RETRIBUTIVE VENGEANCE AT THE NEW HEBRIDES.

Globe, Volume VIII, Issue 1046, 1 November 1877, Page 3

RETRIBUTIVE VENGEANCE AT THE NEW HEBRIDES.

[By Telegraph.] Auckland, October 31. The following are the particulars of the vengeance carried out by H.M. schooner Beagle at Tauna, New Hebrides. This island has been notorious for the murder of Europeans living on it. Apart from what occurred before, the series of murders which had taken place since, commencing with Ross, Bell, Captain Daggett and others, and terminating with the locally celebrated Ross Lewen ought to have caused the punishment of the murderers by the several governments of whom they were subjects. But the murders were passed over, and the criminal natives began to believe in their total immunity until at last the British Government, stirred, no doubt, by the utter wantonness and atrocity of the last murder, was induced to teach them a lesson. Preliminary inquiries were first undertaken. Then the Beagle was ordered to the locality, and to execute the murderers. The vessel went down and managed to procure the presence of a number of natives on board. At a preconcerted signal these men were pinioned and laid on the decks. Either from amongst their number, or those procured from the shore, was the brother of the murderer of the man referred to, and he acknowledged that, had his brother failed in his shot (which he did not), he would have fired himself. At an appointed hour this confessed criminal was hung at the yard-arm of the Beagle in the presence of the natives ashore. The body was allowed to hang for a good length of time to convince the natives of his being really dead, and then the prisoners were released, and the body was taken ashore and buried.