FIJI. 463 



raw. He also amused himself by setting up a "tree of forbidden fruit," on the 

 branches of which were hung up the more choice pieces of human flesh reserved 

 for the royal table. Yet when the missionaries and English residents called on 

 the chiefs to put an end to cannibalism, the " conservative party," sticklers for the 

 old usages, energetically defended the national " institutions," maintaining that it 

 was due to society to uphold the system of terror over the lower classes. But the 

 " radicals " triumphed, and even before the British occupation human sacrifices 

 had everywhere ceased, as had also the atrocious custom of launching war canoes 

 over the bodies of prostrate captives. 



A great inducement to accept the sovereignty of England was the dread of the 

 Tonga immigrants, who might overrun the archipelago, just as Tonga itself had 

 formerly been reduced by the Samoan ancestors of the Tongans. At first these 

 islanders dared not venture to land without special permission, but, thanks to the 

 ever-increasing commercial relations, they gradually obtained a footing, especially 

 in the eastern islands lying nearest to Tonga, and at last became numerous enough 

 to form independent communities in Lakemba and elsewhere. One of their chiefs 

 converted to Christianity took the missionaries as allies in extending his conquests, 

 and at every treaty of peace required the vanquished Fijians to burn their temples 

 and join the lotu of oil, that is to say, the Wesleyan Church, whose ministers 

 were paid in cocoanut oil. In 1859, this victorious chief, who claimed to be 

 merely a lieutenant of the king of Tonga, found himself at the head of three 

 thousand victorious troops ; all the eastern islands together with Yanua-Levu had 

 alread}' been reduced, and he was preparing to invade Yiti-Levu when the British 

 consul Pritchard interfered and compelled the Tonga intruders to desist from all 

 further military or political intervention in the affairs of the archipelago. 



The terror of the Tonga invasion was followed by the danger of extermination 

 by American or Australian whites. Some United States seafarers, having suffered 

 some real or fancied wrong at the hands of King Thakumbau, demanded enormous 

 damages, which he would have been unable to pay had not a company of Austra- 

 lian speculators advanced the money in return for 200,000 acres of arable land in 

 the most fertile parts of the archipelago. Henceforth the white planters were 

 masters, and those natives who refused to work on the plantations with the coolies 

 from the New Hebrides, Samoa and India, were fain to withdraw to the remote 

 valleys of the interior. 



Even the annexation was at first followed by disaster, over thirty thousand 

 natives having perished in a few weeks from a frightful outbreak of small-pox, 

 accidentally introduced from Australia in 1875. The population still continues 

 to decrease, and although the number of inhabitants at the arrival of the whites 

 is uncertain, the decay of the race is placed beyond doubt by the ruined villages, 

 the deserted islands, and more recently by the more or less accurate returns of the 

 regular census. Of late years the whites themselves have become less numerous, 

 owing to the fluctuations of trade. An indication of the unhappy social conditions 

 now prevalent is afforded by the fact that the women are in a minority both 

 amongst the natives and the strangers, either arriving voluntarily or else intro- 



