Remote Islanders

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 84, 31 January 1941, Page 5

Remote Islanders

"T HE early contracts of these island peoples with ‘" Europeans were not always beneficial to the islanders or creditable to the Europeans. These Gilbert and Ellice Islands for many years in the second half of last century were the happy hunting grounds of the " Blackbirders," who under a pretence of recruiting labour, often decoyed these brown skinned islanders aboard their vessels and practically kidnapped, selling them to a virtual slavery in the mines of Peru or on the plantations of slave owners in South America. In later years, when Missions began to work in these islands and when the British flag began to exercise more control in the Pacific, many of the islanders were recruited under better but still far from satisfactory conditions for work on the sugar plantations of Queensland. Nowadays, thanks to the protection of the British Government and to the influence of Christian missions, things have much improved. Many Gilbertese and Ellice Islanders are now recruited for mining the phosphates at Ocean Island, where under the wise and enlightened management of the British Phosphate Commission, they are employed under good conditions and given a fair return for their labdur, and where they are assured of fair dealing and of repatriation to their home islands at the end of their term of service. Apart from this, these people have few contacts with the world. There is but little opportunity for trade, and no trading vessels call

except at one or two centres to carry away the copra which has been collected by: small vessels working among the islands. The islands are quite outside the route of the usual steamship lines, and there are no

facilities for tourists to visit them

-(" Building

Christian Civilisation. Britain’s Remotest Colony,"

by the Rev.

G. H.

Eastman

4YA).