Charles Ward Is

Dead

Hero of Cook Is. Flag Incident

From Our Own Correspondent

Rarotonga, March 23.

CHARLES JAMES WARD, the man who was associated in romantic fashion with the raising of the British flag in the Cook Islands, died on Friday, March 6, aged 80 years, after a long and painful illness.

An account of Mr. Ward’s adventurous life, and of the flag incident, was pub lished recently in these columns.

To Rarotongans—so long familiar with his homely figure—a familiar human landmark has been removed. He was typical of a now forgotten generation of Island traders, and his passing stands for the severance of a definite link with the past. Representative of all that was best in these old-timers, Charlie Ward has gone to join the forgotten hundreds of men whose bones are bleaching in the coral sand of a hundred islands, and whose only memorial is the systematised trade-routes which now span the Pacific.

To this company, in some far-off Fidd lers’ Green, one likes to think of “Old Charlie’’ paddling his lone canoe, an old, old man, setting out alone on his last rahui, steering quietly and certainly across the great lagoon of life towards the sunset shadows of all his yesterdays.

Buried with full military honours in the L.M.S. churchyard at Avarua, under the flag which he was largely responsible for having had hoisted over these Islands, Charlie Ward lies within sound of the surf that he loved so well, and above his grave the palms rock royally to the long clean sweep of the trade-wind.

Good sleep to him!