[Footnote 34: That the native tradition was not invented to account for the tribal constitution is shown in the form of the story, which records the assassination and the subsequent delegation of power without assigning any reason for the latter, or noticing the connection between the two. (See my _Diversions of a Prime Minister_, p. 304.)] CHAPTER V WARFARE The state of incessant intertribal warfare in which the first missionaries found the Fijians has led certain writers to represent them as a bloodthirsty and ferocious race whose sudden conversion to the ways of peace could only be accounted for by supernatural agency. There was one missionary, however, whose zeal in the cause of his church never obscured his natural truthfulness. "When on his feet," says Thomas Williams, "the Fijian is always armed.... This, however, is not to be attributed to his bold or choleric temper, but to suspicion and dread. Fear arms the Fijian.... The club or spear is the companion of all walks; but it is only for defence. This is proved by every man you meet: in the distance you see him with his weapon shouldered; getting nearer, he lowers it to his knee, gives you the path, and passes on."[35] The same writer puts the annual losses in battle, without counting the widows strangled to their husbands' manes, at from 1500 to 2000. But this estimate was made when every tribe had muskets, and the possession of fire-arms emboldened tribes to take the field who would otherwise have agreed with their enemy quickly. None of the great confederations existed before 1800: the influence of Mbau scarcely extended beyond the mangrove swamps that face the island stronghold; Somosomo did not claim sovereignty even over the whole of Taveuni; even Rewa and Verata might have reckoned their territory in acres. In the eighteenth century, therefore, a belligerent tribe could put but a handful of men into the field, armed with weapons no deadlier than the spear and the club. As late as Williams's day the great confederations of Mbau and Rewa could not, even with the help of mercenaries from Tonga and elsewhere, raise an army of 1500 without immense difficulty; and, if the annual slaughter amounted to less than 2000 out of a population of 150,000 almost constantly at war when three out of every five men carried a musket in addition to his other arms, the mortality from war must formerly have been quite insignificant.