At mission schools natives are trained in wood-working and boat-building, but the islanders as a rule are not industrious and work only enough to supply their simple needs.
It was just a year after the British took over the islands that the measles epidemic decimated the population, so that, what with the decreased number of the Fijians and the natives’ distaste for work, the plantation owners had to import labourers. Workers were brought in from India, the Solomon Islands, the Gilberts, and the New Hebrides.
The government regulated the employment of imported labour. It cost about seventy-five dollars to bring in a native from the New Hebrides, and forty dollars to get one from the Gilberts, and the employer had to agree to return the labourers at his own expense at the close of their engagement. It cost more to import the East Indians, but they were usually hired for terms of five years, on the understanding that they should have food free for six months after their arrival, and free lodgings and medical care for the whole term. Their wages were paid weekly, the men receiving twenty-five cents a day and the women eighteen cents.
More and more coolies were imported from India, while the numbers brought from other islands fell off. At the close of their terms of service many of the East Indians took up little plantations of their own, where they grew rice, sugar, coconuts, and bananas. There are now upward of sixty thousand of them in the islands, compared with about ninety thousand Fijians, five thousand Europeans, and a sprinkling of half-castes, Polynesians, and Chinese. As in other British colonies to which they have been admitted, the East Indians have bred a serious race problem, and their further importation has been stopped. They declare themselves as good as the whites and demand equal rights with them. A few years ago half the Indian population went on a strike, which reached such a climax of violence that it had to be put down with military force.
Eighty per cent. of the trade of the Fijis is with Australia and New Zealand, and the total amounts to about twenty-two million dollars a year. Some of the imports come from the United States. We supply them with timber, oil, hardware, and cheap clocks and watches. The Fijian will use none but an American axe, which he likes because it is light, sharp, and well tempered. He likes also American-made knives or machetes, with blades about fifteen inches long, with which he clears his fields and gathers his bananas and coconuts. The people buy about one and a half million dollars’ worth of cottons yearly and there is a demand for canned meats and flour.
As High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, the British governor of the Fijis looks after the Tongas, which lie about two hundred miles southeast of the nearest of the Fijis. They still have a native ruler, Salote, the Queen of the Tongans, who handles native matters through her high chiefs. The government is, in fact, a sort of hereditary monarchy under the British crown.
The Tongas have a total area about one tenth that of Connecticut. The largest of them is only twenty miles long, and many are little more than atolls and coral rocks rising out of the sea. Some of them are volcanic, but their soil is well suited to growing coconuts and sugar. The entire population would hardly make a city of twenty-five thousand inhabitants, and there is only one town, Nukualofa, the capital. It has a race track and cricket grounds, and claims some of the finest motor roads south of the Equator.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE SAMOAS