The first Europeans who had intercourse with the natives, so far as we know, were the prize crew of the little schooner built of native timber in Tahiti by the _Bounty_ mutineers in 1791. Having shut up the mutineers in "Pandora's Box" (as the little roundhouse on the quarter-deck of H.M.S. _Pandora_ was called) Captain Edwards victualled and manned the mutineer's schooner as his tender, but he parted company with her in a storm off Samoa an hour before a fresh supply of stores and water was to be put on board of her. The island of Tofua had been the appointed rendezvous in such a contingency, and the schooner duly made the island, but, having waited in vain for the _Pandora_, her commander, now desperate for want of provisions, made sail to the northwest, and cast anchor at an island which was almost certainly Matuku in the Lau sub-group of Fiji. Here she lay for six weeks with boarding nettings up, but the natives appear to have treated their strange visitors with friendliness and hospitality. After terrible sufferings, from which the midshipman lost his reason, and numerous encounters with the natives of the Solomons or the New Hebrides, this handful of brave seamen made the Great Barrier Reef opposite Torres Straits, which, for want of time to search for a passage, they boldly rode at in a spring tide, and jumped, escaping without injury to their little vessel. Mistaken for pirates by the Dutch authorities, they were clapped into prison, where Captain Edwards found them after himself suffering shipwreck on the Barrier Reef. Unfortunately neither Oliver, the gunner in command of the schooner, nor any of his shipmates published the story of these adventures, and the Record Office has been searched in vain for the log which they must have handed over to Edwards; otherwise we might have had a very valuable description of the Fijians a century ago. One or other of the native poems describing the first arrival of European ships may refer to this voyage. This visit, or perhaps an unrecorded one about the same year, 1791, had a sinister influence upon Fijian history, for the evidence which will be set forth in a later chapter points to it as the cause of the terrible epidemic of _Lila_ (wasting sickness) which decimated the group. In the following year, 1792, Captain Bligh ran along the coast of Taveuni in H.M.S. _Providence_, and was followed by canoes. On April 26, 1794, the "snow" _Arthur_ touched at the Yasawa Islands, and was attacked by the natives.