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History
Solomon Island Warriors with Spears in Ornamented War CanoeIt is believed
that Papuan speaking settlers began to arrive around 30,000 BC. Austronesian
speakers arrived circa 4,000 BC also bringing cultural elements such as the
outrigger canoe. It is between 1,200 and 800 BC that the ancestors of the
Polynesians, the Lapita people, arrived from the Bismarck Archipelago with their
characteristic ceramics. The first European to discover the islands was the
Spanish navigator, álvaro de Menda?a de Neira coming from el Peru in 1568.
Missionaries began visiting the Solomons in the mid-19th century. They made
little progress at first, because "blackbirding" (the often brutal recruitment
of laborers for the sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji) led to a series of
reprisals and massacres. The evils of the labor trade prompted the United
Kingdom to declare a protectorate over the southern Solomons in 1893. This was
the basis of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. In 1898 and 1899, more
outlying islands were added to the protectorate; in 1900 the remainder of the
archipelago, an area previously under German jurisdiction, was transferred to
British administration apart from the islands of Buka and Bougainville which
remained under German administration as part of German New Guinea (until they
were occupied by Australia in 1914, after the commencement of World War I).
Traditional trade and social intercourse between the western Solomon islands of
Mono and Alu (the Shortlands) and the traditional societies in the south of
Bougainville, however, continued without hindrance. Under the protectorate,
missionaries settled in the Solomons, converting most of the population to
Christianity.
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