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Hatchet

© Larry Low

During the depths of the Depression, wealthy individuals employed their capital to great advantage. In 1932, John Paul Getty bought shares in companies that later sold for 100 times their purchase price. Other financiers took advantage of desperate economic conditions to purchase artifacts for a pittance.

A hatchet, patiently preserved and said to be of historical significance, was purchased for fifty dollars from a tribal chieftain, who ruled over a remote village, high on the principal island of a group that had been tarred with the Cannibal Isles appellation.

In 1933, two gentlemen, bent on acquiring authentic indigenous instruments on behalf of a foundation, which shall remain nameless, disembarked from the P & O liner, Orcades. Guided by reliable locals, they ventured into the interior of Viti Levu, the largest of the "Cannibal Isles." After a three-day trek through rain forest, rain shadow grasslands and more than one arduous climb from bamboo thicket lowlands thick with mosquitoes, the motley crew straggled into the village of Navatusila, the most remote and one of the more notorious of Fijian highland villages. Notoriety stemmed from an incident that had occurred, not far from here, some sixty odd years prior to the visit of the artifact seekers. Notoriety provided the impetus for their visit. The two gentlemen were accorded more cordial treatment than was an earlier visitor, the Reverend Thomas Baker. However, the locals could not resist skinning the late arrivals just a tad.

The locals did have the decency to wait until the buyers had departed the colony before they crowed that their visitors, having paid good money for a worthless hatchet, would have felt at home in the pages of Gulliver's Travels. When I stumbled across the hatchet yarn, I went so far as to determine the weapon's present location but not its provence. Duly catalogued, it resides, you will be happy to learn, in a museum in Chicago. I am sorry to report that a recent event, of far greater import, renders moot the authenticity of said hatchet.

Early in the week, which was to end altogether too abruptly on the Lord's Day, July 21, 1867, Reverend Thomas Baker of the London Missionary Society, accompanied by a party of Fijians, ventured inland. In an effort to save souls, who had retreated from the rule of Cakobau /Thakambow/, a warrior chief who made himself king, Baker set out to convert Fijians who had retreated from the terror of Cakobau's rule. After a trek of several days, Baker and his party of recently converted Fijians arrived in the village of Navatusila where they were welcomed warmly.