How the islands became Solomon's.

The history of the Solomon Islands starts with a failed marketing campaign. 

The Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira first sighted Santa Isabel island in the Solomons on February 6,1568. He had left Peru with two ships the previous year searching for Terra Australis, a mythic land rich in gold (of course).

 

At first, relations with the native islanders was cordial, but that broke down over a dispute about pigs. They were a critical food resource for both the natives and the Spaniards who demanded more of them than the locals were willing to part with. Recriminations flew. The islanders offered “a quarter of a boy with the arm and hand,” but the Spaniards rejected this reasonable compromise.

 

Things went from bad to worse as the expedition explored other islands in the chain. Then the Spaniards found alluvial gold in one of the rivers on Guadalcanal. Convinced that he had struck it rich, Mendaña shrewdly named the island group Islas Salomon, hoping to promote colonization by suggesting that  he had discovered the source of the fabled riches of Solomon.

 

It didn't work. Europeans didn’t visit the islands again until 1767, when the British navy sighted the the islands.

 

The British finally established a protectorate over the Solomons in 1898, establishing sugarcane and copra plantations.

 

After defeating the British at Singapore, the Japanese took control of the islands. Recognizing that the Solomons' strategic location was key to supporting a Japanese invasion first of New Guinea, then of Australia, they immediately started construction of an airfield. 

 

The Americans realized that the occupation of Australia would be a disaster. leaving Hawaii as the only Allied outpost in the Pacific, ensuring a much longer war or strengthening the possibility of a negotiated peace on terms favorable to the Japanese. So in August, 1942, only two months after the victory at Midway, the U.S. launched an invasion to take the island back. 

 

Today, the Solomons are an independent nation comprising over 900 islands. As a constitutional monarchy, the government has a local as prime minister and Queen Elizabeth II as its queen. Which explains her face on the coins and Prince Philip’s name on the highway from the airport to Honiara.

 

Solomon Islands are in the Melanesian region of Oceania. For whatever reason, the group has never attracted as much foreign development and tourism as Fiji and Polynesia. Indonesian and Chinese companies are logging hardwoods extensively in the jungles of Guadalcanal, but tourism is only beginning to become established. 

The local unemployment rate is 65%, but that is a misleading statistic since much of the population engages in subsistence farming. They grow enough to support themselves, supplementing their diet with fish, chicken, and, yep, pigs. Boys are officially off the menu.

 

Healthcare is free, but education is not, so most poor children remain uneducated. Australia provides educational assistance, but this tends to benefit only those rich enough to afford to send their kids to school.

Locals supplement their incomes in various ways. The roads are lined with vendors selling betelnut, fresh coconuts, and vegetables.

The many rivers double as car washes.

Snack vendors sell fried fish and chicken. Very popular on weekends.

Like most poor countries, the Solomons have a serious trash problem.

 

In the big city, (Honiara has a population of between 65-70,000) the central market offers a wider selection of goods.

Including these beauties. I'm not sure if they're destined to be pets or dinner.

The only museum in town is the National Cultural Museum. It has an exhibits on the 20,000 year record of human presence here. There's also a good exhibit on the native contribution to the Coastwatcher program that kept the Allies informed of Japanese movements during the war. 

 As well as examples of traditional woodcarving. 

 To me, it looks like an intriguing combination of African and Inuit styles. 

 

The place has good bones. It needs a better marketing campaign.

 

 P.

I invade Guadalcanal.

As sad as I was to see Fiji disappear behind the plane, I was excited to be headed to the Solomon Islands and especially Guadalcanal. In addition to some of the world’s best diving, there’s the history of some of the most iconic battles of the Second World War.

We flew west over the outer islands of the Fiji group, following much the same route as I had taken on the ferry a few days earlier. 

The Yasawas from the air. Nacula is the last island at the top of the picture.

There was a long stretch of open ocean, then after a couple hours, the first of the Solomons came into view. It was clearly more heavily jungled than Fiji. In fact, once we landed in Honiara, the capital, I could feel the difference in the air. It was quite a bit hotter and more humid than Fiji. Fiji is more like Hawaii. The vegetation is lush, but not so dense. Here it felt like jungle. 

The trees were huge and healthy; the undergrowth looked impenetrable.

Things get overgrown quickly here.

 

In Fiji, people referred to the Solomons as “the Wild West.“ Malaria is endemic, and there’s a history of unrest, political and tribal. Headhunting was practiced here as recently as the early 20th century. The tourist trade is still in its infancy. Only about 8,000 tourists visit each year. Most of them go to Gizo island in the Western Provinces, about an hour-and-a-half flight from the capital.

Honiara is a scruffy port town with little in the way of amenities for the traveler. It grew up around Henderson Field after the war, when the British moved the capital from the old colonial center in Tulagi across the bay to take advantage of the infrastructure left by the Americans. So there’s no old colonial architecture, few restaurants, and the hotels mostly cater to business travelers.

The Ministry of Finance. The National Parliament building is on the hill behind.

I stayed at the King Solomon Hotel in the middle of town. A nice enough place that also offers fully equipped apartments for long-term guests.

It has a unique cable car system to access the rooms on the upper levels.

 

The first thing I did was try to book a tour of the battlefields. The people at the front desk were stumped, but finally got me on the phone with a man who could help. No, he didn’t have a website, but he could have his girl email me the information. 

 

Later he called back to say that his girl wouldn’t be in that day, but he would describe what was available. He had three three-hour tours—the eastern battle fields, the western battlefields, and a tour of Honiara—at $150 each. I balked at the price, and he apologized profusely. If I could get more people, the price per person would go down.

 

Since that wasn’t an option, I got him to give me a price for just the main highlights: Tenaru River, Henderson Field, Bloody Ridge, and the wreck of the Kinugawa Maru. $110. Done.

 

So the next morning a guide and a driver picked me up in a big tourist van and off we went. I asked my guide, a local named Robert, why there wasn’t anyone else on the tour. Not much demand, he told me. 

 

And apparently there isn’t. Unlike most cities, Honiara has no little travel agencies offering tours to the local attractions. It isn’t that there aren’t any, just that there no demand to visit them. 

There’s no WWII museum here in the capital, no memorials other than a few dusty plaques mounted on an obscure wall in the airport, crowded between large advertising signs. 

 

First stop on the tour was the Tenaru River, the site of the first major clash between the Japanese and the invading Marines. The Marines had taken the airfield that the Japanese had built, and the Japanese commander planned a counterattack across the river. Fortunately, a native islander affiliated with the Coastwatchers, who had been captured by the Japanese, tortured, bayonetted, and left for dead was able to escape and warn the Marines of the impending attack. 

The Marines were dug in on the left bank and, though outnumbered, were able to hold off the Japanese. Nothing to see here. The jungle has overgrown everything.

There is still a problem with people finding unexploded ordinance. There’s a bomb disposal area, but sometimes fishermen try to extract the unstable explosives to use for dynamite fishing. Often they do more harm to themselves than to the fish.

We couldn’t get any closer for safety reasons, but in the bomb disposal area they have the rusted remains of a Sherman tank. Only a few were deployed on the island because they proved too heavy for the terrain. This one was discovered sunk in a swamp.

The airfield captured by the Marines was renamed Henderson Field after a Marine pilot killed at Midway. The Marine and later Army pilots who flew from it were one of the main defenses of the island for the many months it took to secure Guadalcanal.

Recently, the Japanese have invested money to upgrade the airport that they began in the first place. They also wanted to rename it, but the locals refused. It is now called Honiara International Airport, Henderson Field.

A view of the airport looking toward Mt. Austen. If you click the picture and zoom in just right of center, you can see the metal scaffolding that supported the original control tower. That’s all that remains of the WWII-era field.

In front of the airport is a Japanese antiaircraft gun.

 

Next, we drove into the country south and west of Henderson Field to Bloody Ridge, the scene of the most intense fighting of the Guadalcanal campaign.

You certainly wouldn’t know it today. 

This small memorial is all that marks the spot.

Looking west from Hill 2 toward Hill 1 and Mt. Austen, you can get a better sense of how the battle unfolded. The Marines were dug in on Hill 1 at first, but that position proved to be too close to the dense jungle at the base of the hill, so the line was pulled back to Hill 2. It's hard to tell from the photo, but the slope up to Hill 2 is quite steep, which is one of the main reasons the Marines were able to fight off repeated waves of Japanese charging directly at them.

 

My guide told me that one visitor, a Marine Raider who had fought in battle, told him that the landscape still looked exactly the same as it did during the fighting.

 

I was surprised how close Bloody Ridge was to Henderson Field, only about a half mile away. Henderson Field is only a quarter mile from the shoreline, so the original beachhead that the outnumbered Marines were holding was actually a very small area. It's one thing to read the words in a book and quite another to stand on the ground and feel the reality of it.

The depression in the ground marks where a gun was positioned.

The area is now peaceful fields and villages.

A few signs of the past remain if you look closely. The siding on this house incorporates some of the metal matting that was used to stabilize the original Henderson Field.

Next, we drove toward the west end of the Island, stopping briefly at the site of another battle. Japanese troops took heavy casualties attempting to cross the river here.

About a dozen kilometers out of Honiara, we visited this idyllic beach where I snorkeled through the wreckage of the Kinugawa Maru, a Japanese transport beached after being bombed by American planes during the Battle of Tassafaronga. What's left of the ship is overgrown with beautiful corals and home to thousands of brilliantly-colored fish. 

 

The beach is a favorite weekend picnic site for the locals. Again, there are no markers or memorials. Just the gentle waves and the memories rusting away into the sand.

 

P.