penny looking-glasses, twopenny
knives and other weird rubbish, and are aghast to see large stores
stocked with thousands of pounds' worth of goods of all kinds, goods
which are sold to the natives at a very low margin of profit,
for competition is very keen. In the Society Islands the Chinese
storekeepers undersell us whites--they live cheaper." And "in Levuka
and Suva, in Fiji, in Rarotonga and other islands there are scores of
broken-down white men. They cannot be called 'beachcombers,' for there
is nothing on the beach for them to comb. They live on the charity of
the traders and natives. If they were sailor-men they could perhaps
get fifteen dollars a month on the schooners. Why they come here is a
mystery.... Most of them seem to be clerks or school-teachers. One is a
violin teacher. Another young fellow brought out a typewriting machine;
he is now yardman at a Suva hotel. A third is a married man with two
young children. He is a French polisher, wife a milliner. They came from
Belfast, and landed with eleven pounds! Hotel expenses swallowed all
that in three weeks. Money is being collected to send them to Auckland,"
and so on. There is always so much mischief being done by globe-trotting
tourists and ill-informed and irresponsible novelists who scurry through
the Southern Seas on a liner, and then publish their hasty impressions.
According to them, any one with a modicum of common sense can shake the
South Sea Pagoda Tree and become bloatedly wealthy in a year or so.

Did the "Special Commissioner" know that these articles would lead to
much misery and suffering? No, of course not. They were written in good
faith, but without knowledge. For instance, the wild statement about
looking up "some one of the innumerable reefs and low atolls... beds
of treasure, full of pearl-shell that sells at L100 to L200 the ton,"
etc.--there is not one single reef or atoll either in the North or South
Pacific that has not been carefully prospected for pearl-shell during
the past thirty-five years.

Then as to gold-mining in British New Guinea, "where you can dig gold in
handfuls out of the mangrove swamps".

Diggers who go to New Guinea have to go through the formality of first
paying their passages to that country from Australia. Then, on arrival,
they have to arrange the important matter of engaging native carriers
to take their outfit to the Mambare River gold-fields--a tedious and
expensive item. And only experienced men of