Bau

The root of war

formationDrafted from Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858)

As late as 1800, supremacy in Fiji belonged not to Bau but to Verata, whose sway ran over part of the main island and several of the smaller ones. Bau at that date was ruled by Na-Ulivou, who had already fought off a challenge from thirty rival sons of a chief named Savou contesting his own succession, and been honoured afterward with the title Na Vu-ni-valu - the root of war - a title his successors bore ever since. Aided by white settlers and the firearms they brought, Na-Ulivou turned that same energy against Verata itself, stripped it of its dependencies, and left its sovereign little more than his own town to rule. By the time Na-Ulivou died in 1829, Bau, not Verata, was the power the rest of Fiji had to reckon with.

His brother Tanoa succeeded him as Vunivalu. The inheritance did not stay settled for long. Tanoa's reign of twenty-three years was filled, almost from its start, with rebellious subjects and rebellious sons, and at its worst a powerful and far-spreading rebellion drove him from Bau entirely, forcing him into an exile that lasted years while his enemies held his own chief city. His young son Seru was allowed to remain on the island, dismissed by the rebels as too young to be worth killing - a judgment that would prove to be the single worst mistake of the whole uprising.

Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858) · Alfred Thomas Agate · Public domain

Tanoa himself, once restored, showed exactly what kind of ruler the rebellion had been fought against. Old age eventually forced him to hand the active duties of his position to a son acting as regent, but his cruelty did not dim with the years: a cousin who begged his forgiveness for some offence was instead mutilated and eaten alive before him, and a son sentenced to death by the club was, when the first blow failed to kill him, finished at Tanoa's own furious insistence. This was the man - proud, implacable, and by his own subjects' testimony still feared even in extreme old age - whose throne a boy too young to be thought dangerous would one day win back for him.

Evil to Mbau

expansionDrafted from Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858)

The rebels who held Bau during Tanoa's exile were not unanimous about what to do with his son. The old chief of Viwa, one of the revolt's own leaders, warned that Seru was a clever youth and ought to be killed before he could do them any harm; the others judged a mere boy no threat, and let him stay. It was the last miscalculation the rebellion made.

Seru spent the time he was allowed quietly building a following. He won over men of real influence to his exiled father's cause, among them his own close friend Verani, who happened to be nephew to the same Viwa chief who had wanted Seru dead. When the moment came, the plan was executed with a single night's work: the quarter of Bau held by Tanoa's remaining loyalists was fenced off from the rest of the town, and the rebel quarter beside it was set alight. The rebels fled in confusion to the mainland, where they were eventually delivered up to Tanoa - restored, by his son's own hand, to the throne the rebellion had taken from him.

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich · Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858) · Edward Gennys Fanshawe · Public domain

A name that meant terror

Bau's welcome home for its returning king matched the violence of the coup that had won it back. Captured rebel chiefs were killed and eaten to celebrate Tanoa's restoration - two bodies were still in the ovens when the first Wesleyan missionary reached the island in 1837 - and Seru himself took a new name from the episode: Thakombau, meaning evil to Bau, for the destruction and terror his coup had caused the very town it saved.

Tanoa reigned nearly fifteen years more after his restoration, growing old, proud, and no gentler than before - vain enough to blacken his grey hair with powder, and still capable of the mutilations and executions that had marked his rule from early on. Age eventually left the active work of government to a son serving as regent in all but name. When Tanoa died on the 8th of December, 1852, it was Thakombau - the boy once thought too harmless to kill - who succeeded him as Vunivalu of Bau.

I am lotu

peakDrafted from Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858)

Thakombau's early years as Vunivalu brought Bau to the edge of the same kind of ruin his father had once suffered. War with Rewa, whose king Ratu Nggara pressed the fight with real fury, left Bau beleaguered and its own subjects wavering. Even inside the town, loyalty was for sale: Koli, chief of the Lasakau fishermen who lived on part of the island, was quietly bribed by the rebel chief Mara and by Rewa itself - canoes, land, and women from one side, a hundred canoes promised from the other - to fence off his own quarter of Bau and open a second front against his king. Only the missionary Calvert's own intervention, a mixture of blunt warning and a well-timed gift of hatchets and axes, talked Koli out of the revolt at the last hour, and Bau survived a conspiracy that could have cost Thakombau his life and, with it, every established authority in Fiji.

National Library of Australia · Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858) · John Cochran · Public domain

National Maritime Museum, Greenwich · Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858) · Edward Gennys Fanshawe · Public domain

It was in this extremity that Thakombau's own converted faith was tested past performance into conviction. Urged by Calvert to flee while escape was still possible, the King refused: "I cannot do that. If evil comes, I must die. But I think the Lord will deliver me. I am lotu." Bau held out against odds that impressed even its enemies - the King of Rewa himself was heard to say that if Thakombau's faith were hypocrisy it would only feed the fire against him, but if it were real, Rewa would never take him at all.

A death that ended the war no battle could

The war Bau could not win by force was ended instead by an enemy's death. On the 26th of January, 1855, Ratu Nggara, Rewa's implacable king, was carried off by dysentery before he was able to leave the instructions for continuing the war that Fijian custom required of a dying leader. Thakombau moved at once, sending an ambassador with an offer of peace framed entirely in the language of his new faith: "Tell the Rewa people to become Christian, and let us establish a peace that shall be lasting... I am Christian, not because I am weak or afraid, but because I know it to be true."

The offer nearly unravelled when a holdout faction under the chief Mara, excluded from the settlement, gathered fresh support for another rebellion - but King George of Tonga, visiting Fiji at the time and drawn into the conflict against his own wishes, brought that final resistance to a swift end. Some seventy towns returned to their allegiance to Bau, and Thakombau, meeting the defeated rebel chiefs aboard a British warship lying off Ovalau, reproved them for their past folly and urged them toward the pursuits of peace rather than further war. The coalition that had once driven his father into exile and nearly killed him in his own capital now answered to Bau more completely than it ever had before.

Thakombau's baptism

contractionDrafted from Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858)

Victory over Rewa did not by itself settle the question that had hung over Thakombau since the darkest days of the war. At the commencement of 1857 he dismissed the many wives that were among the clearest marks of a Fijian chief's wealth and standing, and was publicly married to his chief Queen alone - a sacrifice the source records as one strangers to Fiji could hardly appreciate the size of. With that difficulty removed, the Vunivalu and his Queen were publicly baptized on the 11th of January, 1857.

The missionary who performed the ceremony left a description of the congregation that gathered to watch it: husbands whose wives Thakombau had dishonoured, widows whose husbands he had killed, relatives of people he had ordered strangled, and children descended from men he had eaten and who had sworn to avenge them. Before this same assembly, a man who had once accepted near-divine honours as a living god stood and confessed, in his own words, that he had been a bad man, that he had disturbed the country, and that he had once told the missionaries he would go on fighting rather than embrace their religion. He took the baptismal name Ebenezer, in acknowledgment, he said, of God's own hand in preserving him through the fighting of 1854 and 1855 - the war that had nearly cost him Bau itself. His Queen took the name Lydia.

Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, Volume I - The Islands and Their Inhabitants (1858) · Unknown engraver · Public domain

An old order's last king

Thakombau's baptism did not end Fijian politics, and it did not end his own rule; he remained Vunivalu of Bau, and the towns that had returned to his allegiance the previous year stayed returned. What it closed instead was the world Bau's own rise had been fought in - a world of priest-sanctioned war, cannibal feasts celebrating a father's restoration, and a young man's name taken from the terror of a single night's arson. The king who once answered a missionary's offer of escape with "I am lotu" had, by January of 1857, made that declaration in front of the very people his old religion and his old wars had most directly harmed.

The debt was being paid

endDrafted from Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji (1922)

Christianity did not end the fighting that had made Thakombau's own name, and the war-weariness that had settled Bau's contest with Rewa in 1855 did not last forever either. In the years after his baptism, Thakombau's own government - built, by his own account, on the same matanitu he had once named for his European ministers - waged further campaigns against tribes still holding out for the old order, forces trained and led in part by white officers now serving a king whose own authority had come to rest as much on foreign administration as on Fijian custom.

By 1874 that reliance had become dependence outright. Sir Hercules Robinson, Governor of New South Wales, negotiated a Deed of Cession placing Fiji under the sovereignty of Queen Victoria, and once Thakombau and the leading chiefs had signed it, the Union Jack was raised and Fiji became a Crown Colony. Robinson invited the king he had just dispossessed of sovereignty to visit him in Sydney as a guest, and sent HMS Dido to carry him there with a large retinue of his own people.

Auckland Libraries · Brewster, The Hill Tribes of Fiji (1922) · Francis H. Dufty · Public domain

A third of the population

The voyage cost Fiji more than the cession itself had. One of Thakombau's attendants came home from Sydney carrying measles, a disease the islands had never encountered before, and it spread through the group with a speed and mortality nothing in Fijian experience had prepared anyone for. By the early months of 1875 it had killed roughly a third of the population - among them Ro Vuthango, a redoubtable old fighting chief in the island's own interior who had led his own people for decades and now succumbed to an enemy no army could meet. The epidemic devastated the tribes still resisting Christian and colonial authority worst of all, and the resulting unrest, blamed by many on the anger of ancestral gods neglected under the new order, fed directly into the frontier war the colony's first governor fought to subdue the interior the following year. The kingdom Thakombau had spent his whole life building ended, in the end, not on a battlefield but on a warship's guest deck, carrying home a sickness that did more damage than any of his own wars ever had.