“The natives were cowed and disheartened by the pestilence, which they believed to have been introduced purposely to destroy them,—a belief encouraged, I am ashamed to say, by some of our own countrymen, and which was probably the main cause of the disturbances in the Highlands of Viti Levu in the following year. They were perplexed by reiterated assurances, from the whites living among them, that by the mere fact of annexation to Great Britain their own laws and customs had been abolished; that their rules of succession, and for the transmission of property, had no longer any existence; that many of their cherished habits were illegal; that their lands had become the property of the Crown; and that they would themselves be expected, if not required, to labour on white men’s plantations. They were told, moreover, that all distinctions of rank among them were at an end,—a notification more perplexing than pleasing, in its suddenness, to the people generally, and which naturally caused irritation and distrust among the higher chiefs. “A third element in the population, the immigrant labourers from other parts of Polynesia, whose contracts of service had long expired, but whose employers had no means to send them back to their homes, and who had remained, in some cases, for many years in by no means voluntary servitude, were exasperated by the bad faith they had experienced. “At the end of the year 1875 I found myself with a revenue of £16,000, from which I had to meet an expenditure of over £70,000, and at the head of a dissatisfied and impoverished white population of some 1500 persons, in the midst of a native population nearly one hundred times as large, suspicious, watchful, and uneasy; while on but too many estates, bands of wrongfully detained immigrants formed a real, though apparently unrecognised, source of danger.