Fifteen years or more ago, old Ingova, the notorious head-hunting chief of Rubiana lagoon, was about at the height of his power, and his raids of slaughter to neighbouring islands were of dreadful frequency. It was to this canoe house that he returned after a successful expedition in his great TOMAKO (war canoes) laden with ghastly trophies, but ever since Rear-Admiral Davis, then of H.M.S. Royalist, sacked this place in 1891, all has been comparatively quiet, though I did hear, while I was there, that Ingova had led a head-hunting raid or two.
The old shed, for it looks very like one, stands near the margin of the lagoon, not far from the fringe of the thick bush and forest. All is fast falling into decay, and the whole place has a haunted feeling about it. Inside was an old war canoe and the remains of former splendour. Till you came to look carefully at the structure its size did not strike you, but I found it was about 72 feet long by 30 broad, and quite 30 odd feet to the top pitch of the roof; the high slots above the two doors were made to let out the tall fore-peaks of the canoes.
The erection of a tambu house is generally an excuse for a big festival, and at one time required a human head to be sacrificed and eaten, and was thus the cause of many a head-hunting expedition.
Bones of human beings can still be seen hanging in these houses. The body of the victim was always eaten at the feast, and, besides it, pigs, fish, and other animals were devoured in large quantities. Gorging is anything but a crime in the Solomon Islands; in fact, it is not an uncommon sight to see a native so puffed up with over-eating that his friends have to lay him out on the ground and then gently knead his back—this operation they find helps to digest the food, though personally I would not like to recommend it to a dyspeptic.
At Santa Catalina there is a very fine specimen of a tambu house, over sixty feet in length. All the principal posts are carefully carved with weird representations of fishing expeditions, fights, war canoes, head-hunting expeditions, and other pictures of the daily life and occupations of the Solomon islander. The ridge pole, which is bigger than the usual run of these poles, is carved all over with {92} pictures which no modern journal would care to reproduce. The roofs of most tambu houses are more or less alike in general construction. They are supported on four or five rows of posts, the central one being about fourteen or fifteen feet high, whilst the outside ones do not run to more than three or four feet high, owing to the slant of the roofs.
Throughout the group there is not one village standing out above all others, and there is no capital town, but on every island there are villages, and the chief in each considers his the capital.
The two largest islands of the Solomon group are Bougainville and Guadalcana; Bougainville, the larger of these two, belongs to Germany.
Guadalcana, from the sea, is an uncanny looking place—a great dark mountain gradually rising to a height of 8000 feet, covered with dense, dark foliage and culminating in a volcano. The Lion’s Head near by is a ragged cluster of grey rocks. Here and there patches of sage green relieve the monotony of colour and show where clumps of palms are growing. A thin line of bright yellow sand, and the white foam of the sea as it breaks over the reefs, add colour to the island and make of it a strange picture.
ON THE FRINGE OF A PRIMÆVAL FOREST, SIMBO, SOLOMON ISLANDS