FEENCH MELANESIA. 337 



remarkably fertile, is one of the most insalubrious islands in the Avhole archi- 

 pelago. The New Hebrides planters forward corn, fruits, pigs and poultry to 

 Noumea, capital of New Caledonia, and a large part of the archipelago is owned by 

 a New Caledonian company. 



In the Appendix will be found a table of the Santa Cruz and New Hebrides 

 groups, with their areas and populations. 



III. — French Melanesia : New Caledonia and the Loyalty Islands. 



New Caledonia, one of the largest oceanic islands east of Australia, has an area 

 of nearly 7,000 square miles, and about 8,000 including the adjacent islets and 

 the Loyalty group. It also enjoj^s exceptional importance from its position on 

 the great highway of navigation between Sydney and San Francisco. But, what- 

 ever be its present and future economic value, its notoriety has hitherto been mainly 

 due to the part it has played as a French convict station since 1864, and especially 

 since the fall of the Commune. So small has the earth become that no event can 

 happen without being felt as far as the Antipodes. After having been a place of 

 exile for thousands of Frenchmen involved in political and social storms, this 

 Melanesian land has become the jail of other thousands condemned by the laws of 

 their country, and subjected to experiments in a new order of penal treatment. In 

 fact, New Caledonia is less a colony, as it is conventionally called, than a region 

 affording scope for philanthropy and criminal jurisprudence to test their respec- 

 tive reforming and punitive systems. 



The political destiny of New Caledonia presents but few elements of permanent 

 stability. Annexed to the French colonial empire in 1853, owing to a shipwrecked 

 crew having been eaten by the natives, this remote oceanic land has, so to say, no 

 military or commercial basis to facilitate its retention as a French possession. It 

 is over 4,000 miles distant from Cochin China, and nearly 3,000 from Tahiti, the 

 chief French island in the East Pacific, while it is surrounded on all sides by large 

 British colonies or territories — peninsidar New Guinea in the north-west, the 

 southern section of the Solomon Archipelago in the north, Fiji in the east. New 

 Zealand in the south-east, and in the west the vast Australian continent, with its 

 thriving and expansive populations. Strictly speaking. New Caledonia is a geo- 

 graphical dependency of Queensland, and the irresistible progress of Australia 

 scarcely leaves a doubt that the natural force of gravity will sooner or later draw 

 it within the political sphere of the neighbouring continent. Already most of its 

 commercial and industrial undertakings are organised by British speculators, and 

 English terms enter largely into the " bichlamar " jargon, which serves as the 

 medium of intercourse between the whites and the natives in their mutual trading 

 and shipping relations. 



Owing to its remoteness from the highway followed by the Spanish galleons 



plying between Mexico and the Philippines, New Caledonia, notwithstanding its 



extent, was one of the last oceanic lands discovered by explorers. It was first 



sighted in 1774 near its northern extremity by Cook, who afterwards skirted the 



22—0 



