John Hall James, an Australian, was born in Richmond, Victoria, in 1848. He went to Fiji at the height of the cotton boom in 1866, took up land on Viti Levu, and returned to Australia eight or nine years later after a hurricane had destroyed his crops. He died in Melbourne in 1923.
The correspondence, which covers the period 1870 - 1875, and the diary of the Ba Campaign, May 1873, give a vivid idea of the life and attitudes of a European planter in Fiji just before and just after Cession.<BR><BR>For further descriptions see <I>Transactions and Proceedings of the Fiji Society</I>, 1958-59, Vol.7, pp.73-89.