Walt Watson is probably dead by now. He was my neighbour in Tripoli. He was an American ‘ace TV reporter’ who had, amongst other adventures, accompanied Marilyn Munro on her tour of US military bases throughout Japan and South Korea. He was absent from his apartment in Garden City for a while. But when he reappeared, he told me he had been sent to the Belgian Congo because the US State Department had got wind of a potential attempt to remove the colonialists by force. Belgians were doing their utmost to get across the border to Kenya and safety. It was the first zephyr of what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan referred to as the ‘Wind of Change’ which became something of a gale for a while.

Some days later I was on duty at the RAF staging post a few miles south of Tripoli when several military aircraft arrived from the UK, India, Italy and Canada. They were on their way to the Congo to rescue Belgian colonists who were fleeing the attention of rioters wielding their machetes with intent to butcher white people. One of the aircraft returned carrying some passengers. Also on board were three wooden packing crates over which had been draped blue UN flags. The crates contained mutilated bodies of nuns. There was a high demand for and a consequent shortage of coffins in Leopoldville. Long ago King Leopold’s men had set a cruel precedent which the rioters emulated with enthusiasm.

The Congo descended rapidly into bloody chaos and attracted several retired British Army men as mercenaries. One of their leaders became known as ‘Mad Mike’ Hoare. He was a retired British Army major and his mercenary exploits in the Congo inspired a performance by the noted film star Richard Burton in the 1978 film ‘Wild Geese’. There is a tension amongst the military between the need for disciplined and cooperative behaviour and unorthodox heroism, The latter trait was exhibited often by the super-mercenary Vice Admiral Lord Cochrane who served in wars of independence with the Chilean, Brazilian and Greek navies whilst he was at odds with the British establishment between 1818 and 1825.  Mercenaries are interesting people and sometimes used as state proxies. The Russian Wagner group was Putin’s proxy army in Libya, and it helped him establish a profitable foothold in the Mediterranean and the Sahil.

There was a famous, and notably unorthodox, mercenary who operated in Fiji in the early days of the 19th century. He was Charlie Savage and his story, repeated as it is in many histories of Fiji, may be true in parts. He used his skill with firearms to support the ambitions of the chief of a warlike federation which was centred on the island of Bau, near the Rewa River estuary in Fiji’s largest island, Viti Levu. Missionaries have strong moral convictions which causes them to make unfavourable judgements about the likes of Charlie Savage. However, they provided us with the first written history of Fiji, so we need to keep this in mind when reading the first mention of him in their reports.

 So, we pick up the story in the reports of Christian missionaries Thomas Williams et al who were active in Fiji after Savage ended his career somewhat abruptly by being killed, cooked and consumed.  There was a tendency amongst British colonialists to criticise their fellow countrymen who go native as did Charlie Savage. There is an early mention in print of Charlie Savage in ‘Fiji and the Fijians’ by the sometime missionaries, Williams, James, Calvert, Rowe and Stringer.

 ‘’About 1804 a number of convicts escaped from New South Wales and settled amongst the [Fiji] islands. Within two or three years there were twenty of them: reckless, cruel, profligate men, whose muskets made them a terror to the enemies of their patrons; they lived by violence and the safe slaughter of savages armed only with primitive weapons; their reward was unrestrained licence, and their morals were that of a poultry yard.

Some of them were men of the most desperate wickedness, being regarded as monsters even by the ferocious cannibals with whom they were associated. These lawless men were twenty-seven in number on their arrival but in a few years the greater part had ended their careers, having fallen in the native wars, or in deadly quarrels amongst themselves.

A Swede named Savage who had some redeeming traits in his character, was acknowledged as the head man by the whites who was drowned and eaten by the natives at Weilea, in 1813’’

The language the missionaries use leaves us in no doubt that both the ferocious cannibals and the monstrous mercenaries needed the attention of the missionaries to repent of their sins and convert to Christianity. They did convert Fijians and precipitated the end of cannibalism, child culling and widow strangling. The missionaries do not say how these lawless men reached Fiji from Australia, but they do make a special case for ‘A Swede named Savage’. The majority of the ‘reckless, cruel, profligate men’ arrived in Fiji on merchant ships which were seeking cargoes of sandalwood.

Charlie Savage, who may have been Swedish, had arrived in Fiji from Tonga in an unorthodox manner. There are reliable sources who suggests that he had been a survivor of the armed brig ‘Port au Prince’ which had hit a reef off Tonga. His reputed skills as a marksman and fighting soldier, akin perhaps to those of the British Royal Marines, give credence to the claim.

Sailors with experience of ‘muskets and cannons’ were sought after crew members of ships owned and operated by merchant adventurers which carried ‘Letters of Marque’, as did the Port au Prince. She was a vessel with a doubtful history having at one time been employed in the transatlantic slave trade.  She is recorded as an English private ship of near 500 tons armed with 24 cannons and 8 carronades. She was thus armed and authorised, by virtue of the ‘Letter of Marque’ to capture or sink French and Spanish vessels. Preferably capture because she could put a prize crew aboard, sail them to a port ‘within the King’s dominion’ and sell them to the prize commissionaires.

England was at war with Napoleon’s France which is why the British Admiralty was issuing ‘Letters of Marque’ to armed merchantmen. The United States also issued Letters of Marque at this time and was engaged in an early form of Gun Boat Diplomacy in the Sandwich Island and Fiji.

Holders of Letters of Marque were known as Privateers. They were supposed to operate within the law. Owners were required to register their ship with the British Admiralty and to stand security for the sum of £1500. In return They could tackle and seize vessel and cargoes belonging to France and Spain.

The Port au Prince had been busy whaling and sealing and had dropped anchor off Tonga when she was boarded and looted by Tongans who may have failed to take the considerable treasure in gold coins she had aboard. The wreck has been located by divers recently. They may be hoping that some of the gold she carried is still amongst the decaying timbers.

The Tongans killed about half of her 60 odd crew and burnt her down to the waterline. Was Savage one of the survivors? From the evidence now available it seems very likely. He certainly found his way to Tonga and is said to have learned to speak Tongan

How did Savage get from Tonga to Fiji? By a remarkable series of chances. His story is bound up in that of an American brig called Eliza which came to grief on a reef as she was on her way to secure a cargo of cedarwood in Fiji. It is akin to that of a shipwreck with which I had some dealings in last century. My story may help us to see how he reached the island of Bau, the seat of a powerful War lord, and find employment there as mercenary.

Navigating amongst the Fiji Islands is hazardous because of the extensive reefs which are at the same time amongst its precious assets. This is an anecdote I wrote in my own diary sometime after leaving Fiji.

SHIPWRECK ON A REEF WITH DIAMONDS

Sometime in the dead of night I received a telephone call from a senior personage in the trading company for which I worked in Fiji. I am not sure why it was me he called but I did have the experience to deal with his problem. He told me that the company’s ship, the SS Lakemba, on its way from Suva to Sydney, was shipwrecked on a reef. The SS Lakemba was an old-fashioned cargo and passenger ship which had long tramped her way from Vancouver to Sydney and back via Hawaii, Western Samoa, and Fiji. She had reached the end of her honourable life and was to be paid off when she arrived in Sidney. Now she was about to die. My caller told me a rescue ship was on its way to save the passengers and crew who would be coming ashore in due course. What, he wanted to know, could I do about it?

I had dealt with similar events in Libya. It was easy to tell him to set about chartering an aircraft to take them to Sidney and to arrange hotel rooms for them in Suva whilst we waited for the rescue ship to arrive. He asked me to see if a suitable aircraft would be available whilst he conferred with his superiors. I called Qantas and they had a Boeing 707 in Sidney we could use for a price. The ship’s owners agreed to charter it and instructed me to do so and to make the other arrangements to get the passengers from the dockside in Suva to Sidney as smoothly and quickly as possible. By the time the rescue ship, the Cable and Wireless vessel ‘Retriever’, arrived alongside Suva docks we had staff, accommodation and ground transport ready. We had also chartered Fiji Airways to fly the passengers from Suva to the international airport at Nadi to meet the Qantas charter: interesting but not exiting.

It was the consummate seamanship of the captain and crew of the CS Retriever which saved one hundred and fifty survivors four of whom were in their eighties. The captain of the SS Lakemba had kept her engines going and the propellers turning until the rescue had been all but completed. Soon after they were stopped the ship fell off the reef into deep water. It was, as they say, beyond salvage.

When the rescue ship docked, I went aboard with a representative of the wreck’s owners. I found the rescued passengers in a saloon. They were venting their frustration in emphatic terms. I stood on a chair and explained the arrangements I had made. This cheered them up somewhat. I waited with the owner’s representative at the foot of the gangway as they disembarked. A somewhat distraught passenger engaged us in conversation. This is the gist of his story in so far as I remember it.

He had joined the ship in Vancouver intending to emigrate to Australia. He arranged for his camper van to be loaded aboard as deck cargo. He would use it to travel around Australia looking for a place to settle. The camper van had, of course, gone down with the ship. He added that he had invested his savings in diamonds. He had concealed them in the bodywork of his camper van and been unable to retrieve them before he was rescued.

The Fiji reefs are spectacular. I hope that Global Warming is not killing them.

They had a terminal effect on the American brig Eliza which was on her way to collect a cargo of Sandalwood from the southwest coast of Vanua Levu, Fiji’s second largest island, but was off course by a goodly margin. She was off the Island of Nairai in the Lomaviti archipelago when she hit a reef. According to the dairy of one of her crew members this occurred:  

‘’On the 20th of June 1808, being in S. lat. 17, 40, E. Long 179, at about eleven o’clock p.m. the man who had the lookout on the forecastle, seeing breakers but just ahead, cried out “with the greatest vehemence, and gave us the alarm. I then was sick in my bunk below, but with the others, I jumped out, but before we could get on deck the vessel struck on the rocks. We caught the axe and cut away the rigging and the masts went over the side, and as they fell broke our whaleboat in pieces, but we got the long boat out and put the money in it to the amount of 34000 dollars, the navigating implements, muskets, a cask of powder and balls, cutlasses and some of our clothes: we also lashed two canoes together, and John Husk and William Brown went on board of them to keep them astern of the long boat and heading the seas, while mase[sic] the rest of us went into the long boat. Our fears were great that, if the vessel went to pieces, we should be killed……’’

Where had the brig been? On the 1^st  of May 1808 the Eliza had set sail from Port Jackson in Australia and twelve days later arrived in Tonga. It was there that two survivors of the Port au Prince were living. They both persuaded the Captain of Eliza to take them on as experienced and useful crew members.  One was called Charlie Savage who was to become a notable figure in the history and folklore of Fiji.

Somehow Savage travelled the considerable distance from Nairai and wreck of the Eliza to the Island of Ba where the War Lord was aggressively striving to become the paramount chief of Fiji.  Legend has it that whilst he was on Nairai a ‘canoe’ voyaging from Bau stopped at the island and recruited him as the War Lord’s ‘white mercenary’. We know nothing of the inducements offered but we know that he took several muskets and quantities of powder and ball with him. The Fiji Times published an interview with his decedents living in Fiji today. They claim the news of Savage’s presence had reached the Paramount Chief of Bau, Ratu Naulivou, who sent the ‘canoe’ to offer him employment.

Historians sum all this up by saying that the brig Eliza brought the musket and Charlie Savage and thus changed the nature of warfare in Fiji. Some say that Charlie Savage and his muskets propelled the Cakobau dynasty to the paramount chieftainship of Fiji but that is too simplistic. However, the muskets alone would have made a notable difference because the Fijian weapons of war were only effective for skirmishing. They were mainly bows and arrows, spears and clubs. Before a battled there was a great deal of posturing and threatening and once everyone was sufficiently motivated, close order fighting began resulting in a few casualties. If possible, each side would try to carry off their dead otherwise they would be butchered, cooked and consumed by their enemies. These intense motivational events have persisted in the Thimbi. Today the superb New Zealand Rugby teams perform the Haka to terrify their opponents before the starter’s whistle. The Fijian Rugby team perform a similar war dance called a Cibi. The Fijians pronounce that ‘Thimbi’, a name which understates its power to intimidate opponents.

We have become almost inured to the sight on our TV screens of large numbers of deaths and numerous casualties in the burgeoning warfare of the early days of this century. But it was possible to survive the wounds inflicted by spears and clubs. A lead ball shot at short range from a musket by comparison caused severe and often fatal wounds. A good marksman could pick out and kill Chiefs and leaders who died as if by magic, creating confusion and panic. When they were first used in Fiji, they were psychologically damaging. Today we find combatants are getting used to drones but in their early days they created panic on the front line.

However. There was a fundamental limitation with muskets. They took time to load. Modern films based on Bernard Cornwall’s novels about the character he calls Sharp who ‘fought’ in the Peninsular battles of the war against Napoleon have shown how this was done and how crack soldiers who did it well were sought after. British infantrymen who were drilled in their use and could manage three shots a minute starting with their weapons already loaded. Charlie Savage is said to have been highly effective with them. This is how he is perceived in Fiji today. It is part of a piece in the Fiji Times dated 11^th January 2015:

‘It was a sight completely alien to the Bau people. A strange white skinned man with red hair and beard was being accorded rites and ceremony normally befitting a great warrior, more-so, one of their own. Many Bauan natives had never seen a white man before, except that Kalle Svensson aka Charlie Savage, was no ordinary kaivalagi (white) man.

The giant Swede single-handedly turned the tide of war in Fiji when Bauan warlord, Naulivou, was determined to overwhelm his enemies and stamp his dominance throughout the land. But Savage’s influence would grow and legend has it that the sons he had by high ranking women, given to him in marriage, would be killed to prevent anyone usurping the chiefly leadership at Bau’.

Often repeated stories about Savage are still circulated. Foremost amongst them has him standing in a canoe on the Rewa River firing his muskets at the people of a village. He kills so many villagers that their dead bodies are built up in a wall behind which survivors sheltered.

The other and most likely story is that he had a ‘arrow proof sedan chair’ made of coconut fibre and other vegetation in which he sat with some preloaded muskets and was carried into range of his enemies. So protected, he fired though an opening, cooly picking out leaders who fell dead as though by magic.

He was specially treated by then War Lord of Bau and given a highborn woman as a wife. That led to trouble in the end because his son by her would have had some claim to the War Lord’s place when he died. His was therefore killed. Savage had other wives with whom he had children. His descendants are living in Fiji under the name of Shaw. Their story appeared in the Fiji Times dated May 29^th, 2017.

Savage himself was killed when attempting to rescue some of the crew of a merchantman who had been recruited by a War Lord to settle a dispute which became a shooting war. They had become surrounded and were in mortal, danger. Savage offered to negotiate with their besiegers. He approached them unarmed. A fatal mistake.  His head was held under water in a convenient pond until he drowned and then, it seems, they butchered him, cooked him and ate him.

One small point to make. He is often referred to as being Swedish. He may have been. The claim needs more evidence in my view.

The Hakluyt Society published ‘The Journal of William Lockerby – Sandalwood Trader in the Fijian Islands 1808-1809’. In it the Journal is preceded by a diligent and scholarly analyses of the arrival of white men among the Fijian Islands and observations on their effect on the social system they encountered and which they changed or, as one critic has said, mutilated by 1840. There are now numerous scholarly papers and publications analysing the effect of ‘colonialism’ on the plight of native Fijians and the Indo-Fijians who live now under the military government of Rear Admiral Bananarama.

There are other factors to considered. The Fiji Islands were long isolated behind the extensive coral reefs. They are still, as I have shown, dangerous to unwary mariners and were more so in the days of sail. In Tahiti the arrival the HMS Bounty was greeted by canoes bearing welcoming men and women. No such welcome was offered when ships arrived amongst the Fiji Islands. There, the women were absent and the men often menacing. The story of the mutiny on HMS Bounty is being scrutinised carefully and new conclusions drawn. There are crucial differences between the arrival of Whiteman in Tahiti and Fiji.

Those early sailing brigs which penetrated the Fijian reefs and fetched up in Sandalwood Bay loaded their holds and bilges with the valuable wood. They were privateers which were crewed by men who were educated in the ways and means of rope and sail, musket and cannon and used to living in close and sparse quarters under the rule of hard driving masters. Notably they lived for long periods without women. However, they expected a share of the profits and were volunteers not pressed men.

Some of these men were left behind or were put ashore as troublemakers or were survivors of wrecks. They were recruited by the War Lords engaged in internecine warfare and favoured with status and women, sometimes with high borne woman, with whom they had numerous children.

The warfare and the influence of these white men helped to catalyse the mutation of Fiji’s ancient social system. They were followed by Christian missionaries of which more annon.

John Oakes

24th December 2024