Matayalevu in the Yasawas. Breadfruit trees have been planted throughout the village. Besides giving protection from the hot sun, these give an added supply of food. States Consular Agent, who presented him with a bill for $43,000. The presence of a United States warship made Thakombau promise to pay. To get the money, he offered to cede Fiji to Great Britain, and to give 200,000 acres to the British Government in return for the money he wanted. At this time, the British Government had the Maori Wars on its hands, and Thakombau was opposed by other chiefs, so the British rejected the offer. Thakombau then offered Fiji to the U.S.A., who were themselves occupied with a civil war, and they did not even send a reply to the offer. Finally, after a good deal of negotiation, Thakombau ceded Fiji to Queen Victoria in 1874.

BRITISH ADMINISTRATION The British Government promised that the Fijian's rights of ownership over their land would be preserved. The first duty of the British Administration was, and is, the interests of the Fijians. This was the responsibility of the British Colonial Office, but there was another Government Department called the India Office. It was negotiating with India to recruit labourers for work on the Fijian sugar plantations. In 1875, a new disease called measles had wiped out one-third of the Fijian population. At the same time, the settlers and traders wanted labourers. The Governor of Fiji refused to demand money taxes from the Fijians, so that they did not have to work for wages. The taxes were in produce. In this way, the Fijians were confirmed in the ownership and occupancy of their land.

INDENTURED LABOUR But it did not give the European settlers any labourers. That is why the India Office, in 1875, was trying to get indentured labourers for Fiji. The labourers were bound to work on the plantations for ten years and were, after the period of ten years, guaranteed a return passage to India. The India Office (that is, the British Government) promised that those who decided to stay in Fiji after they had finished their indenture, should have rights ‘in no whit inferior to those of any other race’—that is, it seems that the Indians were promised as much right to have land as anybody else. By 1916, when the indentured labour system was ended, 64,000 Indians had been brought by the ship-load to work in the sugar plantations of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company; 24,000 of these had been taken back to India, and