Âmona; The Child; And The Beast; And Others

Âmona was, as his master so frequently told him—accentuating the remark with a blow or a kick—only "a miserable kanaka. " Of his miserableness there was no doubt, for Denison, who lived in the same house as he did, was a daily witness of it—and his happiness. Also, he was a kanaka—a native of Niué, in the South Pacific; Savage Island it is called by the traders and is named on the charts, though its five thousand sturdy, brown-skinned inhabitants have been civilised, Christianised, and have lived fairly cleanly for the past thirty years.