NEW CALEDONIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVIII, Issue 14629, 15 March 1911, Page 8

NEW CALEDONIA.

WHAT ARE THE JAPS DOING? A KANAKA KING'S STORY. No. V. [BY. oub special CORRESPONDENT.] I met him in Sydney; he was dressed in an ordinary street-going suit of tweecl, wore a soft felt hat, carried a double gold chain with dangling seals across his waistcoat, and spoke good English. But he •was a Kanaka. You. could tell that as soon as he showed his teeth. He confided to me that ho had been in Australia 27 years or more, and that he loved Australia. • That was the land of his adoption; he had fought side by side with white men in the South African war—he said this proudly—and had helped to beat the Boers. I questioned him closely as to his antecedents, and found that he is a i native of Mare Island, the most southern of the Loyalty Islands which lie north of New Caledonia; that if that island were Btill the undisputed home of the Kanakas and not a French possession he would oven now be King Watriama V., lording it over two or three thousand dusky but loyal subjects; that he is a man of some refinement and reading and study, speaking good French and English, and two or three native dialects; and that notwithstanding that he has cut himself off from the land in which he was born, the fact remains that his father was King of Mare, that It© himself would hold the position— ! subordinate to France, of courseif he were still there, and that his brother is a sort of regent for him over in that little paradise of coral and palm trees. It can readily be understood, then, that Watriama, although he is a naturalised Britisher, and has been out of active power in Mare for more than a quarter of a century, still has a warm spot in his heart for his birthplace and a deep feeling of affection for his dark relatives there.

The ex-king is an enemy of France and of French rule. He considers that what France has not done for the islands would fill a book. What she has done would cover only a postcard. And in his own small way he has been striving to point cut to France that it would be far better if she gave up the islands to the suzerainty of Great Britain.

In the course of a reasoned and sane interview, hedged round, ft is true, by lots of extraneous matter, it was possible for me to extract a good deal of information from Watriama that still further confirms the fact that whatever else the Japanese may have been sent to the island of New Caledonia for, the mere pretence of employment as miners is not the. sole object they have in view. A King's Wonder. " I wonder," he said, " if Australian people have any idea of the serious bearing my news may have on the future of Australia ? lam not"an alarmist, but I want the people who havo been so good to me to know that these Japanese workmen have been spending a great deal of their time making plans and sketches of the surrounding country and the adacent islandsfor what purpose I shall endeavour to point out. New Caledonia is aboui 3£ days' sail from Sydney, 1000 miles. Japan is 5000 miles away. Think what that means to Japan — and Australia. Say England and France were combined against European enemies— their hands —Japan, with a base so near, could be down on this country like a flash. My dream has always been for a combined "British Archipelago, including these five islands, called Loyalty (New Caledonia being only one of them). No foreign enemy, Japs, or others, should be allowed to come so near to this island continent. At present New Caledonia is a French protectorate', and France is friendly to England. . Surely England could approach France with a view to the place becoming English, and preventing any menace to 'Australia. I know that my people desire most to become British subjects. You should not allow these moves to go unnoticed." ' This was the substance of Watriama's prelude. Afterwards he told more minutely of what he had heard, and how he had heard it. " Some of my people over there," he went on, " who still recognise me as their king, and who are all my dear friends, are men who work as sailors and labourers on ships that travel from Noumea and Thio to Brisbane and Sydney and other places. Naturally, when they are at home, they get into conversation with their relatives and friends who live in and around Thio, many of whom work for Le Nickel in the mines that look down upon the little village.

Inside Information from Tiiio. Some of the Japanese, they tell me, have been there a long time, and they are organised, so that the men -who hold the superior positions lead the men at their sports and games, just as they boss them in their work. And it is these men who are and have been engaged in the task of spying out the island and taking measurements and photographs and other data to send home to Japan.' All over the island there are Japanese with whom they are in, constant communication by courier and by kanaka runners, who regularly take messages written in Japanese from one part of the territory to the other. Australia does not know, perhaps, but there is a splendid service of secret communication in this way between the various Japanese in the island of New Caledonia. They do not depend upon the posts to carry their letters. It is all done in this quiet, unobtrusive fashion, from man to man, and if I am any judge of what is taking place over there then the Japanese know a great deal more about the inner geography of the island, and about its possibilities for offence and defence in case of war, than many of the French officials in Noumea.

"Then in the islands that I know best, Mare and the others, these friends of mine tell me that the visits of Japanese are quite common, and nave become so frequent that nobody takes any notice of them. Only a little while ago a kanaka who came from my home village told me that just before he left there were three Japs, knocking about the place who had never been there before. They came in a small sailing ship, did no work, did not fish, were not gathering shell, and had no business dealings at all with the white traders on Mare.

Japs. With a Theodolite. "But they were there for a considerable time going round the island, sailing into every little inlet, and, as this native said —knowing no better—taking pictures with a thing like a telescope on three legs. I got him to explain what this thing was really like, and there can be no doubt but that* it was a theodolite. I know what a theodolite is, because I saw them used in South Africa by the engineers, and I understand them. "Then, too, Japanese, to my certain knowledge, have been seen in the Baio du Sandal, and the Baie Chateaubriand, two bays on the east and west sides; of Lifou, and these men again were not engaged in the ordinary trading that one would have expected " such people to be engaged in in far-away islands like these. All such incidents as these have made me frightened of the Japanese and their intrigue in my country, and I am doing my best to get them moved out of the country." What a White Man Said. Corroboration of some parts of Watri : ama's story comes from a white trader who has lived in the Loyalty islands all his life —60 years".. or moreand who speaks fluently at least half a dozen of the polyglot native dialects that are common over there. I told this gentleman of what Watriama had said, and he remarked that as far as he knew the Loyaltys there Mas no reason whatever to doubt him. "I have seen the Japs there myself," he remarked, "in. and around Mare and Lifou. Wo never took much notice of them, except to express some surprise among ourselves at the fact that they seemed to live without doing any trading, and always had supplies of tea and rice and salt fish in their boats."