Language Contact since 1865

Abstract The first acquisition of land by Europeans from ni-Vanuatu for plantation purposes was on Tanna in 1867, when Henry Ross Lewin purchased 324 hectares to establish a cotton plantation. This was a good time to grow cotton as the American Civil War of the 1860s had caused cotton shortages and driven up the world price. Not only did Lewin set himself up as a cotton planter, but he had also been involved in the earlier recruitment of Tannese labourers to other islands, presumably to cut sandalwood and later to work on other plantations (Scarr 196T 16). He employed 120 Efate labourers on his plantation on Tanna in 1873. A number of other Europeans acquired land on Tanna, generally employing labourers from Efate. Relations between the Tannese and European planters on the island were evidently not good, in part probably because the Tannese and the Europeans had very different ideas about land ‘ownership’ and the rights that this entailed (Van Trease 1987: 19). By 1874 Lewin had been killed and European attempts to develop plantations on Tanna came to a temporary halt.