Page:The Boy Travellers in Australasia.djvu/149

Rh claim. Samoa is at present the favorite resort of the beach-comber; perhaps you don't know what a beach-comber is.

"All through the islands of the Pacific there are men whose history is shrouded in obscurity, and who are unwilling to tell the truth about themselves, for the simple reason that the truth would be inconvenient. They are deserters from ships, runaways from home—perhaps in consequence of crimes for which the law would like to lay hands on them—outcasts from decent society or society of any kind, and not at all particular as to how they make a living. They were more numerous fifty years ago than at present, but there is still a sufficient number of them for all practical wants of the country. In the days when England sent its criminal classes to Australia, the South Sea Islands were filled with escaped convicts and ticket-of-leave men; but that source of supply no longer abounds, and thereby hangs a tale which may as well be told here as anywhere else.



"The first white settlers of the Feejee Islands was a band of twenty-seven convicts, who escaped from imprisonment in New South Wales, in 1804, on a small schooner which they had captured. They landed in Feejee with a few muskets, and in their encounters with the natives their weapons made them all-powerful. The natives regarded the muskets as something supernatural, and if the white men had conducted themselves with intelligence they could have obtained mastery over the whole population with very little trouble. The natives were ready to acknowledge them as rulers, and did in fact exalt several of them to the position of chiefs. But the fellows quarrelled with the natives and among themselves, and when Commodore Wilkes touched at the Feejees, in 1840, only two of them were alive.

"These wandering or stationary vagabonds are the men who are