Voyage of H.M.S. Pandora | Page 5

to Tahiti for information, when it would be too late to beat to the eastward without immense loss of time.
From Aitutaki Edwards bore north-west to investigate the second clue, and in the Union Group he made his first important discovery of new land--Nukunono, inhabited by a branch of the Micronesian race, crossed with Polynesian blood. From thence he ran southward to Samoa, where he came upon traces of the massacre of La Pérouse's second in command, M. de Langle, in the shape of accoutrements cut from the uniforms of the French officers. Consistent with his usual concentration upon the object of his voyage, he does not seem to have cared to make enquiries about them.
At this stage in the voyage there occurred an accident which, from our point of view, must be regarded as the most fortunate incident of the voyage. The tender, very imperfectly victualled, parted company in a thick shower of rain. At this date Fiji, the most important group in the South Pacific, was practically unknown. Tasman had sighted its north-eastern extremity: Cook had discovered Vatoa, an outlying island in the far southward, and had heard of it from the Tongans in his second voyage when he had not time to look for it; Bligh had passed through the heart of it in his boat voyage, and had even been chased by two canoes from Round Island, Yasawa; but no European had landed or held any intercourse with the natives. It is not easy to understand how islands of such magnitude as Fiji should have remained undiscovered so long after every other important group in the Pacific had found its place in the charts of the Pacific. They were known by repute; Hamilton writes of "the savage and cannibal Feegees"; they lay but two days' sail down-wind from Tonga. Three years before the Pandora's cruise the Pacific had been thrown open to the sperm whale fishery, which has had so large a part in South Sea discovery, by the cruise of the English ship Amelia, fitted out by Enderby; and yet neither ship of war nor whaler had chanced upon them. But for a meagre passage in Edwards' journal, and a traditionary poem in the Fijian language, we should not know to whom belongs the honour of first visiting them. The native tradition sets forth that with the first visit of a European ship a devastating sickness, called the Great Lila, or "Wasting Sickness," attacked the people of one of the Eastern Islands (of the Lau group), and, spreading from island to island, swept away vast numbers of the people. There are, it may be remarked, innumerable instances in history of the contact between continental and island peoples, both of them healthy at the time of contact, producing fatal epidemics among the islanders. Even among our own Hebrides the natives are said to look for an outbreak of "Strangers' Cold" after every visit of a ship. The Fijian tradition certainly dates from a few years before the beginning of the last century.
The real discoverers of Fiji seem to have been Oliver, master's mate; Renouard, midshipman; James Dodds, quartermaster, and six seamen of the Pandora, who formed the crew of Edwards' tender; and surely no ship that ever ventured among those dangerous islands was so ill furnished for repelling attack. Edwards had sent provisions and ammunition on board of her when off Palmerston Island, but by this time they were exhausted, and a fresh supply was actually on the Pandora's deck when she parted company. Her provision for the long and dangerous voyage before her was a bag of salt, a bag of nails and ironware, a boarding netting, and several seven-barrelled pieces and blunderbusses. She had besides the latitude and longitude of the places the Pandora would touch at.
The following account of their cruise is drawn from the remarks of Edwards and Hamilton on finding the tender safe in Samarang, for I have searched the Record Office in vain for Oliver's log. If he kept any, it was not thought worth preserving. On the night the tender parted company, the 22nd June, 1791, the natives of the south-east end of Upolu made a determined attack upon the little vessel with their canoes. The seven-barrelled pieces made terrible havoc among them, but, never having seen fire-arms, and not understanding the connection between the fall of their comrades and the report, they kept up the attack with great fury. But for the boarding netting they would easily have taken the schooner, and indeed, one fellow succeeded in springing over it, and would have felled Oliver with his club had he not been shot dead at the moment of striking. On the 23rd they cruised about in search of the Pandora until the afternoon when, having drunk their last drop