ISLES OF PACIFIC.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 16317, 25 August 1916, Page 6

ISLES OF PACIFIC.

YOUNG CROWN COLONY. LOYALTY OF THE NATIVES. After an absence of over three months, Professor MacMillan Brown has returned to New Zealand, after investigating many interesting points in connection with conditions of life in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. The latter islands, according to Professor Brown, have the most delightful climate in the world. They were, up to the beginning of the present year, a British Protectorate, when they were proclaimed a Crown Colony. There is only a population of some 3000 natives in the whole of the group, comprising about a dozen islands, which are merely atolls, just above the level of the ocean.

' The Gilbert Islands, formerly German, now British, which lie to the north, right on the equator, are a much more important group. There are about a dozen islands, with a total population of 30,000, where formerly there were hundreds of thousands of people, tuberculosis, introduced by the white man, having been responsible in large measure for this decrease.

Improvident Natives. Professor Brown was accompanied throughout the' group by the Commissioner, Mr. Charles Workman, an old guardsman and Oxonian. The Commissioner looks after the natives splendidly. Formerly they used to build their houses on the groundhe has taught them to build them on 3ft piles to get ventilation; he attends to their hygiene, and in many ways endeavours to check the ravages of the tubercular scourge. In the copra season the improvident natives spend all they make, and on account' of the diminishing output, of native foods, rice is imported and doled out to them. They are lazy and live mostly on cocoanuts and bananas.

The natives of the Gilbert Islands have to pay a —something like 51b of copra a yearto the Government as a stand-b.v provision to reimburse the Government for providing food for them in times of drought and famine. The Gilbert Group is in the drought beltthe doldrums particularly the Southern Gilberts, and they may not get any rain for a year at a stretch. There had been no rain for six

months -when. Professor Brown was there. A long drought meant no cocoa-nuts and no bananas, and everybody had to eat Government rice.

A Loyal Colony. " The Gilbert Group is the best administered British colony in the world better administered than any German, British, or Dutch colony," said Professor Brown. The natives are splendidly loyal, and subscribed between £4000 and £5000 to the war funds. They badly xtanted to go to the war, but that was out of the question. Each island is governed by a council of natives, who administer th.i affairs of the island, judge all cases, and dictate what punishment offenders against the law are to receive. The Commissioner does not interfere figures only as a sort of Court of Appeal when there is a particularly knotty problem to solve. And that has been the custom from time immemorial in the —they have never had kings or —only the council. I had the pleasure of attending a meeting of thg council of Taputeuea —meaning wholly the ruler."