sian blood. From thence he ran southward to Samoa, where he
came upon traces of the massacre of La Perouse's second in command, M. de
Langle, in the shape of accoutrements cut from the uniforms of the French
officers. Consistent with his usual concentration upon the object of his
voyage, he does not seem to have cared to make enquiries about them.

At this stage in the voyage there occurred an accident which, from our
point of view, must be regarded as the most fortunate incident of the
voyage. The tender, very imperfectly victualled, parted company in a
thick shower of rain. At this date Fiji, the most important group in the
South Pacific, was practically unknown. Tasman had sighted its
north-eastern extremity: Cook had discovered Vatoa, an outlying island in
the far southward, and had heard of it from the Tongans in his second
voyage when he had not time to look for it; Bligh had passed through the
heart of it in his boat voyage, and had even been chased by two canoes
from Round Island, Yasawa; but no European had landed or held any
intercourse with the natives. It is not easy to understand how islands of
such magnitude as Fiji should have remained undiscovered so long after
every other important group in the Pacific had found its place in the
charts of the Pacific. They were known by repute; Hamilton writes of "the
savage and cannibal Feegees"; they lay but two days' sail down-wind from
Tonga. Three years before the _Pandora's_ cruise the Pacific had been
thrown open to the sperm whale fishery, which has had so large a part in
South Sea discovery, by the cruise of the English ship _Amelia_, fitted
out by Enderby; and yet neither ship of war nor whaler had chanced upon
them. But for a meagre passage in Edwards' journal, and a traditionary
poem in the Fijian language, we should not know to whom belongs the
honour of first visiting them. The native tradition sets forth that with
the first visit of a European ship a devastating sickness, called the
Great Lila, or "Wasting Sickness," attacked the people of one of the
Eastern Islands (of the Lau group), and, spreading from island to island,
swept away vast numbers of the people. There are, it may be remarked,
innumerable instances in history of the contact between continental and
island peoples, both of them healthy at the time of contact, producing
fatal epidemics among the islanders. Even among our own Hebrides the
natives are said to look for an outbreak of "Strangers' Co