Combat· Fiji Punitive Expeditions
Waya Punitive Expedition
A reprisal in the Fiji islands for the murder of American traders.
After two American citizens trading at Waya, in the Yasawa group, were killed by the islanders, a landing force of Marines and sailors went ashore on 30 September 1858 to exact punishment. The Americans engaged the Fijian defenders, who resisted, and destroyed the village. Several of the landing party were wounded in the fighting, though no American deaths are recorded. The action was the second of the decade's major American punitive expeditions in Fiji, of a piece with the long-standing policy of answering attacks on American commerce in the South Pacific with force. It echoed the reprisals the Wilkes Expedition had carried out in the same waters in 1840, and it reaffirmed, to the island communities, that the killing of American traders would bring an armed response from the warships that ranged the Pacific.
Record no. 384