First Americans in New Caledonia

Prom Our Noumea Correspondent NOW and again, in the foothills of the central mountain chain, and under the giant banyan trees, parties of American soldiers in New Caledonia come across bleached piles of human bones and skulls, and remains of the old native feasting middens, where sometimes white sailors as well as black warriors were roasted to a turn. In actual fact, the first American crew ever to set foot on New Caledonian soil were promptly knocked on the head and eaten.

That was some years before the French took possession of the isle.

It happened at Balade, where the natives had just looted the first Catholic mission. The local chief, a thorough old scoundrel, saved for himself a particu larly handsome cassock, in which he was fond of parading up and down the beach, with the idea of tempting white men to land. In his hands he would hold' a breviary, which he pretended to read in the manner of the “white witch doctors.”

The crew of a Yankee schooner named “The Cutter” mistook him for a mission ary and went ashore to talk with him.

But they were massacred, and put into the tribal ovens. As a strategist that old cannibal was not to be despised.