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"THE SAVAGE SOLOMONS"

An All-Black Who Became A Cannibal King -And Other Wonders ee oe

T#0uGH the Solomons have been much in the news and in our minds, the usual "background information" has been lacking as detailed accounts of the ‘operations there. Our correspondent, C.R., went right through the archipelago some years ago, as "supercargo" (to use the old Pacific term) on one of the few vessels that make the trip.

HE Solomons, first of the South Sea Islands to be discovered by Europeans 500 years before Cook, were almost the last to be annexed, and quite the last to be civilised. Discover why, and you have their portrait. I had experienced the first reason before ever I saw the jungle-clad peak of Guadalcanar as high, roughly, as Egmont, rise slowly out of a heaving greasy ocean. All the way up through the New Hebrides from New Caledonia, one forested peak rising ahead as the last shimmered into invisibility behind, the air had grown hotter, heavier, stickier. Such landfalls as we made by night were pleasant enough: Where we lounged along the rail listening to the distant swish of our wake along the coral coast like an echo, and watching the flicker of torches on flashing paddles and sweat glistening black skins where the flying fish were being attracted mothwise into the nets. But there are good reasons against approaching many Solomons "harbours" by night. And in the day a night romantic shore would as often as not show itself as just a brilliant and dark jungle mass climbing steeply into a ceiling of everlasting rain (mountain figures run as high as 500 inches a year!) and overhanging a stinking "beach" of crocodile snouts and cot-tages-on-stilts among mud and mangroves, Speaking of the Weather But it might have been worse. In trading and mission houses ashore, small and low, with thick steel cables anchoring the roof down to hurricane anchors, they would astonish me, the newcomer, with tales of the November weatherwhole islands blown bare as if by a forest fire, dwellings carried through the air and flying down smashing like eggshells, giant coconut palms snapped and strewn about like matches. And on ship I was told of the big four-hundred-ton Southern Cross IV. picking up after one bad year the crews of no fewer than 16 smaller schooners irreparably wrecked, having herself worn out the gale by heading into it for two whole days under full steam pressure. Two volcanoes smoked away. A year later one blew up. A tidal wave 20 feet high swept the low islands, dashing men to death among the coconut plantations. On the mountainous islands, boulders bounding down the slopes crushed workers in the gardens.... In the north there are pleasant enough proprietary islands where life, smoothly organised to the smallest detail, moves every moment of the year to the nod of Lord Leverhulme. But by and large

it is easy to see the primary good reason why the Encyclopedia reads-* annexed 1893!" Still Some Cannibals When I tell you that three years before my visit the Solomons were under martial law, and that even to-day on Hebridean Melekula human flesh still figures in the ceremonial Nambu feasts (and probably does too in the fastnesses of Bougainville’s 10,000ft. Mt. Balbi and other high inland areas), you will guess at the second good reason why our omnivorous Imperial leviathans left these islands like mustard on the plate side-until 1942 suddenly showed them to be bulwarks, daggers, spearheads, stepping-stones, wedges, and other metaphors of the game of power. With Central Borneo and New Guinea they remain the world’s last patches of savagery-Old Style. Because the archipelago forms, within the New Hebrides, a wide-mouthed stocking of land into which the defeated of Indonesia have been successfully emptied, every island of size is divided among many diverse tribes, speaking different languages, practising different cultures, and almost always at enmity. Some villagers are naked. Some wear certain ornaments or a grass kilt. Some are tattooed. One Guadalcanar area has totem castes. Rennell Island is not even Melanesian. Witch-Doctors, Too But everywhere, except in the Christianised areas, the islanders live in dread of ancestral spirits and of the magic of the witch-doctors. Every village has its own wooden godlets, each performing some specialised job. Some bring success to the crops, some fish to the nets, some smoke 3 8 the eyes of attacking enemies. witchmen, on the other hand, can-for a consideration-bless or curse with equal effect crops, nets, tools, canoes, weapons, and marriage unions. Drums are always booming in the jungles and conch -shells relaying news with almost radio efficiency. By day the darkened hut-holders sleep insecurely, twitching at the flies, except when the women are out hoeing queta or taro or yams, or when their work-exempted lords are pursuing some Governmentforbidden high-mountain blood-feud with bone-tipped throwing spears and ludicrously inefficient bows. But as gigantic bats steal eerily abroad and mosquitoes begin their ceaseless whine for blood the people awake with the breeze and chatter and dance through the night hours in the safe circles of firelight. Altogether, those who imagine the Pacific Islanders as having led an idyllic existence until corrupted by the mis(Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) sionary’s prohibitions and the trader’s cotton clothes- will be speedily disillusioned by a few days spent among these unwashed Melanesians, lips stained vivid red with betelnut chewing, hairmop bleached yellow with lime, leaf skirt crawling with vermin, body (almost as often as not) hideous with gigantic cysts or suppurating sores, and face sullen with ancestral fears. Both the missionaries themselves and their endeavours (putting content into their verbal message by long years of welfare service) will extort any visitor’s admiration. Under constant threat of fever and climate, storms and hostilities, appetite flagging from monotonous diet, mental balance tottering under long loneliness, and spirits rarely stimulated by visible success, they occasionally face more sudden and spectacular disasters. Take the case of the Dunedin man, who, going to the Reef Islands to erect a mission house, was so impressed that he begged to be given the theological training to occupy it. Once when passing between two of his islands his whaleboat was swept by a sudden squall and carried out of sight of land. For 17 torrid days, without water or compass, he was swept hither and thither, sometimes painfully paddling all day towards some sighted or suspected land, only to find it vanish again in the succeeding night. And then in midnight blackness he was flung through the surf of a reef on to a lagoon -to discover himself by dawn light on his own home beach! All Black Among the All-Blacks One day, too, alone and clad only in a fathom of calico loincloth, there landed on cannibal San Cristoval the Rev. Dr. Charles Edward Fox, M.A., Litt.D., and sometime Senior Scholar of the University of New Zealand and an All Black half-back. Though the islanders knew hite men only as treacherous " blackirders," he was still alive next morning. And thereafter, as month after month, year after year, passed by he graduated from hourly danger through contemptuous toleration and then halfhearted acceptance to actual bloodbrotherhood with the chief’s son. The

ceremony of opening the veins and} mingling the bloods signified a complete transference of identities-names, titles, possessions, wives. So that, when years later the former Cannibal King died, the missionary buried him as " Charles Fox." And, though he refused to become tribal chief in his place, this University graduate and ex-All Black still pays a yearly poll tax as " Martin Takahaina." A Miss By 25 Miles The Spanish names on most of the islands are due to their being discovered by the Mendana expedition, out from Peru in 1567. The pilot Pedro Fernandez de Quiros, who brought its shattered remnants at last to Manila, spent the next quarter century dreaming and intriguing to get back to colonise the "Islas de Solomon." For himself he believed them to skirt Terra Australis itself, the mysterious undiscovered Great Southern Land.’ Sure enough, when in 1593 he at last got command of the fleet of his desire and crossed the Pacific slightly to the south, there he saw a long lofty continuous coastline. Naming his landfall Austrialia del Espiritu Santo with all the sensations of Columbus, he surveyed out a "New Jerusalem" on the " Jordan." Then a storm drove him out of the bay and back to Mexico in most mysterious circumstances (a hushed-up mutiny?) for he was ceértainly no worse a seaman than his lieutenant Luis Vaes de Torres who, riding out the storm, discovered in the process that the new-found Continent was an illusion caused by the overlapping from their angle of approach of the New Hebridean chain. Torres therefore continued west looking first for the true Australia and secondly for a way home to Spain. He found the latter in the Strait that now bears his name. And the former he saw just 25 miles away, but did not investigate supposing it to be "just another of these blank blank blank islands" .(I paraphrase his Spanish), or By * At the moment it looks as though the Japanese, also running into trouble in the Solomons, may miss Australia by a g00d many more than Torres’ 25 miles.

This article text was automatically generated and may include errors. View the full page to see article in its original form.I whakaputaina aunoatia ēnei kuputuhi tuhinga, e kitea ai pea ētahi hapa i roto. Tirohia te whārangi katoa kia kitea te āhuatanga taketake o te tuhinga.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19420904.2.15

Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 6

Word count
Tapeke kupu
1,548

"THE SAVAGE SOLOMONS" New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 6

"THE SAVAGE SOLOMONS" New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 167, 4 September 1942, Page 6

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