The Solomon Islands and Their Natives

by H. B. Guppy

[344] Dalrymple’s Historical Collection of Voyages: vol. I., 58.

Thus terminated the attempt of the Spaniards to found a colony in the Solomon Islands; and the ill fate which it experienced was scarcely calculated to encourage others to undertake a similar enterprise. Barely half of the four hundred souls who had left Peru under such bright auspices could have reached the Philippines. Among them, however, was Quiros the pilot of Mendana, who, nothing daunted by disaster and ill-success, returned to Peru and endeavoured to re-awaken the spirit of discovery which was losing much of its enthusiasm with the departing glory of the Spanish nation. The Viceroy of Peru referred him to the Court of Spain; and, after experiencing for several years the effects of those intrigues which seem to have been the accustomed fate of the early navigators, Quiros set sail from Callao at the close of 1605, to search the Southern Ocean once again for the Isles of Salomon and the other unknown lands in that region. He had been supplied with two ships, and was accompanied by Luis Vaez de Torres as second in command. It is unnecessary to enter here into the particulars of the voyage across the Pacific. It will be sufficient for my purpose to state that Quiros finally sought the parallel of 10° south, and sailed westward in the direction of Santa Cruz, which he had discovered with Mendana ten years before. Being rather to the northward of the latitude of Santa Cruz, he struck a small group of islands, the principal of which was called Taumaco by the natives. These islands have been identified with the Duff Group, which lies about 65 miles north-east of Santa Cruz. Nearly two centuries had passed away before these islands were again seen by Europeans, when they were sighted by Captain Wilson of the missionary ship “Duff,” in 1797. During the ten days spent by the Spaniards at Taumaco, Quiros obtained information of a number of islands and large tracts of land in the neighbourhood, which seemed to confirm him in his belief in a vast unknown extent of land in the Southern Ocean. The list of these islands are included in a memorial[345] subsequently presented by Quiros to Philip II. of Spain, which contains many particulars of the discoveries of the expedition in this region. Some of them I have been able to identify with names on existing charts, but referring my reader to [Note XIV.] of the Geographical Appendix, I will only allude here to the most interesting reference in this memorial, which is to a large country named Pouro, that is without doubt the large island of St. Christoval in the Solomon Group, which lay rather under 300 miles to the westward. The central portion of St. Christoval is at present called Bauro, and by this name the whole island is often known to the natives of the islands around. Thus, without suspecting it, Quiros had described to him an island of the lost Solomon Group, and the very island which had been more completely explored than any other by the expedition of Mendana nearly forty years before. Had he been in possession of Gallego’s journal, in which the native name of Paubro is given to St. Christoval, he would have at once recognised in this Pouro of the Taumaco natives the Paubro of Mendana’s expedition. His informant spoke to him of silver arrows which had been brought from Pouro, but this circumstance did not set him on the right track; and thus for the second time this enterprising navigator unwittingly let the chance pass by of finding the Isles of Salomon.[346]

[345] Dalrymple’s Hist. Coll. of Voyages: vol. I, p. 145. This memorial is given in the original in Purchas, (His Pilgrimes, Part VI, Lib. VII, Chap. 10.) Vide also De Brosses “Histoire des Navigations aux Terres Australes:” tom. I, p. 341: Paris 1756.

[346] The question of this name of Pouro is further treated in [Note XV.] of the Geographical Appendix, since an attempt has been made by Mr. Hale, the American philologist, to identify it with the Bouro of the Indian Archipelago.

The opportunity had gone; and, for this reason, the remainder of this voyage of Quiros has no interest in connection with the Solomon Group. The information which he had obtained of the numerous islands and tracts of land in the vicinity of Taumaco seems to have banished from his mind all thoughts of the missing group. Steering southward, and passing without seeing the island of Santa Cruz of which he had been in search, he reached the island of Tucopia, of which he had previously obtained information from the natives of Taumaco. Continuing his course, he finally anchored in a large bay which indented the coast of what he believed was the Great Southern Continent. The name Australia del Espiritu Santo was given by him to this new land, when flushed with the success of his discovery. In the hour of his supposed triumph, fortune again frowned on the efforts of the Spanish navigator. A mutiny broke out on board his ship, and Quiros was compelled by his crew to abandon the enterprise. Without being able to acquaint Torres of what had happened, he left the anchorage unperceived in the middle hours of the night, and after making an ineffectual attempt to find Santa Cruz, he sailed for Mexico. Torres, after ascertaining that the supposed southern continent was an island,[347] continued his voyage westward, and, passing through the straits which bear his name, ultimately arrived at Manilla.

[347] This island is one of the New Hebrides, and still retains its Spanish name of Espiritu Santo.

The results of the expeditions in which Quiros had been engaged could hardly have been looked upon with feelings of great satisfaction at the Spanish Court, where the veteran navigator in the true spirit of Columbus now repaired to advocate the colonization of the Australia del Espiritu Santo he had just discovered. The Isles of Salomon had been also discovered, it is true; but two succeeding expeditions had failed to find them. Santa Cruz had similarly eluded the efforts of Quiros; and his last discovery of the supposed southern continent had been proved by his companion, Torres, to be an island. Several years had passed away, and Quiros was an old man before his wishes for a new expedition were granted. In furtherance of the exploration of the Isles of Salomon and the Australia del Espiritu Santo, he is said to have presented no less than fifty memorials to the king; in one of which, after painting in the brightest colours the beauty and fertility of his last discovery, he thus addresses his Sovereign: “Acquire, sire, since you can, acquire heaven, eternal fame, and that new world with all its promises.” Such appeals coming from one who might fitly be called the Columbus of his age could scarcely be rejected by the monarch. In 1614, Quiros, bearing a commission from the king, departed from Spain on his way to Callao, where he intended to fit out another expedition. Death, however, overtook him at Panama on his way to Peru; and with Quiros died all the grand hopes, which he had fostered, of adding the unknown southern continent to the dominion of Spain. Had he lived to carry out his project, Australia might have become a second Peru. The spirit of enterprise on the part of the Spanish nation never again extended itself into this region of the Western Pacific. During the next century and a half the large island-groups, which the Spaniards had discovered in these seas, were not visited by any European navigators;[348] and it is surprising how few benefits have accrued to geography from these three Spanish expeditions to these regions. Their discoveries have had to be rediscovered; and it has been only by a laborious process on the part of the geographer that the navigator has been able to make any use of the imperfect information, which the Spanish navigators have bequeathed to us of their discoveries in these seas.

[348] In 1616, the Dutch navigator, Le Maire, when he discovered and named the Horne Islands in lat. 14° 56′ S. and Hope Island in 16° S. thought that he had found the Solomon Islands; but these islands lie more than a thousand miles to the eastward of this group. Dalrymple’s Hist. Coll., vol. II., p. 59.

The death of Quiros deepened more than ever the mystery that was thrown over the Isles of Salomon. Although Herrera[349] had published in 1601 a short description of these islands, which he must have derived from official sources, no account of the first voyage of Mendana was published until nearly half a century after the return of the expedition to Peru, when in 1613 a short narrative appeared in a work written by Dr. Figueroa.[350] However, the exaggerated description, such as Lopez Vaz had given, obtained by virtue of prepossession a stronger hold on the memories of the sea-faring world. The same spirit of jealousy against other nations, which had compelled Gallego to suppress his journals, and had so long withheld any account of Mendana’s discoveries, now doomed to destruction the several memorials and documents of Quiros; but fortunately the work of destruction was not completed. The consequence of such proceedings was to greatly heighten the exaggerated misconceptions relating to the Isles of Salomon. We learn from Purchas[351] that Richard Hakluyt was informed in London in 1604, by a Lisbon merchant, of an expedition which had left Lima in 1600 and had fallen in “with divers rich countries and islands not far from the islands of Salomon. One chief place they called Monte de Plata, for the great abundance of silver there is like to be there. For they found two crowns’ worth of silver in two handfuls of dust, and the people gave them for iron as much and more in quantity of silver.”[352] Amongst the misconceptions which prevailed is one which we find in a memorial addressed by Dr. Juan Luis Arias to Philip III. of Spain,[353] where he refers to the discovery of “New Guadalcanal” and “San Christoval” as quite distinct from Mendana’s subsequent discovery, as he alleges, of the Isles of Salomon; and he alludes to the opinion of some that New Guadalcanal was a part of New Guinea. In Peru the actual existence of these islands came to be doubted; and successive viceroys held it a political maxim to treat the question of the existence of the Solomon Islands as a romance.[354]

[349] Vide [page 192].