ABSTRACT
Indians have been in Fiji since May 14, 1879, when the first 498 indentured labourers arrived in the Leonidas from Calcutta. They came to a newly-established British Crown Colony, which had been ceded by the Fijian chiefs to Queen Victoria in 1874. Hitherto, plantations of cotton and coconuts had been run with labour from nearby island groups, such as the New Hebrides. But new regulations, designed to check the abuses in the ‘blackbirding’ of these natives, had made it hard to obtain recruits. The Fijians themselves provided the obvious answer to this labour shortage. But Fiji’s first Governor, Sir Arthur Gordon, refused to run the risk of a plantation system’s effects on the Fijian way of life. He felt that the recruitment of young men to labour camps, with the consequent disorganization of family life and of the structure of the Fijian village economy and authority system, was not a course open to a Government which had pledged itself in a Deed of Cession to look after Fijian interests. Nor did the Fijians themselves wish to neglect their lands for routine work which they disliked.
