Verata had given her submission with the basket of earth, and her enmity was no longer to be feared. The rival of Bau now lay to the southward. Through the system of navigable creeks in the delta of the Rewa river there was a water highway to Rewa, interrupted only by a narrow isthmus, over which the canoes had to be dragged. Commanding this isthmus stood Nakelo, whose strength no enemy had broken. Nakelo had refused to the Bau canoes the right of passing their town, and had compelled the messengers between Bau and Rewa to make the long and tedious journey by sea. The conquest of Nakelo would therefore be the first step towards the sovereignty of the fertile delta. Savage took entire command of this expedition. He ordered them to plait a litter of sinnet large enough to hold him, and dense enough to turn arrows. On one side a slit was left as an embrasure for the musket, but the rest of it was arrow-proof. Then poles were fixed to it as handles, and Savage was carried round the town of Bau to test its strength. The force went against Nakelo by water, taking the litter in the canoes. When they were near to the place and could see the embankment crowned with the war-fence, Savage chose from among his followers two of the strongest and most fearless, and ordered them to set the litter down within bow-shot of the walls, and then to run back to their comrades, for he would engage the enemy alone. No sooner was the litter set down than it was stuck as full of arrows as the spines of an echinus. But when the garrison saw that there was but one man against them and no ambush, they were bolder, and made as if they would leave their defences and rush down upon him. For this Savage was waiting. As they mounted on the fence to take the better aim with their bows he fired through the embrasure of his litter, and a chief among them fell. The rest stood, helpless with terror, until he had loaded and fired again. Then, as at Verata, a panic seized them, and one among them took a mat and held it up to ward off the lead from the wounded chief as if he would ward off arrows; but the bullets pierced this also and wounded him who held it. Then they fled. And the warriors of Bau, who had been waiting out of bow-shot, leaped over the fence into the town, clubbing all they met and shouting their death-cry. So Nakelo the invincible was burned, and many prisoners were taken to Bau, to be dashed against the temple-stone and baked in the ovens. Savage was given of the captive women as many as he would take, and he gave them to the other foreigners that were in Bau. And the chief of Nakelo fled to Rewa, and sent from thence his submission by the hand of Matainakelo, craving leave to rebuild his village. So Ra Matenikutu took the whale’s teeth, but ordered the men of Nakelo to dig a canal through the isthmus that obstructed the water-way, and henceforward to suffer canoes from Bau to pass to Rewa without hindrance, for the Queen of Rewa was a Bauan lady. And Nakelo dug a ditch into which the water could wash at high tide, and the swift current did the rest, making the wide channel through which we pass to-day.
And now the power of Bau was swelled by the fame of these victories. Broken tribes, fleeing from their enemies in Vugalei, came to Ra Matenikutu, asking leave to settle on his waste lands in return for the tribute they would pay him for protection. Thus did Namara become bati to Bau; for when they chanced to meet the chief at Kubuna where they had come for salt, and he gave them a shark and a sting-ray to eat, there was a friendly contest between two of them that were brothers, as to which of them should be clubbed by the other as an offering to the great chief in return for the fish; and their cousin hearing the dispute cried, “You speak as if a man were as precious as a banana. What is a man’s life? Let the elder be clubbed.” So the younger clubbed him and presented his body to the chief. And when he knew what they had done he was grieved, and bade them bury the body there and not cook it; and he said, “I wanted no return for the fish, but ye have shown that ye are true men. Return to your place, and bring your wives and children, and come and settle on this land, and cultivate it, and be my borderers, for I have need of true men.”
There is no need to tell of how Buretu and Kiuva were subdued, and Tokatoka was driven out, until there remained only Rewa that was not subject to Bau. Against all these Bau prevailed through Savage, who ever led her forces with his musket. Other ships called in the group for sandal-wood, and left deserters and discharged seamen, attracted by the news of the dollars stored at Nairai, to swell the foreign colony at Bau—Graham from Sydney, Mike Maccabe and Atkins discharged from the “City of Edinburgh.” These men, and three others whose names are lost, lived together in a house between Soso and the chief’s town, practising every native custom except cannibalism, and far surpassing them in one form of licence. When a ship called for a cargo of sandal-wood, they would hire themselves out to pull the boats at a wage of £4 a-month, to be paid in knives, tools, and beads, which clothed them with a brief importance among the natives of Bau when they returned; but, for the rest, the natives looked on them with scorn and fear, as men with the manners of beasts and as breakers of the tabu. There came a day when one of the tributary tribes of Bau brought a great offering of food to the chief, Savage being absent with the army. The yams and turtle were piled in the rara opposite the dwelling of the white men. Here it was apportioned by the chief’s mata; but when he called out the names of those who were to come and take a share, he did not cry the names of the white men. These then became very angry, and two of them, less prudent than the others, ran into the rara with their knives and slashed at the heap of yams, trampling the food under foot. Now the Fijians will endure any insult before this, and when the tidings reached the town every man caught up his weapon and ran towards Soso. But the white men were armed and ready, and as they came on three muskets flashed out from the dark doorways and three fell. And when they rushed on again it was the same. Many fell that day by the muskets; but the Bauans knew them to be but three, and their thirst for the blood of the white men only grew the stronger. Then one of them ran and took a firestick, and bound dry masi round it, and flung it into the thatch on the windward side, and the wind fanned it into flame. Still, though the white men knew that the house was burning, they would not leave it, for they saw the clubs brandished without, and knew that there was no escape. At last, when they could bear the heat no longer, they ran out, hoping to reach the water, and two of them leapt into the sea and dived, swimming out to sea; but three were clubbed and slain as they ran. And while the men were preparing to follow those who were escaping by swimming, the words came from the chief to spare them. Thus were Graham and Buschart spared—the first to perish more miserably at Wailea, and the other to be the means of discovering the fate of De la Pérouse.
Savage had now the government of the group in his own hands. He had raised Bau to the mastery of the surrounding tribes; he could determine the future policy of the Bau chiefs; he had food, and man-servants, and women as many as his soul could desire. Yet there was one thing the lack of which poisoned all his existence. He had neither liquor nor tobacco; and what earthly paradise could be complete to a sailor of those days unless he had the power of getting drunk? It was this want, together with the necessity of maintaining his influence by the possession of the tools and muskets so eagerly coveted by the natives, that led him to take his last journey from Bau. In May 1813 news reached Bau that a large ship was anchored on the Bua coast, ninety miles distant, to load sandal-wood. From the description of the vessel the whites knew her to be the East Indian ship Hunter, for which some of them had worked during the preceding year. It was arranged with the chiefs that in three months an expedition should be despatched to Bua to bring them back, so that they might not be left among the treacherous natives of that coast. Taking their wives with them, they reached the ship without accident, and were employed to pull the boats at the usual wage.
Maraia, Savage’s daughter, remembered his last night in Bau, though she was then but four years old. She was alone in the house when her father came in and opened the sea-chest, which he always kept locked. From this he took a string of bright objects that glittered and flashed in the light from the door. Her exclamation startled him, for he thought that he was alone. He told her that he was going away for a long time, and that he must therefore hide his property in a place of safety. Then he kissed her and went out, taking a canoe to the mainland. She was asleep when he returned, and the canoe sailed for Bua before she awoke. She never saw him again. Perhaps his treasure was a string of silver dollars that still lies buried somewhere on the land opposite Bau.
The second mate of this ship was Peter Dillon, the lively Irishman who was afterwards made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur for his services in finding the remains of De la Pérouse’s expedition. His story of the death of Savage and of his own escape has become, as it deserves, a classic in Polynesian literature. The sandal-wood had been coming in too slowly to suit the captain of the Hunter, and a bargain was at last struck between Captain Robson and the chief of Wailea, that if he would help them against their enemies they for their part would fill the ship within two months. On April 4 the crew, in three armed boats, accompanied by about 4000 of the natives, laid siege to the town of Nabakavu and took it, killing eleven of the enemy and destroying several villages. The bodies were there and then jointed, cleaned, baked in stone ovens, and eaten by the victorious natives, after which the boats returned to the ship. Four months passed away and two-thirds of the cargo were still wanting, when the chiefs sent a message to say that they could get no more sandal-wood. Nor would they come near the ship for fear of being taken as hostages. The captain now resolved to punish his old allies. Accordingly he attacked a fleet of their canoes and captured fourteen of them with a loss to the natives of one man. At this juncture two canoes arrived from Bau with a force of about 220 men under the command of Tabakaucoro and Matavutuvutua, the brothers of the Vunivalu, and Namosimalua, the chief of Viwa, afterwards one of the first Christian converts. Their ostensible object was to escort the white men and their wives back to Bau, but they did not intend to return with empty hands. The captain now determined to capture and destroy the canoes that were left to the people of Wailea, lest they might annoy him during the repairing of his tender. On September 6, 1813, the crew of the ship and about a hundred of the Bau warriors landed armed near the village, and proceeded towards it without any attempt to maintain order. They did not know that the few natives who were retiring before them, using the most taunting and insulting gestures, were “the bait for the net,” and a certain indication that they were walking into an ambush. They reached a small village and set it on fire, and as the flames shot up they heard a horrible uproar from the path they had just traversed. The Bau chiefs knew the cries for the vakacaucau or death-cry of the Wailea, signifying that they had killed an enemy. The ambush had fallen upon the straggling party in the rear. Dillon and his companions now tried to fight their way back to the boats; but after emptying their muskets into the crowd of infuriated savages, they were driven to take refuge on the crest of a little hill. Only six of them reached it: the Bau chiefs and two of the white men from Bau were clubbed in the plain below. The party on the hill were Dillon, Savage, Buschart, Luis, a Chinaman who was wrecked with Savage in the Eliza, and two sailors from the Hunter. It was not yet mid-day; their ammunition was nearly exhausted, and they were hemmed in by many hundreds of infuriated natives, all sworn not to let them escape. From the top of the little hill they could see their boats at anchor, and the ship in the offing. Beneath them in the plain they saw the enemy carrying the bodies of their comrades, slung across poles, to the shade of some trees, where they were cut up and wrapped in green banana-leaves, to be roasted with the taro. But first they were set in a sitting posture, and insulted with unnameable indignities, while musket-balls were fired into them. The natives made several rushes at the hill, and were driven back by the steady fire of the little party. But the position was so appalling that Savage proposed an escape into the mangrove at the back of the hill, and was only prevented from doing so by Dillon’s threat to shoot the first man that left the hill. Most fortunately for Dillon’s party, there were eight prisoners on board the Hunter who had been captured by Captain Robson in his attack upon the canoes a few days before. As soon as the natives became calm enough to listen to Savage, they were reminded that these men were still alive, that one of them was the brother of the priest of Wailea, and that as soon as the news of their death reached the ship the prisoners would assuredly be sacrificed. The natives had hitherto supposed these men to have met the usual fate of prisoners of war. The priest now pressed forward, asking eagerly whether they were speaking the truth, and Savage (the unblushing Dillon says that it was he himself, but he also says that he could speak the language perfectly in four months, and gives some curious specimens of his proficiency) promised that if one of their number were taken to the ship the prisoners would be released, and a large ransom be paid for the lives of himself and his companions. These terms being agreed upon, Dafny, the wounded sailor, was induced to trust himself to the protection of the priest, and was seen to embark in a canoe and reach the ship in safety. Soon after his departure a number of the chiefs came within a few paces of the crest of the hill and spoke in the most friendly way to Savage, promising him safe-conduct if he would go down among them. So convinced was he of their sincerity that he urged Dillon to let him go down, assuring him that by so doing he could obtain safe-conduct for all. Having at last won his consent, he left his musket and went down to a spot about two hundred yards from the base of the hill, where the chief Vonasa was sitting. For a time they seemed to be on friendly terms, and the natives tried their utmost to persuade Dillon to follow Savage’s example, saying, “Come down, Peter, we will not hurt you; you see we do not hurt Charlie.” At this moment the Chinaman, Savage’s former shipmate, stole away from behind Dillon to claim the protection of a chief to whom he had rendered former service in war. He had scarcely reached the foot of the hill when the natives, seeing that it was hopeless to persuade Dillon to come down, yelled their war-cry and rushed up the hill to the attack. Savage was seized suddenly by the legs and thrown down, and was then held by six men with his head in a pool of water near to which he had been standing, until he was suffocated, while at the same moment a powerful native came behind the Chinaman and smashed his skull with his club. The two bodies were immediately disembowelled, cut up, and wrapped in leaves to be baked in the ovens.
Meanwhile the chiefs furiously incited their men to capture the hill with a rush. There were four muskets between the three defenders. Wilson, being a bad shot, was kept loading while the other two fired. Buschart, an old rifleman, shot twenty-seven men with twenty-eight shots: Dillon seldom missed. In the face of these heavy losses the men would not respond to their chiefs, but kept off, shouting defiance. The ovens containing the bodies of the men killed in the morning were now opened, and the roast joints of human flesh distributed among the different chiefs, assembled from all parts of the coast, with the same order and ceremony as is used in the apportionment of feasts on public occasions. From time to time the chiefs shouted to Peter to come down before it grew too dark to cook his body properly, and boasted of the number of white men they each had killed. To his reply, that if they killed him their countrymen on board the ship would suffer, they cried that the captain might kill and eat his prisoners if he chose, but that they meant to kill and eat him (Peter) as soon as it grew dark enough to approach him without being shot. Dillon’s greatest fear was that they would be tortured. He had heard from Savage stories of the flaying and branding of prisoners, of eyelid-cutting and nail-drawing, and he resolved to use the last cartridges upon himself and his companions.
Late in the afternoon the little party were horrified to see the boat returning from the ship with all the eight hostages. They believed that the captain would take the precaution of releasing four only until they were safe on board, but now they had no longer any lien upon the mercy of their assailants. As soon as they landed, the hostages were led unarmed up the hill by the priest, who delivered an imaginary message from the captain, bidding them hand over the muskets to him and return to the ship. While he was haranguing Buschart, the idea of seizing him flashed across Dillon’s mind. It was a desperate expedient, but they were in a desperate plight. He suddenly presented his musket at the man’s head, swearing that he would shoot him dead unless he led him safely to the boat. The priest was the only man among the natives who possessed sufficient influence to keep the infuriated warriors in check. He was taken by surprise, and did not attempt to escape. Shouting to his people to sit down, he led the strange procession down the hill, through the angry multitude, now silent under protest, and on to the beach, walking slowly with a musket-muzzle at each ear, and another between his shoulders. Arrived at the beach, he said that he would rather be shot than move another step towards the boats. The whites backed into the water, still covering him with their muskets, until they reached the boats. Then, as they pushed off, the natives rushed down and sent a shower of harmless arrows and stones after them. Six of the crew and eight of the white men from Bau had perished.