Tonga Islands

Over past years, the auction house has sold items including a twelve-bolt copper diver's helmet for PS3,000, a palm leaf club from the Tonga Islands, which made PS5,800, a four-string banjo for PS2,200, a New Zealand rugby jersey from the Wales All Blacks game of 1905 which realised PS10,000 and a sevenfoot-tall bronze model of a stag, which sold for PS7,800.

He stayed in Tonga for about four years before travelling back to Britain on a passing ship, recounting his adventures to amateur anthropologist John Martin in "An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands".

But unlike these truculent posses working for the Spanish crown, the first white people who settled in the Tonga Islands were beachcombers, and the missionaries of the London Missionary Society who arrived a little later were quite surprised to find some countrymen, though the missionaries soon fled when civil war broke out.