PROPAGANDA BY PHOTOGRAPHS.

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in virtue of his local rank. His office, however, seemed to place him next to the Governor in importance, for he alone can have the ordering of other men's labour without paying for it—a distinction that carries weight in every community. Tukuaho told them how much he regretted that an empty Treasury had tied his hands, so that he could not yet pay them the nine months' salary due to them on Mr Baker's departure; but he announced that from that day forward their salaries would be punctually remitted to them, and that the payment of the amount owing to them by his predecessor (he was not going to speak ill of the absent) would depend upon their own loyalty. The sooner they could induce their friends to pay their taxes, the sooner would they receive the arrears due to them.

Next day the mail-steamer from New Zealand put in, after touching at Nukualofa. From the former place she brought Mr Baker's son-formerly his private secretarycarrying, for distribution among the natives, a bundle of lithographs of his father, subscribed "The Premier appointed by Tubou"; and from the latter Mr Watkin, the chief minister of the Free Church, and the staunch ally of the late Premier, ostensibly to make church collections, but also, as it afterwards proved, to further unsettle the minds of his flock.

At mid-day we set sail for Nukualofa. A chain of volcanoes traverses the Tongan group from north to south, and one or other of the craters is generally in a state of sufficient activity to be employed by one of the contending Church parties against the other. In August 1886, the sudden eruption in Niuafoou was pointed to by the

F

persecuted Wesleyans as a sign of the wrath of heaven against the Free Church; but the tables were turned, and the dull glare of Tofua, which we had seen every night from Haapai, was now seized upon by the Free Church ministers as a warning of the peril of the State from British machinations. But an eruption is public property, and I was told that Tofua was used by our own supporters to awe the opponents of "the just-dealing Government" into complacency.

With the view of seeing the crater more closely we steered direct for Tofua, and were becalmed within two miles of the volcano long after sunset. The night was very dark, but every few minutes the dull glare of the crater was illuminated with a burst of flame, and masses of red-hot rock were projected into the air with deep reverberations. The crater was not more than 200 feet above the sea-level, and was close to the north shore of the island. I therefore tried to persuade the crew to take us into the deep strait that separates the island from the sugar-loaf cone of Kao. But they were frightened at the explosions, and flatly refused, urging that we should be becalmed on the lee side, and become a target for the missiles from the crater. It was useless to urge that the stones would not fall into the sea: they were obdurate, and we had reluctantly to steer southwards.

It was within sight of this island that, on the morning. of May 1789, the crew of H.M.S. Bounty mutinied and set their commander, Lieutenant Bligh, adrift in the launch. On landing at Tofua he was treacherously attacked by the natives, and John Norton, his quartermaster, was struck down as he was casting off the stern

THE MUTINY OF THE BOUNTY.

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fast. The sequel is thus told by the natives. They dragged the body inland to a malac1 (the island being the property of the Tui Tonga, there are many there), and after exposing it for three days, they buried it. But the whole of the track made by the body as it was dragged along has ever since remained bare of grass, as well as the spot where the corpse lay exposed.

Mariner, who visited the place in 1808, saw this track, and says that it had not the appearance of a beaten path. At the end was a bare place, at right angles to the path, about the length and breadth of a man's body. Daylight found us within sight of the "new island." Early in 1886 a submerged reef broke out into sub

1 Sacred enclosure where sacrifices were offered.

aqueous eruption. It suddenly rose, and formed an island 160 feet above the sea, composed of smoking scoria. A question arose in Nukualofa as to the nationality of this new land, and an enterprising expedition was despatched to settle the matter by planting the Tongan ensign on the summit. We found that the sea was making great havoc of this, the latest addition to King George's dominions. With every storm great masses of the soft pumice were dislodged, so that in a few years the island will be reduced to its old form of a reef awash at low tide.

VII.

MEETINGS ORDINARY AND EXTRAORDINARY.

THE politics of Tonga are a never-ending struggle between the farkava and the fono. In the intervals of the solemn ceremony of kava-drinking the most outrageous scandal is talked, the most startling lies invented,-for kava loosens the tongue-strings without muddling the senses. Were it less cheering and more inebriating it would be politically innocuous, for it is easier to govern a nation of drunkards than a people suffering from the diseased garrulity born of the pepper-root. Kava is drunk in every village in Tonga at least once a-day. Beside the doorpost in every house lie the flat and the round poundingstones whitened with the dusty fibres; and at each gathering, failing the moral character of an absent friend, politics, or church matters-which are so interlaced with politics that they are the more dangerous of the two—are the subject of conversation. To purify the air of the cloud of lies and miscomprehension that the faikavas have discharged into it, periodical fonos are necessary.

A fono is a compulsory meeting of the people to listen to the orders of some person in authority. Before Chris