His fellow invoice clerk was a young fellow built on his own lines and he, too, was spiritually restless - dissatisfied with a clerk's life and yearning for something more rewarding. Often these two discussed the price of cotton and the prospect of the cotton market for a long way ahead, and eventually they decided to leave Dickson's and migrate to the Fijis in search of fortune. They resigned on the same day and shortly afterwards arranged passages - it was during this period of waiting that Francis Cobbold met with an aggravating misfortune, breaking his arm while trying to jump a horse over a three-rail fence.
It was two months before he was able to use the injured arm again. Still determined to try his fortune in Fiji, he sailed for Levuka via Sydney and New Zealand on the City of Auckland - a smart steamer having a cutaway yacht's bow.
The voyage was pleasant, and he made two good friendships on board ship. One was with an Italian surveyor named Martinelli and the other was with a Mr Wingate, whose brother had been so helpful to Francis Cobbold at Messrs Dickson's. They, too, were going to Fiji, their object being to survey eight thousand acres of land on the Island of Viti Levu for a Melbourne syndicate.
4.
Together with other groups of islands in the immense Pacific Ocean, the Fijian Archipelago is unique in formation and colourful in its history. According to geologists, back in a tremendously far distant age a great part of what is now the Pacific Ocean was an extended land mass, while the Continent of Australia was still submerged except for the Great Dividing Range running down its east coast, the Mt Lofty and Flinders Ranges in South Australia, and the south-western portion of Western Australia. A cataclysmic upheaval caused the Pacific 'continent' to sink beneath the sea and the sea to drain off the land about the Australian 'islands', thus raising one continent while lowering another.
Certainly the study of any modern chart of the Islands of the Pacific gives the impression that a continental mass has subsided, leaving only its most elevated portions above sea level in the shape of islands. In the Fijian Archipelago, there are over two hundred and fifty islands, and they vary enormously in size from Viti Levu, with its mountains and rivers lying in an area of 4,053 square miles, to a mere rock. In many cases, not even a rock or sand cave is left above water to indicate the position of former islands. However, around the sites of these original islands the coral insects have built reef walls that enclose still lagoons from between two or three feet to fifty fathoms in depth, generally with a precipitous edge to the deep water.
In calm weather, when no breaking surf marks the submerged reefs, they are extremely difficult to locate. During his epic voyage of some 3,600 miles in an open boat into which he and eighteen companions had been forced by the Bounty mutineers, Captain Bligh sailed across an unsuspected reef above which was just four feet of water - a reef capable of wrecking any ship.
Nowhere in the world are there more reefs and shoals in proportion to the size of the Archipelago than Fiji. Even today, when in command of a steam-driven ship and when supplied with accurate charts, a sea captain seldom deviates outside known channels of deep water - the hazards presented to ships dependent on the wind can be clearly appreciated.
5.
During the 1840s common sea adventurers arrived in the Fiji Archipelago. They were a roaring, fighting, buccaneering crowd, and when Francis Cobbold reached Levuka, then the chief port and the largest native town on the islands, they had not quite passed on. Blackbirding was rampant and murder a common crime.
Blackbirding refers to the recruitment of people through trickery and kidnappings to work on plantations, particularly the sugar cane plantations of Queensland (Australia) and Fiji. The practice occurred primarily between the 1860s and 1901. Those 'blackbirded' were recruited from the indigenous populations of nearby Pacific islands or northern Queensland.
Cobbold's age at this time demands comment. When modern boys are studying for their school leaving certificate, he was working in the rigging of a clipper; when the modern boy is venturing from the parental home to study at a high school or university, Cobbold was sailing to an archipelago not fully charted or even fully explored, little known to the outside world, and populated with proven savages. At the age of fifteen he had embarked on a venture undertaken only by grown men of the roughest and the wildest natures. It was not as though he were an orphan kicked out into the world to fend for himself or go under, or that his people were needy, or that circumstances drove him. Nor was he sufficiently affluent to travel for pleasure, or for the excitement to be gained from visiting out-of- the-way places. If further proof of a dauntless spirit is needed, it will be found in full measure in his subsequent history.
At Levuka he met a charming family - a Mr Whalley and his wife with their two sons of about his own age and their daughter, aged twelve years. Whalley had been a government servant at Geelong, Victoria, and apparently the lust for adventure had seized upon him. Tall and thin and sure of himself, he and his courageous wife accepted Francis Cobbold with firm friendship.
Walking one day on the beach at Levuka, he was presented to a quite famous personage - none other than King Cakobau, pronounced Thakombau, the true King of the Cannibal Islands. Of striking physique, His Majesty expressed his delight at the introduction, smiling broadly and revealing his nicely filed teeth. The eating of human flesh was not then fashionable at Levuka, but it was suspected that the First Citizen often indulged his craving.
At the Whalley's invitation, Cobbold accompanied them to their plantation - or what was alleged to be a plantation. He and the entire family left Levuka one evening in an open boat fitted with a lugsail and the usual complement of oars for the home on the Ra Coast of the Island of Viti Levu. For a one time civil servant, Whalley revealed marked ability as a navigator for, steering by the stars all night through, he beached the small boat quite close to his house, a native hut built with bamboo and thatched with grass.
Only a small portion of the plantation was cleared, while no planting had been done. They lived chiefly on yams, coconuts and fish. He had no money - or very little - but very little money was needed other than for development of the plantation.
The only labour performed during young Cobbold's visit seems to have been the construction of a bamboo pipeline for carrying water from the nearby hills for domestic purposes.
Several other settlers were neighbours of the Whalleys, among them being an old Scotch gentleman named Carstairs who possessed a wonderful baritone voice and a plantation in the maturing stage. Accompanied by Mrs Whalley on her piano - imagine the determination and the struggle to get it there from Geelong! - Carstairs often sang 'Jessie's Dream' in which she hears a Highland Regiment rushing to the relief of Lucknow, and out across the tropic beach and the slow-heaving sea would roll in rich Highland accent:
"I hear the pibrochs sounding!"
Francis Cobbold's visit to the Ra Coast was both pleasurable and memorable and not a little instructive. It formed a prologue, as it were, to the play of many acts that was to follow.
Ra is one of the fourteen provinces of Fiji, occupying the northern area of Viti Levu. Ba is a province covering the north-west sector of Viti Levu; the name Ba is also used for a province, a tikina (a native Fijian administrative region comprising several villages), a town and a river.
CHAPTER FOUR
Years 1870 to 1871
The Coral Island
1.
When he returned to Levuka from the Ra Coast of Viti Levu, Francis Cobbold took up an appointment as bookkeeper to Messrs Unwin & Nieman, the proprietors of the Albion Hotel.
This