CANNIBALS AND SANDALWOOD
The Journal of William Lockerby. Edited by Sir Everard Ira Thurn and Leonard Wharton. (The Hakluyt Society. 31s. 6d.)
CIVILIZATION has seldom had missionaries less fitted to serve her than the first European visitors to the Fijian Islands. Many were time-expired convicts from Botany Bay ; others were speculative sailors from Boston and Port Jackson. Between them they succeeded in establishing a firm tradition of dishonesty, brutality, and greed.
William Lockerby was one of the less ruffianly members of the body of sandalwood traders. He died in 1853, a wealthy Liverpool shipowner whose children were somewhat embar- rassed by the fact that their father had lived naked with South Sea cannibals for a year of his adventurous youth. There has thus been an interval of nearly a century between the writing of his Fijian journal and its publication by the Hakluyt Society. When Lockerby, the Scottish mate of the Boston ship Jenny, arrived in May, 1808, at Mbua, in the island of Vanua Levu, the Fijian sandalwood trade had been in existence for about seven years. Before the ship's cargo was completed Lockerby quarrelled with his captain, who sailed for China, leaving the mate and six of the crew to shift for themselves. Fortunately for Lockerby the chief of Mbua was friendly, and offered him protection in a manner "more like a father than an uncul- tured savage." Lockerby was equal to the emergency :— " I adopted their manners and customs as much as possible ; went naked with only a belt made from the bark of a tree round my waist that hung down before and behind like a sash. The islanders also were dressed in this way. . . . My body was some- times painted black, sometimes white, according to their different rites and ceremonies. My hair was at times painted black and other times red."
It was a tradition in Lockerby's family that during his exile he married a Fijian princess ; but if it was true, he was too prudent to mention it in the journal. There is evidence that he was not insensible to the charms of the island women ; "They are," he wrote, "remarkably handsome, and have all that delicacy of form and softness of voice and manners which distinguish (the) female from the other sex in every part of the civilized world. Their virtue might be set as an example to nations who pride themselves on being far removed from them in knowledge and refinement."
Intertribal war broke out and Lockerby was captured by the
enemy at sea. The hostile fleet of one hundred and fifty canoes attacked an island village, which was stormed after a three days' siege. About four hundred of the inhabitants— old men, women and children—were unable to escape. They were massacred :—
"Some were knocked down with clubs and lanced with spears, &c. Several of the younger class attempted to run away. These their murderers pursued as they would chase a wild beast, and before they were overtaken had a number of strews in different parts of their bodies. They were then dragged by the feet and hands over the rocks to the canoes. . . . No quarters were given to any but a boy of about ten years old, who was remarkably deformed in his limbs and body ; he, they said, was a Callow (witch doctor)."
That night and the next day was spent in cooking the bodies of the prisoners and eating them.
Eventually Lockerby was rescued by two European ships, which had arrived at Mbua Bay. The rest of his stay in the island was occupied in trading. During one journey for san- dalwood to an outlying village, he saw a widow strangled beside her husband's grave. "She did not appear the least uneasy," he remarks, and she made no resistance to her executioners. Lockerby was shocked and punished the villagers for doing what they thought was right by firing on them and burning some of their houses.
A month later Lockerby left the islands for ever, and of the parting scene he says : "It would have made anyone forget at the moment that these people were cannibals."
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