ABSTRACT
Till the end of the eighteenth century very little was known of the Fijian islands except from the scanty reports of the few seamen who in exploring the uncharted waters of the South Western Pacific had sighted, and even in very rare cases touched at, one or other of the smaller outlying islands. During the first ten or fifteen years of the following century, however, many British and American ships visited one part of the coast of one of the larger Fijian Islands, for the sake of the sandalwood which accidentally had been found to grow there abundantly. But surprisingly little record of these visits has survived, buried for the most part in the Shipping Gazettes of Australia and the East Indies. By 1815 the sandalwood had been exhausted, and for the next twenty years, though several strangers who had been brought by the sandalwood ships remained there—the so-called ‘beachcombers,’ the island folk were little visited from outside, unless by an occasional American ship in search of bêche de mer. Then, in 1837, Wesleyan missionaries gained a footing in the islands; and about the same time other Europeans began to establish themselves as traders among the native folk.
