For, in the years 1869 and 1870, if not before, the captains of the labour ships, finding that a sufficient supply of willing natives could not be procured, had begun to cajole them on board.  When they went to trade, they were thrust under hatches, and carried off, and if the Southern New Hebrides became exhausted, and the labour ships entered on those seas where the ‘Southern Cross’ was a welcome visitor, these captains sometimes told the men that ’the Bishop gave no pipes and tobacco, he was bad, they had better hold with them.’  Or else ’the Bishop could not come himself, but had sent this vessel to fetch them.’  Sometimes even a figure was placed on deck dressed in a black coat, with a book in his hand, according to the sailors’ notion of a missionary, to induce the natives to come on deck, and there they were clapped under hatches and carried off.

In 1870, H.M.S.  ‘Rosario,’ Captain Palmer, brought one of these vessels, the ‘Daphne,’ into Sydney, where the master was tried for acts of violence, but a conviction could not be procured, and, as will be seen in the correspondence, Bishop Patteson did not regret the failure, as he was anxious that ships of a fair size, with respectable owners, should not be deterred from the traffic, since the more it became a smuggling, unrecognised business, the worse and more unscrupulous men would be employed in it.

But decoying without violence began to fail; the natives were becoming too cautious, so the canoes were upset, and the men picked up while struggling in the water.  If they tried to resist, they were shot at, and all endeavours at a rescue were met with the use of firearms.

They were thus swept off in such numbers, that small islands lost almost all their able-bodied inhabitants, and were in danger of famine for want of their workers.  Also, the Fiji planters, thinking to make the men happier by bringing their wives, desired that this might be done, but it was not easy to make out the married couples, nor did the crews trouble themselves to do so, but took any woman they could lay hands on.  Husbands pursued to save the wives, and were shot down, and a deadly spirit of hatred and terror against all that was white was aroused.

There is a still lower depth of atrocity, but as far as enquiry of the Government at Sydney can make out, unconnected with labour traffic, but with the tortoise-shell trade.  Skulls, it will be remembered, were the ornament of old Iri’s house at Bauro, and skulls are still the trophies in the more savage islands.  It seems that some of the traders in tortoise-shell are in the habit of assisting their clients by conveying them in their vessels in pursuit of heads.  There is no evidence that they actually do the work of slaughter themselves, though suspicion is strong, but these are the ‘kill-kill’ vessels in the patois of the Pacific, while the kidnappers are the ‘snatch-snatch.’  Both together, these causes were working up the islanders to a perilous pitch of suspicion and exasperation during the years 1870, 1871, and thus were destroying many of the best hopes of the fruit of the toils of all these years.  But the full extent of the mischief was still unknown in Norfolk Island, when in the midst of the Bishop’s plans for the expedition of 1870 came the illness from which he never wholly recovered.