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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 9

"Havannah Harbour, Fate

"Havannah Harbour, Fate,

where we were detained seven days, a favorable wind for anchoring at Tanna never having come.

"Here we heard that the Flirt did not restore the Three Hills and Tongoa men to their own islands at the end of three days, as agreed, but took them, pigs and all, to Fiji. A Faté man who escaped from the Flirt at Mau, another small island on the north coast of Faté where the Flirt called on her way to Fiji, brought us this word; and so also did a Faté lad whom the Flirt's agent in the kidnapping business, (one Jimmy Shangoon, a native of Wea, one of the Loyalty Islands), had taken ashore with him on his leaving the Flirt at Faté. This Jimmy has been before engaged in this way, and is affirmed to have committed several murders while so engaged—attacking canoes, cutting down those that resisted, and carrying off the rest. He is at present residing at Havannah Harbour.

"While we were detained here, word was also brought us that the chief of the other side of Tongoa is greatly enraged just now at white men, owing to a schooner having taken away two of his wives and a number of his people to Port au France, New Caledonia, that he is waiting for an opportunity to take vengeance, and that he intended to come on board of the Dayspring, on the day that we left, with a number of his men, as if in a friendly way, and then suddenly fall on us and kill all the white people on board. We left, however, at daybreak, and thus providentially escaped them.

page 75

"I have heard that the captain of one of those slaving vessels having come to an island where he knew Bishop Pattison had been visiting, dressed himself like a bishop, went ashore with a Bible in his hand, and sang psalms in order to allure the natives on board; and that he thus obtained a good many.

"On the sixth day after we came to Havannali Harbour, we visited