1 3 oo AUSTRALASIA ILLUSTRATED. 



crowd of swimming fishermen around quickly quiet them by a crunch between their jaws. 



The death of a New Caledonian chief is celebrated with much ceremony. His wives 

 generally strangle themselves. The body is wrapped in mats and placed in a sitting 

 attitude, some male attendants, from six to twenty-four in number, being appointed 

 watchers. Their hair is cut short, and they are smeared with charcoal and oil, becoming 

 strictly taboo to the sight of the women. The people retire early to their huts, while 

 the deceased is borne round by the watchers to the chief's favourite haunts in life. 

 When the body is sufficiently decayed, it is taken into the bush and decapitated by the 

 chief mourner. During their vigil with the departed warrior, the watchers have to go 

 through much tedious ceremonial. All food is thrown into their mouths by another, 

 and no one is allowed to partake with his own hands. Every action is accompanied by 

 the triple repetition of a certain cabalistic word. During this period, they are occupied 

 in making the gigantic masks of carved wood, painted black, which is placed over the 

 head and covered with sable feathers and hair reaching to the knees. When the body 

 has been deposited in the bush and the tribe assembled, the women painted white and 

 wailing lugubriously, the watchers disguised in their masks spring out of the scrub bran- 

 dishing spears and fire-sticks. The chief mourner advances from the bush with the dead 

 man's head held aloft, and shows it to the assembled tribe. The principal men address 

 short speeches of ceremony to it and to the mourners, and the head is then interred in 

 some almost inaccessible cave which forms the tribal cemetery. Food is left for the 

 dead in remote places, and the religion is a worship of ancestors who are supposed to 

 act the part of tutelary deities. 



Settlement in New Caledonia may be said to date from the coming of Mr. Henry 

 and Captain Paddon, who were respectively English and Australian. The town of Noumea, 

 the capital of the colony, owes its existence to Mr. John Higginson, originally of Adelaide", 

 whose name is representative of the business energy and enterprise of the Islands. He 

 first settled here in 1863, and his forethought planned the town and laid it out, as his 

 activity was mainly instrumental in the erection of the principal official and private build- 

 ings and the alignment of the roads that open up the interior of the Island. The design 

 of the town is regular enough, but. the building up of Noumea has not been in harmony 

 with the character of the plans. Most of the houses and minor places of business appear 

 to have been carelessly built of wood, roofed with the corrugated iron that is so ill-suited 

 to the requirements of these tropical countries. The capital is enabled to present a 

 better appearance than private effort might have given it, from the fact that it contains 

 the principal Government buildings, the residences of the Governor and officials, the 

 military barracks and the head penal establishments. Approached from the sea, the town 

 is seen to lie in the hollow of a plain between two groups of hills, its rectangular 

 sections and the straight lines of its streets presenting to the distant eye the regularity 

 of a geometrical figure. The population of the town of Noumea itself, as may be 

 expected, is made up of a strange agglomeration of representatives of the people of 

 many nations. The French are of course in the majority, but the total is swelled by 

 traders and planters from Australia, English, Italian and German settlers, and visitors 

 from Bourbon and the Mauritius, with a residuum made up of Malays and Asiatics, and 

 natives from the New Hebrides and other neighbouring islands. The whole colony was, 



