2JO 
Wild Life in Southern Seas. 
precede the subsequent ceremony performed by a 
white missionary or native teacher. 
In Tahiti, the celebration of marriage, says 
Ellis, took place at an early age, “ with females 
at twelve or thirteen, and with males at two or 
three years older (and, indeed, this is still the 
practice). Betrothment was the frequent method 
(as it is in Fiji at the present time) by which 
marriage contracts were made among the chiefs 
or higher ranks in society. The parties them¬ 
selves were not often sufficiently advanced in 
years to form any judgment of their own, yet, 
on arriving at maturity, they rarely objected to 
the engagements their friends had made.” 
Sometimes, however, previous attachments had 
been formed, which resulted in the same tragedies 
that occur from the same cause in civilised life. I 
remember hearing of one such instance which oc¬ 
curred at Niue, the “ Savage Island” of Captain 
Cook, only a few years ago. A young native girl 
had become much attached to a man who, with a 
number of other islanders, had gone away under 
a two years’ engagement to work the guano 
deposits on Howland Island, in the Equatorial 
Pacific. When they returned she learned that 
her lover was dead, and from that day her once 
