FIJI.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 2396, 20 November 1880, Page 2

FIJI.

SECOND EDITION

The following account of an outrage by the Natives, to which brief reference was made in our telegraphic columns a fortnight ago, is from the “ Fiji Times” of the 16th October:— On Sunday night last, 10th October, an outrage was perpetrated at Toko Toko, on the Rcwa River, which in atrocity surpasses anything that has occurred since the massacre of the Burns family on the Ba River. At the junction of the back river with the main streamm there stands an accommodation, house, the property of Mr de Wolf, but latterly kept by a Mrs Williams, who with three daughters (the eldest about fourteen years old), has resided there for the past three years. About halfpast eleven o’clock on Saturday night after all had gone to bed, Mrs Williams heard voices ouside, and called out to know who was there. Receiving no reply, and as the noise still continued, she. rose, and throwing on a wrapper,-'went into the front part of the house. At that moment the door was burst in, and discovered a Fijian standing in the floorway, with a number of others at his back. The front man threw olf his sulu and entered the house, and with a scream, which brought her children to her side, the terrified woman retreated into a passage leading to a back door. Then the window in the children’s room was burst in, and a number of men entered by that and dashed their uluas (short hand-clubs) into the beds where the girls had been sleeping but a few moments previously. In terror for their lives, the poor woman and children hastened to escape in their nightdresses by the back door, and while doing so an oar was hurled spear fashion at them, and narrowly missed the mother. They lied out into the night and rain, and hid themselves in the vchico which grows near to the house, and made their way to the native town of Toga Dravu, distant over a mile, where they found shelter for the night. Upon their return in the morning the house was found a perfect wreck —doors ami windows smashed in, boxes broken and furniture ruined. Vb was stolen from one box, and 10s of Government money, which had been paid for postages also abstracted. The stamps were scattered about outside the bouse, and all the clothing bad been carried away. This lias occurred, not in an isolated district on the outskirts of civilisation, but almost at our very doors, in the middle of the populous Ilewa district, where police stations, magistrates, Courts, and constables are even more numerous than they are in Levuka, ami that such au atrocity could be planned and earned out with such unparalleled audacity speaks little for the moral effect all this machinery of government has produced.