Coconuts are common to all the islands of the South Seas, and provide the chief source of income. Niuafoou, an outlying island of the Tongas, is said to grow the largest in the world.
Rubber growing is proving profitable in the Fijis, and nurseries have been established for raising the young trees. The Fijian’s inborn dislike of work has often made it necessary to import labour for the plantations.
CHAPTER XXXVI
THE FIJIS AND THE TONGAS
THE ports of Australia and New Zealand swarm with sea captains, traders, and others, who know the South Seas as you know the palm of your hand. The Canadian Pacific steamers plying between Vancouver and Sydney by way of Hawaii call at the Fijis, and the Tongas are easily reached from Auckland, New Zealand. During my stay in these waters I have had the many talks about these far-away islands that form the basis of what follows.
I have spoken of the Tongas as being easily reached from New Zealand. This seems a strange statement when I tell you they are about as far from Auckland as New York is from Cuba. Distances mean little in the South Seas, however. The Fijis are eleven hundred miles from Auckland and the Tongas are only a few hundred miles nearer, yet New Zealand once wanted them put under its government. The idea was to establish here a British Island Empire which should be two thousand miles in length, or longer than the distance from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The project fell through, and the two archipelagoes are still crown colonies, the Tongas being under the British High Commissioner for the Western Pacific, who is also Governor of the Fijis.
There are men still living who can tell stories of the days when the Fijians were the most bloodthirsty cannibals on earth. They made human sacrifices, and widows were burned on the funeral pyres of their husbands. When a chief built a home he planted a living victim under each post, and when his canoes were launched he used men as rollers upon which the craft slid down into the sea. When he died his wives were strangled to line his grave; such a thing as killing a baby was too common for notice.
The last king of the Fijis, Thakombau, was the son of Tanoa, a notorious man eater. Thakombau himself was something of a cannibal, but his father craved human flesh as a matinée maiden craves candy. He sent his war canoes about the South Sea Islands for victims, and they often brought back cargoes of dead men, women, and even babies. Upon their return everyone joined in a feast of human flesh.
One can still see on the islands the ovens in which the cooking was done. They were filled with red-hot stones, and it is related by the missionaries that victims were often roasted alive. At one time fifty bodies were cooked, and at another eighty women were strangled for a single feast. Whenever the stock of dead enemies ran low, the king used to send his men to the watering places to lie in ambush for fishermen or for women who had gone down to bathe.