408 ‘A MISSION TO VITI. 
put to death and eaten, whilst his bones were converted 
into sail-needles, and distributed amongst the people as 
a remembrance of victory.* 
However, it was not only from shipwrecked mariners 
and runaway seamen, that the early white population 
was recruited. In 1804, a number of convicts escaped 
from New South Wales, in all about twenty-six, who took 
up their abode in Fiji, who however died out rather ra- 
pidly, either in the intertribal wars, in desperate fights 
amongst themselves, or in consequence of the irregular 
life led in a tropical climate. In 1824 only two, in 1840 
only one of them, an Irishman of the name of Connor, 
survived, who occupied the same position towards the 
king of Rewa as Savage had done towards that of Bau. 
Connor does not seem to have been of such a deep, plod- 
ding nature as his comrade, or to have troubled his head 
much about the affairs of the future. Even when, after 
the loss of his royal patron, misfortune overtook him, 
he appears to have preserved all the humour for which 
his nation is proverbial, and was fully aware that the 
natives would never let him starve as long as he could 
while away an idle hour by the narration of a telling 
tale—upon which he depended towards the close of his 
days, quite as much, or perhaps even more, for a liveli- 
hood, than upon the rearing of fowls and pigs. 
On the whole, the natives seem to have treated the 
first white men that came to live among them with hos- 
pitality and kindness. This is exactly what, from the 
nature of their country, might have been predicted. A 
‘sanguinary custom may have demanded that bodies slain 
* Dillon, ‘Discovery of the Fate of De la Pérouse.’ 
