THE SOLOMON ISLANDS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 79, 23 September 1911, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE SOLOMON ISLANDS.

AS THEY WERE. PHYSICAL CONSTITUTION AND HISTORY. (By Professor Macmillan Brown, in the Sydney .Morning Herald.) A glance at the map of the Pacific Ocean will do more than the most elaborate description to show the relations of the Solomon Group amongst the thousands of islands that stipple the centra] and western regions pf the great sea. It is part of a bow-ishaped series that stretches from Japan in the north through the Philippines, the east of the Malay Archipelago, the islands off the north* coast of Now Guinea* the New Hebrides, Fiji, Tonga, New Zealand. It is not far from the centre or handgrip of the bow; and a gap separates its most westerly members, the Bismarck Archipelago, from Celebes, and its most easterly from the New Hebrides, whilst a wider gap separates the latter from Fiji. There is more than mere metaphor linking up this iiccklase of archipelagoes. They are all actively volcanic and in process of rising, whilst the inner necklace of the 'Ladrones, Carolines, Marshalls, Gilberts, Ellice, Union, Paumotus, and Austral groups has lost its volcanic energy and is in the process of subsiding. The latter evidently lies on the old volcanic fissure of the Pacific to the west and south-west of its central abyss. The former lies along its more recent fissure. As the one ceased its activity, the other opened and began a new rising and erup- j tive period. The northern horns' or ends' of the two unite in the still active Ladrones and Bonins to the south of Japan. The Solomons reveal best the northwest and south-west direction of the southern part of its arc. They consist of two parallel series of islands that stretch like long beads in this direction, the longest being in the more northerly series, Bougainville, Choiseul, Ysabel, Malaita, only the first having a stil> active volcano. The southern series has , many smaller islands that are quite clearly craters. Savo was in action when the Spaniards saw it in the sixteenth century, and again in the middle of last century; and both it and Narovo have steaming hot springs. Many of them show quite plainly their terraces of recent elevation, all of coraline formation; Whilst Naone, south of Bougainville, shows in its sedimentary strata its long period of deep submersion. The best example of recent elevation is to he found away in the south of the New Hebrides; half a century ago the Presbyterian Mission ship, the Dayspring, lost her anchor in deep water off Tanna. It is now on the top of a hill that has taken the place of the deep bay. Like the other groups in the sickleshaped series, the * Solomons have been changing their size, height, and mutual relations throughout terrestrial history, and if a cinematograph film had been stretched over theix during that period, and then spun before our eyes in a few seconds, it would have recorded a bewildering dance of these green islets; but two alternating movements would have given the rhythm—elevation and subsidence. Now they were strung together, again they were scattered in farflung islets. In one of those upward movements they must have, linked on to New •Guinea and got part of its flora, and fauna: in another they must have linked on to the nearest groups of Polynesia to the south-east, and then thev acquired their less dominant kinship with Polynesian flora and fauna.

THE PHYSICAL KINSHIP OF THE . SOLOMON ISLANDERS. In a more recent period, probably the elevation preceding the subdence that has just ceased, man had evolved in the lands to the southeast of Asia, and with his negroid features passed into New Guinea and Australia, and doubtless into those "roups that are rightly called Melanesia, or the archipelago of the blacks. One of the features of these negroids that has made the greatest impressions on mv mind is the deep cleft at the root'of the nose; it is universal, and seems to link up the Mclanesians with the Tasmanians and Australians. But that is a very ancient kinship. For the short head and the prognathoid face that prevail amongst the Solomon Islanders point to the negrittos or negroid pygmies of Malaysia and New Guinea as their kin rather than the long-headed and tall negroids. Over Melanesia, as over Australia, flowed waves of dark Caucasianism, raising the 'stature and straightening out the woolly hair somewhat. But the Caucasian waves that reached Melanesia were fewer and feebler, for the straight black hair and European-like features are rarer there, and the face-hair is not so luxuriant as amongst the Australians of the north.

There is. however, noticeable amongst these dark negroids a considerable frequency of light brown, almost auburn, hair—a phenomenon that is not reported from Australia. I have observed it in various islands of the Solomons, but it is most frequent amongst the boys from Mulaita, the most Polynesianiscd of the large islands, and that which lies most in the eye of the south-east trade winds. And this light hair is wavy or curly rather than tufty or woolly, and generally goes with features that are decidedly European. Several traders, recruiters, and planters assured me that they generally belonged to the families of chiefs. This light hair is still more common in Polynesia; it is more the rule than the exception with children up to puberty in that central region of the Pacific;' and it is to be found amongst the Indians of Central America, especially near the Pacific coast, and on the scalps of mummies on the coast of Peru. Here the traders have fallen into the habit of calling it albinoism, but in all the specimens I have seen the eyes were not pink, and, though the complexion was lighter, there was no absence of pigment. INFLUENCES FROM THE WEST. Every indication, in fact, seems to I point to Polynesia as the most fertile I source of foreign influence, on Melanesia. There have been influences from other directions. One is manifest in the loom of the Santa nz group as coming from the north: it is the same as the loom of Micronesia and the Philippines, and not unlike the loom of the Ainus of Japan, and that of the Indians of Central America; it has no kinship elsewhere; and the Santa Cruzians are too dull to have invented it independently, lint most inllnenee has come from the Malay Archipelago: thence came the i chewing of betel nut with lime and the leaf of a pepper plant. This got as far east as the Santa Cruz group and the Polynesian island of Tikopia, near it, but no farther. Had this left Malaysia later than the beginning of our era iron implements and weapons would have come, too, for the iron age began there just before our era. It, just overlaps the region of kava-drinking, which came from Polynesia. The only other custom of importance that came from the west was head-hunting, but it reached down only to the middle of the Solomons, South Georgia, Ysabel, and Xai'o\o: it cleaned Ysabel, Kulambangra. Rendova, and many small islands wholly or almost wholly of population, and left them the openest arena for the planters. Skulls are valued as ceremonial decorations farther east, but

there is not a consuming passion for them as there was in the Rubiana group of South Georgia. The destruction of their village by his Majesty's ship Monarch in 1895 and similar measures have rooted out the. habit, though missionaries and traders still occasionally lose their heads because they are needed for some ceremonial.

An art that came from the west shows how fitful was the migration against the trade winds, even though it could either coast or have land in sight all the way from Malaysia. It is pottery. We have it on the south-west coast of Now Guinea, and to the north in the Bismarck Archipelago; Bougainville is the only island of the Solomons that makes it: llaga is the only one of the New Hebrides, and that "perhaps the least fertile and least progressive of the group. To the south-west New Caledonia alone had the art. and that it had it early is shown by the finding of pieces of native earthenware 20ft below the surface. Fiji was the farthest east the art reached, though the Tongans had begun to learn it from them. That it went no farther into Polynesia shows how closed an area that region ' was during neolithic times. Had any women from .Malaysia or the potterymaking islands of Melanesia gone back with the Polynesian expeditions into their own groups in neolithic times we should undoubtedly have found earthenware in the central and eastern Pacific.