Among the features in Mr. Fison's character which commanded the respect of all who knew him were his transparent honesty, his readiness to acknowledge, indeed to proclaim on the housetops, any mistake which he had made, and, moreover, his absolute disinterestedness. When he lived as a missionary in Fiji he was repeatedly offered land by the natives, and he might easily have made large profits by accepting their offers and selling the land again to settlers. But he steadily refused to enrich himself by means which he regarded as injurious to the natives and inconsistent with his sacred profession. Once, as he was walking with a chief on the shore, the chief pressed him to accept land. Mr. Fison stopped, measured six feet or perhaps a little more (for he was a tall man) on the sand, and said: "If I die in Fiji, you may give me so much land. I will not take more."[1] So he lived and died poor, but honoured.
Mr. Fison's intimate acquaintance with Fijian custom was of public service. When the Lands Commission was about to sit, he delivered a lecture at Levuka on the native system of land tenure in Fiji. The substance of it was published in The Journal of the Anthropological Institute,[2] and soon after by the British Government in a Blue Book. It was also translated into German, and published in one of the German official books at the time when the claims of German landowners in Fiji were under consideration. Many years later the Governor of Fiji, then Sir Henry M. Jackson, K.C.M.G., esteemed the treatise so highly that he caused it to be reprinted from Mr. Fison's manuscript in a fuller form at the Government Press; and in a despatch of July 31st, 1903, Mr.
- ↑ Mr. Fison's opinion and practice in this matter were shared by the great majority of his fellow-missionaries in Fiji. Only three out of forty-three bought land. See The Journal of the Anthropological Institute etc., vol. x. (1881), p. 352 (note).
- ↑ "Land Tenure in Fiji," The Journal of the Anthropological Institute etc., vol. x. (1881), pp. 332-352.
