323 



CHAPTER XXII. 



NEW CALEDONIA.— LOYALTY ISLANDS. 



(September 28 to October 8.) 



Loyalty Islands — Aspect of New Caledonia — Ilavanuab Passage — Prasline 

 Bay — Canoes — At Anchor in Port-de-France — ^'isit from the Governor — 

 Visit Returned — Madame Guillain — M. Guillain — Government House and 

 Gardens — The Governor and the Protestant Missionaries— The Capital of the 

 Colon}' — The Model Farm of Yahove — A New Kind of I'lough — Coffee 

 Trees — The Aborigines — Religion — Manners and Customs — Infamous Usage 

 of Natives by Whites — Captain Cook's Favourable Notice of them — Basset, 

 Chief of Yengen— His House in the Interior — Appearance of the Country — 

 Trimly-kept Houses— I'oles Surmounted by Skulls — Remarkable Irriga- 

 tion — Remains of Ancient Aqueducts — Return to Sydney. 



On September 26, the day of the shelling of Sifu, the 

 'Cura^oa' weighed at eiglit p.m., and stood away for New 

 Caledonia. Favouied by a steady breeze from ESE., we 

 made an excellent passage, and on the morning of the 27tli, 

 reached Mare, one of the Loyalty Islands, a low level land 

 apparently neither wooded nor fertile. After leaving Mare, 

 where we received a supply of cabbages from the natives, 

 who brouglit them off from the island, which we did not 

 get near enough to land, we stood away for Sifu,^ Avhich 



' It is painfully illustrative of the brutality of manners disgracing onr 

 vaunted superiority over heatlieuism, that when H.M.S. ' Havannali ' 

 anchored ofi' Sifu, the natives, both men and women, wlio swam to the 

 sbip in a swarm, eagerly saluted the crew with the foulest English 

 oaths, of the purport of which thry were manifestly ignorant, and for 



