The Solomon Islands and Their Natives

by H. B. Guppy

In the vicinity of Gorai’s house, I noticed three small enclosures, apparently graves, two of them round and one oblong, and all fenced in by a paling of sticks. Lying on the ground within each enclosure were such articles as strings of trade-beads, clay-pipes, betel-nuts long since dried up, and dishes of palm leaves such as the natives use for serving up their food. A communicative old man informed me that a few months before a woman and a girl belonging to the chief’s household had died, and that their bodies had been first burned between four posts and the ashes had been placed in the oblong enclosure. They bore, so he told me, the pretty names of Événu and Siali. On my asking the reason of placing articles such as beads and betel-nuts on the grave, he told me that in addition cocoa-nuts and other food had been placed there previously in accordance with the native custom, which the old man endeavoured to explain by pointing his fingers towards the skies. I should here mention that on the spot, where the body of Kaika had been burned some months before, there was placed a wooden framework in the form of a long box, the materials being obtained from a ship’s fittings. Inside it were placed some beads and coloured calico.

The custom of depositing skulls in cairns on the points of islands, which is prevalent in the eastern portion of the Solomon Group, is not generally practised amongst the islands of Bougainville Straits: and I rarely came upon them in my excursions. However, on an islet in Choiseul Bay, I found two cairns, one of which was tenanted only by hermit-crabs with their cast-off shells, and the other contained two skulls that had apparently lain for years in their resting-place to which they were attached by the tendrils of creeping plants. On the summit of Oima, I came upon a heap of stones under which was supposed to be the remains of a Bougainville native killed in a fight, but I failed to find any of his bones after examining the heap.

The sea is generally chosen as the last resting-place for the natives below the rank of chief in the islands of Bougainville Straits. Lieutenant Malan, whilst engaged in sounding at the entrance of the Alu anchorage, passed two large canoes in one of which were being conveyed, for burial in deep water, the remains of a woman who had died during the previous night. The relatives of the deceased accompanied the corpse, but took no share in the paddling, being employed in wailing and bemoaning their loss after the conventional manner of the Chinese. A peculiar style of paddling was adopted by the funeral party; each man, pausing after every stroke, partially arrested the motion of the canoe by a backwater movement of his paddle.

In Simbo or Eddystone Island, the bodies of the dead are sometimes placed amongst the large masses of rock which lie at the base of Middle Hill on the west coast of the island. My attention was first attracted to this custom by the stench that came from this spot as I passed it in a canoe. Some human bones were observed on the reef which lies off the anchorage. In the eastern islands the dead are often buried at sea. In Ugi and in Florida the skulls are sometimes preserved in a cairn of stones built on the edge of a sea cliff, or at the extremity of a point, or in some remote islet. A dwarf cocoa-nut, which attains a height of from eight to twelve feet, frequently marks the grave of the chief in the island of Ugi. In one of the villages of this island I was shown the shrine of a chief, a small house in which suspended from the roof in a basket were the skulls of the chief and his wife concealed from view by a screen of palm leaves. Some articles of food, including a portion of an opossum, together with a large wooden bowl, were hung up before the screen.

The burial place for men in the village of Sapuna in Santa Anna is an oblong enclosure in the midst of the village which measures 24 by 18 feet, and is surrounded by a low wall of fragments of coral limestone. In this space all the bodies are buried at a depth of five or six feet; and after some time the skulls are exhumed and placed inside the wooden figure of a shark about three feet in length, which is deposited in the tambu-house. One of these wooden fish, which lay on the surface of the burial ground at the time of my visit, had recently been removed from the tambu-house on account of its being rotten through age, and the skull was to be re-interred. The body of a chief is placed at once in the tambu-house in a wooden shark of sufficient size. Women are buried in another ground, and the wooden sharks containing their skulls are deposited in a small house by the side of the tambu-house.

Into the subject of the superstitions and religious beliefs which are held by the natives of the Solomon Islands I shall barely enter, as only those who have become familiar with the natives by long residence among them, and who have acquired an intimate knowledge of their language, can hope to avoid the numerous pitfalls into which the unwary observer is so likely to fall. I would, therefore, refer the reader for information on this subject to a paper by the Rev. R. H. Codrington, entitled “Religious Beliefs and Practices in Melanesia,” which was published in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute (vol. x., p. 261). Through Lieutenant Malan’s knowledge of the Fijian tongue, a language understood by the men who had served their term on the Fiji plantations, I learned that the natives of Treasury and the Shortlands believe in a Good Spirit (nito drekona) who lives in a pleasant land whither all men who have lived good lives go after death, and that all the bad men are transported to the crater of Bagana, the burning volcano of Bougainville, which is the home of the Evil Spirit (nito paitena) and his companion spirits. That the natives of the Shortlands really believe in some future state is shown in the following singular superstition which came under my notice at Alu. I was returning one night in Gorai’s war canoe from one of my excursions, when I noticed that the chief and his men were looking towards the coral island of Balalai which lies a few miles distant from the anchorage. They told me they were looking for a bright light which was sometimes to be seen shining at night in this island in the winter months of the year. This light they believed to be the spirit of Captain Ferguson of the “Ripple,” who had been killed some years before by the natives of Nouma-nouma on the Bougainville coast. I suggested that it might be the watch-fire of a party of the Faro natives who had gone there to fish, or to hunt turtle; but my suggestion was pooh-poohed. Balalai was evidently a haunted island in the minds of my companions, and I desisted from making any further remarks which would be likely to disabuse them of this idea. Often and often when we were anchored within sight of this island I remembered the story, but never saw the light.

The natives of Ugi believe that the souls of the dead pass into fireflies: and should one of these insects enter a house, those inside quickly leave it. The spirits of the dead in human shape are believed to frequent certain islets in Treasury Harbour, where they are occasionally seen by the women. Certain spirits, who are usually accredited with the power of sending sickness or other calamities, are said to take up their abodes in particular districts. Such a spirit haunts the picturesque glen of Tetabau on the northern slope of the summit of Treasury, if we may accept the statement of one of the islanders; and any native who is bold enough to enter this glen will, according to the general belief, provoke the anger of its invisible occupant. The party of natives who accompanied me to the summit of Tarawei Hill in the island of Faro refused to go further than the brink of the hill, because, as they said, there dwelt on the top some evil spirits who would send sickness and death on any intruder. I had therefore to walk along the crest of the hill alone. The echoes which the shouts of my men awakened as we descended the steep slopes to the west were, as I was told, but the voices of the spirits who haunted the summit of the hill.

In the island of Ugi the superstition of “ill-wishing” is very prevalent. When a man cuts off his hair, as in mourning, he buries it unobserved so that it may not fall into the hands of any one who may by sorcery bring sickness or some other calamity upon him; and he adopts the same precaution with reference to the husks of betel-nuts and similar refuse. Whilst I was obtaining some samples of hair from the natives of this island, I was told that if in the immediate future any sickness should befall those who had parted with their hair, they would assign the cause to me; yet, native-like, they allowed me to take a sample with their free consent, for it is their custom never to refuse to each other anything that is asked. The professions of the sorcerer and medicine-man are usually combined in the same individual. These men in the Shortlands have a great reputation in the minds of the natives, being accredited by them with a knowledge almost universal; and the precincts of their dwellings are tabooed even to the chief. One of them named Kikila, a sinister-looking individual with but one eye, had obtained much repute in the practice of his profession. When on one occasion Lieutenant Oldham complained to the chief that some of the calico had been removed by the natives from the surveying-marks, the services of Kikila were employed to bring about the death of the unknown culprit. The sorcerer was not himself aware who the man was; but we were told that for one of so much repute this was quite unnecessary. We never learned the result of his incantation; but in all probability they effected their purpose soon enough by working on the fears of the unfortunate offender. How it was to be done we could not satisfactorily ascertain; but there was no doubt as to the efficacy of the means employed in the minds of the natives.

Amongst the powers of the sorcerers are those of influencing the weather. But such powers are not confined to men of this class alone. In Ugi, different natives are accredited with being able to bring wind and rain; and I knew one man who had earned for himself a considerable reputation as a “wind-prophet.” These powers are claimed by Mule, the Treasury chief, amongst his other prerogatives.

As far as I could ascertain, these natives keep no record, even in the memory, of the lapse of years. Nor are they acquainted with their own age. More than once when trying to obtain the date of particular events, I received the wildest replies. The safest method to employ in making such inquiries is to get the native to refer a recent event to some epoch in his own life, or in the case of earlier occurrences to associate them with his boyhood, manhood, or marriage. When he asserts that a certain event occurred whilst his father was a child, he is probably to be trusted; but when he goes back to the time of his grandfather, no further reliance can be placed on his statements, except as implying an indefinite number of years. I have observed elsewhere ([page 76]) that a grandfather is deemed a personage of such a high antiquity that these islanders, when referring to past events, seldom care to go beyond.