World's apart

Conkers on a wooden dish that we brought back from the Fiji Islands almost half a century ago. Little did I imagine when playing conkers as a young tyke that one day I would travel to the South Seas! 

The Wesleyan missionary the Rev. Thomas Williams, was the principal authority upon the state of society among the Fijians when Europeans first came into contact with them. With his wife and a few other dedicated colleagues he conducted his ministry in the considerable hardship and danger of the cannibal islands of Fiji between 1840 and 1852. He described his experiences in Fiji and the Fijians: The Islands and their inhabitants published in 1858. In the book he illustrated a dish of similar style and described it as a priest's inspirational yaqona dish in duck form, in Fijian a daveniyaqona vakaga, used within the Spirit Temple. Yaqona, a mildly narcotic brew made from the plant Piper methysticum was drunk from the dish by the bete, the priest, via a straw.