The houses in occupation by the whites at Levuka were constructed in the rather crude Fijian fashion, with bamboo walls and thatched roofs. The whites had contributed two general stores, four hotels, and a dozen or so private residences to the township. There was little money in circulation, drafts on Australian business houses forming the major portion of currency. There were no civil servants, no costly transport facilities, no national debt, and consequently no taxation. Always off shore would be several schooners at anchor, while their crews would be found in the hotels, along with settlers from the Ra Coast and from neighbouring islands.
Life was red-raw and red-toothed. Fights were frequent among the whites, and many suffered from delirium tremens. A complex society was quite unknown other than by dividing the population of Levuka into three classes: the natives, the seafarers, and the more sober-minded and respectable of the settlers. A narrow, curved, white beach lapped by the gentle waves of a reef-protected shore, while back from the beach the few houses, the stores and the hotels were hemmed to the west by hills covered with dark-green profuse vegetation - this was Levuka as seen through the eyes of Francis Cobbold.
He worked at his books in the leisurely fashion of the time and place. He came to know well the people living there - the people who came there to trade and to drink, and the seamen who came chiefly to drink and to pick up any trade going, whether in goods or in black ivory. If a man became obstreperous in the Albion Hotel, there was the immensely stout Mr Unwin - semi-clothed in duck and perpetually perspiring - ever ready to invite the quarrelsome one outside to take a fall or two in a wrestling match. There was Mr Unwin's charming daughter to supervise the native domestic staff, and there was Mr Nieman who had married Miss Unwin and who was content to be always overshadowed by his enormous father-in-law.
The wildest, hardest-drinking, blasphemous, good-for- nothing and yet good-natured ruffians ever beheld in the South Sea staggered and lurched from pub to pub; men afraid of nothing, capable of anything, reliant and resourceful; Irishmen, Englishmen, Scotchmen and Australians, Bluenoses and Yankees and Dutchmen and Germans; ex-naval men, or whalers, ex- clerks and ex- everything else. The impact of an iron fist against a stubby chin was more often heard than a 'beg pardon!'
Francis Cobbold had stepped on to this colourful stage in his sixteenth year, and after him came a young man just a few years his senior in the person of J G Pilbrow. Pilbrow had recently left New Zealand where he had been a sheep shepherd for a while - an employment appearing at odds with one who certainly was a cut above minding sheep. A stickler for the dress proprieties of the decade, he demanded equal fastidiousness from others, taking pride in confessing that never once had he started a day's shepherding without wearing a clean starched collar.
About this time, Cobbold met another lad, the son of the captain of a topsail schooner, the Margaret Chessel. Young Wetherall was a year or so older than Francis Cobbold, and these three youths, living in a community of matured, hard bitten men, naturally drifted together. Pilbrow, by virtue of seniority, became their leader.
While Francis Cobbold had come to the Fiji Islands with the main objective of growing cotton, he was less impetuous than Pilbrow to make an immediate start. Pilbrow appears to have been one of those men ever impatient of delay, over- impulsive, none too cautious and in possession of a great faith in himself. It was his opinion that land in the Fiji Archipelago was much too dear, and he offered the proposal that the three young men should sail to the New Hebrides without loss of time, and there select land and proceed to get rich with remarkable facility.
Having become used to working in the presence of men much older than himself, Cobbold at once agreed with Pilbrow's suggestion, while young Wetherall also showed no hesitation about going. In port was a Captain Pollard who hailed from Wivenhoe, Essex, where Cobbold had spent many a golden day with the fishermen. Knowing that the Captain was about to sail for the New Hebrides in his 60-ton schooner, they arranged for their passages with him.
Elated by the prospect of action, the three youths pooled their resources and talked to Mr Doig who owned one of the two stores. They found Doig to be a typical Australian backcountry storekeeper, shrewd in business and an able judge of character. Middle-aged, and with a fair beard, Doig provided them with the necessary goods to the amount of their capital, and then was good enough to grant them credit for a further amount. It does seem that in those days businessmen were good gamblers, always willing to accept a chance even when a chance was a grave risk.
So three very young men set sail on the Colleen Bawn, their purpose being to land among savages on some islands of the New Hebrides group, and create a plantation there. Looking back from the assured safety and the humdrum conditions of life today, this venture appears to be one of the most sublime as well as the most harebrained ever undertaken by courageous youth.
2.
Levuka is situated on the east side of the small island of Ovalau, which lies some miles east of Viti Levu - the largest of the Fiji islands. From this port, protected by the usual reefs of coral from the wild sea sometimes raised by the trade winds, the Colleen Bawn sailed south round the main island before steering a course south of west. Holding to this course for some ten days she finally dropped anchor in Port Resolution in the island of Tanna, one of the southernmost of the islands in the New Hebrides.
Port Resolution is dominated by an active volcano, and after less than twenty-four hours the deck of the Colleen Bawn was covered with an inch of grey dust. Here in 1870, Francis Cobbold saw part of a ringbolt embedded in a rock, which had been used by Captain Cook's ship Resolution when he put into the place to re-caulk her sides in 1774.
The appearance and behaviour of the natives did not encourage settlement of Tanna. They had an evil reputation, which still clung to them for many years after Cobbold's visit. They murdered, one after another, the white men who settled among them. The most determined was a Scot named McLean, who maintained a bodyguard of local boys. His turn came, however, and like his fellows, he suffered indirectly through the sins which the early voyagers and sea ruffians had committed against a wild and primitive people.
From Port Resolution, the Colleen Bawn sailed to Efate, or Sandwich, and there she anchored in Sou'-West Bay early in October. The bay forms a deep indentation in the south-east coast, and from its base juts a low, bush-covered, headland forming a lesser bay on its other side. Off the beach, in each of these lesser bays, lies a small island - that to the north-west being called Mali and the other Vila. The headland masks each from the other.
Cobbold and his two companions were landed on the main beach opposite the island of Vila, together with their stores and baggage. The day was brilliant. The sunlight was reflected by the dancing water of the bay, the gleaming white beach edging the land, and the dark-green vegetation of the jungle which in places was impassable. It was a little world of peace and beauty - on the surface of things.
Immediately after the Colleen Bawn had sailed through the heads of the Bay outward bound, Vila canoes put out which brought a crowd of excited natives to the new settlers led by a particularly truculent ruffian who announced himself to be 'Jimmy' and who boasted of having sailed in a whaling ship. Of his whaling ship experience there was no possible doubt, for his knowledge of English was confined principally to the lurid adjectives to be heard on such a ship.
Here then were three white lads, their boxes and goods near, and round them a horde of naked savages armed with bows and arrows and clubs, gesticulating and excited, and led by a coloured gentleman having a whaling ship's education. It may have been due to this education that the settlers were not slaughtered immediately.
Jimmy, however, was a crafty blackguard who retained