THE QUEENSLAND LABOR TRADE. 221 
below and then the madness broke forth and everyone on deck started 
shooting and kept it up all night long. In the morning they made an 
armed reconnaissance and found that the whole place was a shambles; 
some 50 had been killed outright and blood was flowing everywhere; 
16 were badly wounded and to slightly. The dead were thrown over- 
board and the legs and arms of the badly wounded were tied and they 
too went overboard. The doctor is described as a “‘monster in human 
shape,”’ the instigator and ringleader of the atrocities; however, he 
turned Queen’s evidence and so got off scot-free, while the master and 
one of the crew were sentenced to death, but the sentence was com- 
muted. 
In the same year a ship called the Marion Rennie was the scene of 
a terrible massacre. She had kidnapped men all over Melanesia, 
among them being Ite1 of Sa‘a, who had paddled out to the ship and 
was captured, and Amasia of Fuaga near Ataa Bay, north Malaita. 
Itei was baptized by me in 1896 and Amasia after returning from Fiji 
with a Fijian wife and a son Inia, now a teacher in the Melanesian 
Mission, settled at Qai near Cape Astrolabe and shortly afterwards 
was killed at Ngore Fou on a trumped-up charge of witchcraft. The 
natives on the Marion Rennie mutinied and killed their white captors 
and then were left drifting helplessly about at sea. The Tanna men 
on board fraternized with the Solomon Islanders and killed and ate 
the natives of the other islands. Eventually a man-of-war fell in 
with the ship and conveyed her to Fiji. 
Four Fijians who had been crew on another ship returned without 
their white masters, and told a story of how they had been attacked 
by natives of Anuda, Cherry Island, near Tikopia, and the white men 
murdered. The Rosario investigated the case and decided that there 
was no truth in it; probably the crew had themselves murdered the 
whites. 
At the island of Florida, in the Solomons, canoes were decoyed under 
the stern of the recruiting ship and then boats were lowered on top of 
them and the struggling natives captured in the water; those who 
resisted had their heads chopped off with a long knife. The ships 
that did this sort of thing were purchasing tortoise-shell and were in 
league with the head-hunters of the western Solomons. Desire for 
trade caused the canoes to put out to the ships, which fairly swarmed 
in these years, brigs, schooners, ketches, recruiting mainly for Fiji. 
Some of them had no official license to recruit, some had painted out 
their names, others had no customs clearance from their last port. 
In some cases the men in the canoes were lassoed round the neck from 
the ship and were then hauled on board. In other cases the ship was 
painted to resemble the Southern Cross and a man in a black coat went 
on shore and invited the natives to go on board and see the Bishop. 
Four or five years of this recruiting had practically depopulated some 
