New Caledonia was hailed as an inspiration. The 

 suggestion was at once acted on. That most hazardous colonizing material, a convict popula- 

 tion and its officers, obtained a footing in the Island ; and, though the evil was in itself a 

 small one at first, it was the initial step towards that which has since made the existence of 

 a prison settlement in New Caledonia a menace to the whole sea-board of Eastern Australia. 

 While the Empire lasted that is, up to 18/0 the penal establishment in the Islands was 



