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Foreword

by Raymond Burr

AS ONE of the latter-day "men from Vavalagi"—I came to live in Fiji in 1965—my interest in, and admiration for, Captain Stanley Brown's selective history of this archipelago is of a personal nature: the people, tradition and terrain of this nearly perfect island, Naitauba (where I may be said, truly, to live), are threads in the fabric of his narrative, and as such, add to my understanding of and pleasure in this sovereign nation.

But Stanley Brown has written more than just a chronicle of Bligh, Tasman, adventurers, pirates and men of goodwill who found their several ways to Fiji; he has used this documentation to discuss problems and phenomena particularly pertinent to our time.

Confrontation between the old and the new, between East and West, the principles of yin and yang-in short, the strange interlocking interdependence of good and evil-are no more pertinent to 1872 than to 1972, and it is this universal paradox to which Captain Brown addresses himself through the medium of the historical episodes of Bligh and Whippy, Cakobau and Naulivou, indeed, all those influences national and personal, local and foreign, the men of Fiji and the men from "under the sky."

And yet, and this is where Men from Under the Sky embraces a far wider audience than merely those of us with a preoccupation with history or an intimate connection with Fiji, Captain Brown has observed an extraordinary thing: perhaps uniquely in the history of the world, certainly of the South Pacific, Fiji seemingly has absorbed the advent of other, more massive civilizations, taken what it considered good or productive and-in the main-retained its own sovereignty of people and place. Surely, an example of graceful and dignified civilization for the modern problems and quandaries that beset the world today!

One more personal observation: it comes as no surprise to me that such an affirmative and positive philosophy should come from the pen of Stanley Brown. A sailor whose marlinspike seamanship is legendary in these waters, he is also historian, archeologist, engineer, naturalist and indefatigable good friend-both to me and to Fiji.

Naitauba, Lau, Fiji