The Solomon Islands and Their Natives

by H. B. Guppy

[369] “Discoveries of the French in 1768 and 1769,” etc.: pp. 179, 18 .

In July, 1788, Lieutenant Shortland, when returning to England from Port Jackson in convoy of a fleet of transports, made the Solomon Group near Cape Sydney on the south coast of St. Christoval. He skirted the south side of the group until he arrived at Bougainville Straits, and received the impression that he was coasting along an apparently continuous tract of land, to which he gave the name of New Georgia. Passing through Bougainville Straits, which, in ignorance of the discoveries of the French navigator, he named after himself, Lieutenant Shortland continued on his voyage. The names of the numerous headlands[370] on the south side of the Solomon Group, bear witness in the present [chart] to the accurate observations of the English navigator: and from him Mount Lammas, the highest peak of Guadalcanar, received its name. Like Bougainville and Surville, Shortland was not acquainted with the nature of his discoveries.[371]

[370] Capes Philip, Henslow, Hunter, Satisfaction, etc.

[371] Shortland communicated with the natives of Simbo. An account of this voyage is given in the “Voyage of Governor Phillip to Botany Bay:” London, 1789.

It now remained for the geographers to avail themselves of the materials placed at their disposal by the voyages of the French and English navigators. M. Buache in a “Memoir on the Existence and Situation of Solomon’s Islands,”[372] which was presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1781, deals with the discoveries of Carteret, Bougainville, and Surville. The steps by which he arrived at the conclusion that the groups of islands discovered by these navigators were not only one and the same group, but that they were the long-lost Isles of Salomon of Mendana, afford an instructive instance of how a patient and laborious investigator, endowed with that gift of discrimination which M. Buache employed with such laudable impartiality, may ultimately attain the truth he seeks, invested though it be in clouds of mystery and contradiction. Groping along through a maze of conflicting statements, to which both navigators and geographers had in equal share contributed, M. Buache finally emerged into the light of day, when he asserted in his memoir that between the extreme point of New Guinea as fixed by Bougainville and the position of Santa Cruz as determined by Carteret, there was a space of 12¹⁄₂ degrees of longitude, in which the Islands of Solomon ought to be found. In this space, as he proceeded to show, lay the large group discovered by Bougainville and Surville which, he with confidence asserted, would prove to be none other than the long-lost islands of the Solomon Group.

[372] This memoir is given by Fleurieu in the appendix of his work.

But such a view of the character of the recent French discoveries in these seas was received by English geographers with that spirit of partiality from which the cause of geographical science has so frequently suffered. Mr. Dalrymple in his “Historical Collection of Voyages,” published in 1770, before he had become acquainted with the discoveries of Carteret, Bougainville, and Surville, stated his conviction that there was no room to doubt that what Mendana called Salomon Islands in 1567, Dampier afterwards named New Britain in 1700. In the introduction to the narrative of his second voyage round the world, when he followed up Bougainville’s exploration of the Australia del Espiritu Santo of Quiros,[373] Captain Cook supported this view. The arguments, however, of M. Buache had no weight with Mr. Dalrymple, who in 1790 re-stated his opinion that the Solomon Islands of the Spaniards and the New Britain of Dampier were one and the same, and he referred to the discoveries of Bougainville and Surville as showing no similitude in form to the Solomon Islands of the old maps.[374]

[373] This group, which had been previously named by Bougainville, L’Archipel des grandes Cyclades, was designated The New Hebrides by Cook, a name which it retains on the present [charts].

[374] “Nautical Memoirs of Alexander Dalrymple.”

But in the minds of French geographers there was little doubt as to the correctness of the views of M. Buache. Amongst the detailed geographical instructions given by Louis XVI. in 1785 to La Pérouse, when he was setting out on his ill-fated expedition, was one which directed the attention of this illustrious navigator to the examination of the numerous islands of the Solomon Group, and especially to those which lay between Guadalcanar and Malaita.[375] It was considered almost indubitable, as M. Fleurieu informs us, that the intended exploration by La Pérouse of this archipelago would convert probability into certainty. But when in the vicinity of the islands he was never destined to behold, La Pérouse experienced that mysterious fate which has excited sympathy throughout the civilised world. On the reef-girt shores of Vanicoro his ships were wrecked, and the French commander and his men were never seen again by any Europeans. As Carlyle wrote, . . . “The brave navigator goes, and returns not; the seekers search far seas for him in vain, . . . . and only some mournful mysterious shadow of him hovers long in all heads and hearts.”[376]