Preferred Death To Life

As A Leper

A MINOR tragedy, which gives some indication of the horror with which leprosy is regarded in the Pacific Islands, is reported from Suva.

A Fijian man, Josese Daveta, employed in Suva, became ill; and finally, after medical examination, he was certified to be a leper, and his removal to the leper settlement at Makogai, in the Fiji Group, was ordered. Daveta, greatly distressed, returned to his place ,of employment, and shortly afterwards disappeared.

Alarm was felt when it was noted that he had taken a loaded revolver with him.

It was later reported that he had tried to shoot himself, and so police were sent out to take charge of him. They searched all that night and far into the follow ing day, and then they located him, hiding in the scrub, in a valley, at the back of the emergency hospital.

The police exercised care because of the revolver and the man’s desperate condition. But as they closed in on him a shot was heard, and they found him with a bullet wound in his head. He died in the hospital some hours later.

Miss Ngaire Gilmour, sister at the Colonial War Memorial Hospital, Suva, Fiji, is at present absent from the Col ony on three months’ leave.

Monsieur Albert Bonneaud, a former director-general of Etablissements Bal lande (one of the largest commercial firms in New Caledonia) and formerly vice-president of the Societe des Comp toirs Francais des Nouvelles Hebrides (of Vila, New Hebrides), died in France on April 10, at the age of 68.

Mr. K. Griffiths, of the South Seas Evangelical Mission’s vessel “Evangel”, which operates in the Solomon Islands, is at present on furlough in Australia.