The Solomon Islands and Their Natives

by H. B. Guppy

The natives of the eastern islands of this group frequently stain their hair a light-brown hue by the use of lime, a practice which frees the hair of vermin. The passing visitor might easily carry away with him the impression that such light-brown hair was a permanent character; but on examining adults, he would usually find that the hair is much darker at the roots. The natives (women and boys) of the islands of Bougainville Straits, and according to Labillardière,[106] those of the adjacent island of Bouka, stain the hair by the use of a red ochreous earth, the colour of which, blended with the deep colour of the hair, produces a striking magenta hue.

[106] Labillardière’s “Voyage in search of La Pérouse,” vol. i. p. 246. London 1800.

With regard to the amount of hair on the face, limbs, and trunk, great diversity is observed even amongst natives of the same village. Epilation is commonly employed, a bivalve shell being used as a pair of pincers; but there can be no doubt that the development of the hair varies quite independently of such a custom. Out of ten men taken promiscuously from one of the villages on the north coast of St. Christoval, perhaps, five would have smooth faces; three would possess a small growth of hair on the chin and upper lip; the ninth would possess a beard, a moustache, and whiskers of moderate growth; whilst the tenth would present a shaggy beard, and a hairy visage. With the majority of the Solomon Islanders, the surfaces of the body and limbs are comparatively free from hair; but hairy men are to be found in most villages, and in rare and exceptional cases, the hairy-bodied, hairy-visaged men are the rule. It would appear that in this group, the qualities of treachery and ferocity are possessed in a greater degree by those communities in which hairy men prevail. Hairy-visaged men are commonly found amongst the natives of the Florida Islands. In Bougainville Straits, the great majority of the men keep their faces and chins free from hair, which the chiefs and the older men usually permit to grow.

With age the hair generally assumes an iron-grey hue, as if the decoloration was incomplete. In one old man, however, who was the patriarch of Treasury Island, the hair was completely grey. Baldness usually commences over the fore-head; and is not uncommonly observed beginning amongst middle-aged men. The old women apparently regard hair as an unnecessary encumbrance, the little that remains in later life being generally removed.

I have not yet referred to an almost straight-haired element which has been infused amongst the inhabitants of Bougainville Straits. The individuals, thus characterised, have very dark skins, the hair being even darker, and corresponding in hue with the colour-types 34 and 49. With such natives the face is flatter, and the nose is more écrasé than usual. The hair may be almost straight: and, if not very long, it is often erect, giving the person a shock-headed appearance; whilst in some cases it tends to gather into curls of a large spiral. Other natives possess hair which combines the straight and frizzly characters, giving the whole mass, when combed out, an appearance partly wavy and partly bushy. Small boys in this part of the group have frequently curly heads of hair with large flattened spirals. Traders tell me that straight-haired individuals are found amongst the hill-tribes of St. Christoval at the opposite end of the group. I have seen two such natives, one a woman, and the other a man whom I met near Cape Keibeck on the north coast of the island.

A few remarks with reference to the prevailing hues of the skin may be here interesting. It would seem to be a general rule that the darker-skinned natives occur in the western islands of the group, such as New Georgia, Bougainville Straits, and Bougainville; whilst the lighter-coloured natives are more restricted to the eastern islands such as St. Christoval, Guadalcanar, &c. In different parts of the Solomon Group, the colour of the skin, as may have been already inferred, varies considerably in shade from a very deep brown, exemplified by colour-type 42 of M. Broca, to a copperish hue, best typefied by colour-type 29. The prevailing darker hue of the western islands is represented by type 42, and the prevailing lighter hue of the eastern islands by type 35. Where there is no means of comparison, the darker hues of the skin might be called black. The lightest hues, such as would appear to characterise natives in isolated localities, as in Santa Catalina, and on the north coast of Guadalcanar opposite the Rua Sura Islets, would be best exemplified by colour-type 28. The elderly natives are, as a rule, more dark-skinned than those of younger years, the difference in shade being attributable partly to a longer exposure by reason of their age to the influence of sun and weather, and partly to those structural changes in the skin which accompany advancing years. The colour is usually fairly uniform over the person, but in the case of the Malaita natives, before referred to, the colour of the face and chest was of a lighter hue than that of the limbs and body, as exemplified by contrasting the colour-types 28 and 35.[107]

[107] Vide page for remarks on the effect of the prevailing skin-disease, an inveterate form of body-ringworm, on the colour of the skin.

I would draw attention to the circumstance that my observations were confined to the coast tribes of these islands. The larger islands, which may be compared in size to the county of Cornwall, are but thinly populated in their interior by tribes of more puny physique and less enterprising character, who are ill-suited to cope with their more robust and more war-like fellow-islanders of the coast. These “bushmen,” as they are called, are accredited by the coast-natives with inferior mental capabilities as compared with their own. To call a man of the coast a “bushman” is equivalent to calling him a stupid or a fool, a taunt which is commonly employed amongst the coast-natives. The stone adzes and axes, which have been discarded by the inhabitants of the coast, are said to be still employed by the bushmen. I was unable to make any measurements of these natives; but those I saw were usually of short stature and of a more excitable and suspicious temperament. The hair is worn in the woolly style, is short like that of the African Negro, and its surface has often a peculiar appearance from the hairs arranging themselves in little knobs. I believe that these bushmen, and at the present time I am recalling to my mind those of the interior of Bougainville, have naturally shorter hair than those of the coast, and that the peculiar character of the hair just described is a permanent one.[108] These bushmen probably represent the original Negrito stock of these islands, which, at the coast, often loses many of its characters on account of the intermingling with Eastern Polynesian and Malayan intruders.

[108] Mr. Earl, who well describes this knobby appearance of the surface of the hair of some Papuan tribes, also believes that these tribes may sometimes have naturally short hair. (“Papuans,” p. 2.)

With the object of testing the powers of vision possessed by the natives of these islands, I examined the sight of twenty-two individuals who were in all cases either young adults or of an age not much beyond thirty. For this purpose I employed the square test-dots which are used in examining the sight of recruits for the British army, and I obtained the following results. Two natives could distinguish the dots clearly at 70 feet, one at 67 feet, two at 65 feet, three at 62 feet, four at 60 feet, two at 55 feet, three at 52 feet, four at 50 feet, and one at 35 feet. I roughly placed the average distance at which a native could count the dots at about 60 feet, which is a little beyond the standard distance for testing the normal vision of recruits, viz., 57 feet; but I laid no stress on this difference, and briefly noted in my journal that these natives possessed the normal powers of vision. The quickness of the natives in perceiving distant objects, such as ships at sea, was a matter of daily observation to us; and I was often much surprised by their facility in picking out pigeons and opossums, which were almost concealed in the dense foliage of the trees some 60 or 70 feet overhead. I was therefore impressed with the greater discriminating power possessed by these savages; but the results of my observations on their far-seeing powers were not such as would justify the conclusion that they excelled us very greatly in this respect.