Susâni by Louis Becke — Read

A few weeks ago I was reading a charmingly written book by a lady (the wife of a distinguished savant) who had spent three months on Funafuti, one of the lagoon islands of the Ellice Group. Now the place and the brown people of whom she wrote were once very familiar to me, and her warm and generous sympathy for a dying race stirred me greatly, and when I came across the name "Funâfala, " old, forgotten memories awoke once more, and I heard the sough of the trade wind through the palms and the lapping of the lagoon waters upon the lonely beaches of Funâfala, as Senior, the mate of the _Venus_, and myself watched the last sleep of Susâni.

Funâfala is one of the many islands which encircle Funafuti lagoon with a belt of living green, and to Funâfala--"the island of the pandanus palm"--Senior and I had come with a party of natives from the village on the main island to spend a week's idleness. Fifty years ago, long before the first missionary ship sailed into the lagoon, five or six hundred people dwelt on Funâfala in peace and plenty--now it holds but their bones, for they were doomed to fade and vanish before the breath of the white man and his civilisation and "benefits, " which to the brown people mean death, and as the years went by, the remnant of the people on Funâfala and the other islets betook themselves to the main island--after which the lagoon is named--for there the whale-ships and trading schooners came to anchor, and there they live to this day, smitten with disease and fated to disappear altogether within another thirty years, and be no more known to man except in the dry pages of a book written by some learned ethnologist.