Land use on Mago, Fiji: 1865-1882.

Abstract

During the 1860s, settlers from Australia, New Zealand, America and Europe rushed to Fiji to buy land. The American Civil War (1861–65) had disrupted the supply of cotton, prices rose quickly, and an urgent search for new sources was stimulated. The suitability of Fiji’s environment for cotton growing had been reported by several observers in the late 1850s, and this laid the basis for the rush. Of the many cotton plantations established in Fiji, that on Mago was one of the most innovative and successful. Cotton was introduced into Fiji in the 1830s, and by the 1850s was growing wild, or ‘without attention’,2 in the vicinity of many villages. Samples of cotton from Fiji examined by the Cotton Supply Association, Manchester, in 1859 were reported ‘to be of qualities most desirable for the manufactures of this country ... [and] that such a range of excellent cotton is scarcely now received from any cotton growing country’.3 The Ž rst commercial shipment of cotton to Manchester from Fiji was made in 1860, before the American Civil War broke out, and thus some of the conditions for a rapid expansion of cotton production were already in place before the main in ux of would-be cotton growers arrived. Many cotton plantations were established and although cotton production in the southern states of the USA gradually recovered after the end of the Civil War, ‘plantation land use [in Fiji] in the period 1868 to 1872 was almost completely dominated by cotton planting’.5 Cotton contributed over 80% of all exports from Fiji in 1867 and again in 1870–73. Although there are descriptions of several plantations in the 1870s and 1880s, few detailed maps exist from this period to show the land use and layout of individual estates. Even the evidence put before the Land Claims Commission between 1876 and 1882 included few maps showing land use, although evidence of occupation and use that had been accepted by the Fijians of the area was often crucial to the outcome of a case. Thus the map of land use on Mago in 1882, which forms the centre piece of this paper, is of particular interest because of its relative rarity (Figure 1). Figure 1 is based on a map dated 18 June 1882 and drawn at a scale of 10 chains to one inch (1:7920) by G.G. Crompton, Licensed Surveyor. It was lodged in the map Ž les of the Department of Lands, Suva (Ž le number I.10) and copied for me in 1959–60. It represents the last phase of cotton growing on Mago, the results of some of the crop and livestock experimentation by the island’s Ž rst European planters, the Ryder brothers, and the beginning of a short-lived period of sugar production by the island’s next owners, the Mango [sic] Island Company Ltd. Figure 1 shows that in mid-1882 sugar nurseries had been established and an extensive area, mostly on basaltic soils, allocated for planting in sugar. Almost 80 years later, the only cash crop was coconuts, and the area under palms was almost identical to those areas used in 1882 for coconuts, coffee, cotton and other crops, or being prepared for sugar cane. The map