he could get, and on to the Canterbury Plains, walking his 800 or 1000 miles from village to village, with a few native attendants to carry his blankets and potatoes!
It is perhaps hardly necessary to add that by the time the two Bishops had finished their cruise, one of them had had enough of it, and gave up “missionary cruising” as a bad job. Since that time Bishop Patteson has taken the “oversight” of all these islands to the northward of New Zealand, and is succeeding admirably.
On our return to the ship off Kororarika, we found everything ready for a start, but before shifting the scene to the New Hebrides, we must say a word or two about New Zealand in general, every port of which we have visited, except Otago. To our readers one and all we say, “If you hear anything said against any of the various settlements in this most magnificent country, don’t believe a word of it.” There is no climate in the world like it; no colony in which Englishmen thrive so well. To say nothing of the minerals, gold fields, coalfields, &c., the Canterbury settlement at no very distant period will be the granary of Australasia, and its capital, Christ Church, will be the London of the Southern Hemisphere. The present unhappy war, confined entirely to the, western side of the North Island, will soon be brought to a close, and would never have commenced had we ourselves been wise.
A few days’ sail with a fair wind soon enabled us to cast anchor off Aneiteum, the southernmost of the New Hebrides. Here we found a sandal-wood establishment conducted by a Captain Padden—the same adventurer who was recently obliged to escape from New Caledonia in an open boat, where he seems to have taken part in an attempt to excite the natives against the French. His establishment at Aneiteum gave employment to a great number of the cannibal population of the island, both male and female, and had evidently had considerable effect in semi-civilising the natives, who, but for his influence, would in all probability have given the missionaries (sent out by the London Missionary Society) the same warm reception that the people of other islands in the same group have hitherto done, who invariably cook and eat them!
There were at that time two missionaries on the island, one on the side where the anchorage is, the other on the opposite side. Mr. Alexander, who was the first to attempt the conversion of the natives, and who had settled down before the arrival of Captain Padden, was not so fortunate as Mr. Geddes, who came to assist him. One of the savages, who was generally supposed to have been mad, entered his house and made a most murderous attack upon Mrs. Alexander, whom he hacked and cut with a hatchet and left for dead. He was secured by his own friends, who tried him by their own laws, and executed him after their own fashion. They killed him, cut him in pieces, and distributed the portions amongst the various families in the neighbourhood, who testified their abhorrence of their comrade’s villany by making a good dinner literally at his expense!
The first day we landed amongst these simple-minded savages, the doctor, who happened to be very stout and in excellent condition, excited by far the greatest attention. Whilst we were sitting on a log waiting for a boat to take us off to the ship, men and women crowded round him, feeling his arms and legs, smacking their lips as they did so, no doubt thinking what a splendid broil they would make!
The inhabitants of all the islands touched upon in this paper—viz., the New Hebrides, Loyalty Islands, Queen Charlotte Islands, and the Solomon Islands—are not Malays, like the people of Eastern Polynesia, but belong to the Papuan (or Negro) race; in colour, however, several shades lighter than the African: but they are all cannibals.
We left Aneiteum on the 24th August, and next day were off Tana—Port Resolution and its immediate neighbourhood being the scene of our adventures in that island. Leaving the ship to “stand off and on” outside, we landed in our cutter, cooked a few sweet potatoes in the hot sulphur springs, and after our frugal repast started for the volcano, which we found labouring away just as actively as it did in Captain Cook’s time. A walk of four miles—along a beautiful pathway, flanked on either side by gigantic trees, amongst them the banyan and wild nutmeg-tree, as well as by the hibiscus and other flowering shrubs of various kinds—brought us to the foot of the volcano. There were eight or ten craters, extending over an area of three miles in diameter, which was covered thick with scoria and ashes. Four or five of these craters were extinct; one or two were smouldering and smoking, but two were active enough with a vengeance. Every five minutes there would be a tremendous explosion, and when the smoke had cleared away, we could see high up in the air immense masses of scoria, looking like great blocks of worm-eaten timber, which were red hot when they fell—hot enough almost to melt the few “coppers” upon which we experimented. All the time we were standing on the very edge of the most active crater, and had to dodge the falling masses as best we could. The effect was grand in the extreme, and the