This is the memory palace, I'm Nate de Mayo.

Nothing good ever seemed to come of the ships that came to their islands.

The first were Spanish in 1606, but they were good enough to leave.

Then Captain Cook stopped by in 1774, claimed the islands for England, and then he left

too.

But the English couldn't leave well enough alone.

That was their whole thing back then.

In the people of these South Pacific islands, islands they called Ivanoatu, but Captain

Cook called the New Hebrides.

These people had heard stories from their father's fathers, who had been told by their father's

fathers and on and on.

About Englishmen who tried to take all of their sandalwood trees, and tried to make them

believe in a white god.

And they also heard the stories of how in the 1830s, their ancestors kicked the Englishman

out after five years of fighting and occasionally eating them.

And of how three decades later the English came back, because they could never just leave

well enough alone.

And the French came to, looking for people to work their plantations in Fiji in Australia

and elsewhere.

And when half of the men on your islands had been taken away in ships to who knows where,

it's hard to muster much resistance.

And so the islanders' fathers, fathers' fathers worked for the English and the French.

...