Isles Of

Tragedy

By E.W.H., a Resident of Fergusson Is.

FETZLAFF was a survivor of the tragic attempt to establish a community of Europeans on New Ireland in the late ’7o’s of the last century.

The promoter and organiser of the folly was the Marquis de Rays.

After a long enquiry the Marquis was given a prison sentence.

The expedition arrived in the Southern end of New Ireland with insufficient food, tools and medicines.

Malaria—a deadly scourge in Mel anesia in those days—began to take its toll, and the death rate was appalling.

Two Methodist missionaries (Revs.

George Brown and Benjamin Deaks) assisted by Captain Fergusson of the SS Ripple (the latter was murdered a few weeks later by natives), removed about 50 of the survivors from New Ireland to the Mission Station at Port Hunter, in the Duke of York Islands. Seven of them died there within a few days, and others later.

The first party of these settlers were landed on New Ireland in the year 1880, from the barque Chandanagore.

For some unexplained reason the Chandanagore . when passing the Laughlin Group, 50 miles to the eastward of Murua (Woodlark Island), landed 17 men in the Laughlins. Some time later a schooner, Emilie, also bound for New Ireland, called at the Laughlins and found only 11 survivors. It is presumed she either took them on with her, or landed provisions for them: their fate is not recorded.

Fetzlaff made his home in the Laughlins a short time afterwards,

and he died there in the ’9o’s. In those days, the German steamers from Sydney, bound for New Britain, passed close to the Group. They regularly furnished provisions to Fetzlaff in exchange for the copra he bought from the natives of the atoll.

He was probably a German. When Sir William Macgregor first visited the Laughlins in the Merrie Eng land he found Fetzlaff had hoisted the German flag there. Sir William had it hauled down, and the British flag substituted: and he warned Fetzlaff that if he repeated the offence he would be deported.

Two things probably saved this German from meeting a “sticky end.” The inhabitants of both Murua, and Budibudi (the latter is the native name of the Laughlins) had had previous contact with whitemen. Also, like the Trobriand people, with whom they had kin ship, they were not eaters of human flesh—they had no appetite at all for “long pig.”

IN the middle of last century, Budibudi was used by whale ships as a depot. In their annual migrations to warmer waters to calve, and on their return to the Antarctic with their young, great schools of whales passed close to the Group, and the whale-men took their harvest—so heavy a toll, in fact, that by the ’7o’s the whale ships had to depart for fresh fields and pastures new.

One memorial to them is to be seen in the straight and unwavy hair of the Laughlin natives. When, 45 years ago, I visited the atoll, there were still some old folk alive who remembered the whalers, had been given trips on the whalers, and they had nothing but good to say of the treatment received from them.

Murua ( Woodlark) itself carried a population in those times suffici ently numerous to interest the “blackbirders.” There was a fair anchorage on the NE side of the island, called Spiermat. Many young men were taken away from there to toil in the canefields of Queens land, and not so many returned.

It is useless to deny that the re turn of the kanaka to his island home often meant tragedy. He took diseases not previously known to those healthy races. The last batch of repatriates to Murua landed with the infection of smallpox among them, and this scourge wiped out whole villages. They died miserably in their houses. There were none to give them succour, or food, or burial.

The jungle has mercifully hidden all traces of the tragedy. The native houses caved in and decayed into the soil. But the hardwood posts of the houses could still be seen at the beginning of this century, ■with the bones of their former in mates lying between them.

The cost in lives will never be known, but the sad event was probably the commencement of a decline in the population of Marua —once numbered in thousands, but now only in hundreds. A tale all too common in the history of the South Seas.