Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/71

Rh him overboard. They watched him drown in the surf. They frequently flogged them, and shot them swimming in the water when they tried to escape. They were tried for murder and got penal servitude. Through the revelations made before the Royal Commission this labour traffic was brought to a close, and all the natives got presents and were returned to their homes—that is to say, they were landed somewhere, as they seldom knew anything but the native names of their village and not the new name of their island, and their fate often was to be killed and eaten by a strange tribe. This prohibition of native labour ruined the sugar planters, but some of them knew how their labourers were obtained.

The sugar plantations cannot be worked well by any but native labour, and had the Government acted properly from the first any amount of native labour could have been obtained in a fair and open way, to the good and profit of the natives themselves; but this disgraceful traffic was ignored and winked at till it became a great scandal. The wrongs they had suffered the natives naturally revenged on every white man who came near their islands. [By the Pacific Island Labourers Act, 1901, no Pacific Islanders were allowed to enter Australia after March 1904, or to remain there after 31st December 1906.]

Of late years much of British New Guinea has been explored. Sir William Macgregor ascended Mount Victoria, 13,200 feet high, the highest peak of the Owen Stanley Range; and British New Guinea is rapidly changing. At Kwato is now a fine mission-house and a stone church, and on Samarai or Dinner Island in the beautiful China Straits are also, good buildings. But there has never been any settled policy pursued, and British New Guinea will never have any