While the great island groups of Tahiti, Hawaii, Samoa, New Zealand, Tonga, and the Solomons had been known to Europe for many years—some of them for nearly two centuries—the Fijians lived their lives unconscious that there was another world beyond the reefs that encircled their islands. They planted food sufficient for their needs, they obeyed the rigid code of laws with which custom had bound them, they intermarried with their friends and fought their enemies, but without the carnage that followed the introduction of fire-arms. It is still unknown who was the first European to enter the group.[84]
For the evils innocently produced by the first visitors we must turn to native traditions, those irresponsible records that can lay claim to historical value in respect of their irresponsibility, recording what the historian would have forgotten, and omitting nearly everything to which written histories attach value.
The Rev John Hunt,[85] writing in 1843, says:—
"The first white people with whom the Fijians had any intercourse were four or five shipwrecked mariners, one or two of whom were dressed something like ministers of religion: probably the master and a passenger. The vessel was wrecked on a reef near Oneata called Mbukatatanoa, and the party referred to were either killed at Oneata or Lakemba, and, I fear, eaten also. Shortly after their death a dreadful distemper scourged the natives. It appears, from the description given of it, to have been a very acute dysentery, or a form of cholera. Its progress through the group was fearfully rapid and destructive; in many places it was with the greatest difficulty that persons could be found to bury the dead. Those who were seized died in the most excruciating agonies."
The native version, given nearly fifty years later, one was that morning after a great gale from the eastward the men of Oneata, looking towards the islet Loa on the great reef Mbukatatanoa, saw red streamers waving in the wind; strange beings, too, moved about among them. It chanced that some men of the Levuka tribe in Lakemba, off-shoots from distant Mbau, holding special privileges as ambassadors, who linked the eastern and the western islands, were visitors in Oneata. Two of these, bolder than the natives of the place, launched a light canoe and paddled near to Loa. The report they brought back ran, "Though they resemble men, yet must they be spirits, for their ears are bound about with scarlet and they chew burning sticks." After anxious discussion the double canoe Tai-walata was launched, and when they drew near Loa the spirits beckoned to them, and persuaded them to draw near and carry them to the main island. One of these they proved to be mortal as themselves for he was buried on Loa, being dead of violence, exposure, or disease. Here the tradition becomes confused. Muskets and ammunition were taken from the wrecked ship, but the men of Oneata knew nothing of their uses, else perhaps the native history of Fiji had been different. The powder they kept to be used as a pigment for their faces, and the ramrods to be ornaments for the hair. One warrior, relates the tradition, smeared the wet pigment over hair and all, and when it would not dry, but lay cold and heavy on the scalp, he stooped his head to the fire to dry the matted locks. There was a sudden flash, very bright and hot, and a tongue of flame leaped from the head and licked the wall, and the warrior sprang into the square with a head more naked than when he was born.
A TERRIBLE EPIDEMIC
The red-capped sailors had scarce landed when a pestilence broke out among the people. Here is a literal translation of the poem that describes it:—
The great sickness sits aloft,
Their voices sound hoarsely,
They fall and lie helpless and pitiable,
Our god Ndengei is put to shame,
Our own sicknesses have been thrust aside,
The strangling-cord is a noble thing,[86]
They fall prone; they fall with the sap still in them.