Hebrides

Colonists For N.

How Late Sir James Burns Encouraged Settlement

riOME dav, Australia will face up to the O fact that she owns large areas of land in the New Hebrides, presented to the Commonwealth by the late Sir James Burns on condition that set + le ment of British planters would be vigor ously undertaken. At present, Australia ignores her responsibilities there.

In this connection, Mr. A. B. (“Banjo”) Patterson gave some interesting history, recently in the course of reminiscences published in “Sydney Morning Herald”.—

Sir James Burns

JAMES BURNS, or perhaps I had better give him his proper title. Colonel the Honourable Sir James Burns, of the firm of Burns, Philp and Co., was. at all events as near to an Empire builder as we ever saw in these parts.

A thin and austere Scotsman of the old son-of-the-manse type, . few people would have taken him for what he was —an outstanding financial genius. The great O’Sullivan might toss millions about with the abandon of an elephant throw ing hay; but James Burns risked his company’s money, and his own, in ven tures which required a lot of pluck and a lot of foresight. They were merchants, inlands traders, and graziers; putting the firm’s money behind settlers away up on the Queensland rivers where they were liable to be scuppered by blacks at anv time: financing storekeepers in little one-pub towns, where these store keepers found grubstakes for prospectors and miners; sending their vessels to the whei’e no boats’s crew dared land unless the bow-man had a loaded rifle: running small steamers to places where there were no wharves, and the boat just tied up alongside the bank. Anywhere that there was a risk to be run and money to be made you would see the flag or James Bums. If he had been dealing in diamonds instead of copra and bananas, he might have been another Cecil Rhodes.

I was sent by the “Sydney Morning Herald” to accompany a mob of Aus tralian settlers which Sir James was sending to colonise the New Hebrides. A sort of Pilgrim Fathers affair, this, the settlers going down to live among wild savages in the land of the golden coco nut. I found “Cecil Rhodes’s” understudv in his office, and he gave me the plan of operations.

He said that his firm had bought thousands of acres in the New Hebrides.

“Some," he said, “we bought from the old Scotch company which lost a lot of money in the islands and sold out to us: other areas we bought from native chiefs, traders, and so on. Now the French have gone down there, and we may have to fight for our land. The Scotch company areas should be all right as they were taken up and occupied before the French made any claim; but where we bought say, a thousand acres from a native chief the French are now claiming that they bought the same land from the same chief or that they bought the same land from another chief who had a better right to it. Nothing can be settled till a Court is appointed to confirm the titles. We are sending these settlers down there so that,

when a Court does sit, we will have men on the spot in possession.”

This promised some adventure.

The Argonauts

SOON I was at sea with the Australian Pilgrim Fathers in search of the land of the golden coconut. This was not a bad ship, except that at some time or other she had tried to shift a coral reef and had got a sort of kink in her keel. The captain, a gigantic New Zealander, said she was inclined to steer a bit north by south unless carefully watched!

“If you let her alone,” he added, “she will go round and round in circles; but she’s quite good enough for a trade where any dark night, you might walk her right up on to a reef which has risen out of the sea since the last time you were along. There’s a volcano on Ambrym— you’ll see that—and I wouldn’t be sur prised, any night, to see fire and a new island coming up out of the sea. We’ve got the missionaries on board: it’s their synod trip. They’re good, well-meaning chaps, nearly all doctors, who do a lot for the niggers.”

“Are the niggers dangerous?”

“They were, until they got rifles. They could not hit a barn with a rifle if you put ’em inside it. If they want to kill a man they hide in the jungle and knock him with a waddy.”

I made friends with the settlers and found they were the genuine article hard-handed, anxious-faced men. miners, farmers, shearers mechanics—all off to tackle a job of which they knew little in a land of which they knew less. Many of them were born adventurers who would start off anywhere at the drop of a hat, just for the sake of seeing something new. I fancy there must have been some of this sort with the original American Pilgrim Fathers.

What, in the end stopped the develop ment of the scheme? Simply that the French and English Governments waited to see what would turn up before author ising any decision about the land. Some of the settlers went on with their work but were met with tariffs, while their French neighbours were encouraged with

bonuses! That was the end of a glorious undertaking.