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We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory-nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar. "Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said. "The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year who knows? or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up.
'And then San Cristoval, sixty miles long, with its villages and languages, and Malanta over eighty miles long, and Guadalcanar, seventy! It is a silly thought or a vain, human wish, but I feel as if I longed to be in fifty or a hundred places at once. But God will send qualified men in good time.
Blackett, the new trader at Guadalcanar in the Solomons, was entertaining a visitor, an old fellow from a station fifty miles distant, who had sailed over in his cutter to "have a pitch" with his nearest white neighbour.
Killing was their natural vocation, not wood- cutting; and while they would not have ventured the Guadalcanar bush alone, with a white man like Sheldon behind them, and a white Mary such as they knew Joan to be, they could expect a safe and delightful time. Besides, the great master had told them that the eight gigantic Tahitians were going along.
'We have seven Solomon Islanders five from Mata, a village at the north-west of San Cristoval, and two from the south-east point of Guadalcanar, or Gera, a magnificent island about twenty-five or twenty miles to the north-west of San Cristoval.
"The interior of Guadalcanar has never been explored," Sheldon explained. "The bushmen are as wild men as are to be found anywhere in the world to- day. I have never seen one. I have never seen a man who has seen one. They never come down to the coast, though their scouting parties occasionally eat a coast native who has wandered too far inland. Nobody knows anything about them.
One little fellow about eight years old had attached himself to Coley, clinging about his waist with his arms, but he was too young to be taken away. Iri came down to the beach, and waded up to his waist in the water as the boat put off. In the night Gera, or Guadalcanar, was reached, a fine mountainous island, with a detached reef. Numerous canoes surrounded the vessel, bringing yarns for barter.
Grera and Bauro owed their names of Guadalcanar and San Cristoval to him. In 1594, he obtained permission to found a colony on San Cristoval, and set forth with his wife and four ships.
So he stood waist-deep in the grass and looked regretfully across the rolling savannah and the soft-swelling foothills to the Lion's Head, a massive peak of rock that upreared into the azure from the midmost centre of Guadalcanar, a landmark used for bearings by every coasting mariner, a mountain as yet untrod by the foot of a white man.
We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along the east coast of Guadalcanar. "Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said. "The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year who knows? or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up.
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