62 
Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
Christianised people of Tonga and Fiji, where 
to-day a man’s life and property are as safe 
as if he lived under the shadow of Westminster. 
The largest island of the group is Santo— 
the Espiritu Santo of Quiros, who in a memoir 
to his Royal master, Philip III., spoke of it as 
“ a very great island : a country of the richest 
fertility and beauty. It is to my mind one of 
the finest in the world, and capable under 
colonisation of becoming one of the richest 
places in the Southern Hemisphere.” Its length 
exceeds eighty miles with an average of thirty- 
two in width, and within the great sweep of the 
mighty barrier reef that encloses it are some 
scores of clusters of low-lying islands of purely 
coral formation, densely covered by groves of 
coco-palms, and inhabited by a numerous 
population of strong athletic savages of 
Melanesian blood, whose earliest recollections 
of white men date from the old colonial days, 
when the group was visited by sandal-wooding 
ships from Sydney and vessels engaged in the 
colonial whale fishery. The present race that 
people the mainland are, no doubt, new comers 
within the past three hundred years, for on 
several parts of the islands there are traces of 
