After landing Mr. Palmer at Mota, the vessel went onto the Solomon Isles, reaching Bauro on the 27th:—­

’About 8.30 in the evening the boat was lowered, and the party pulled towards the village, which was the home of Taroniara, in a fine clear moonlit night, by the fires which people had lit for the people on shore, and directed by Taroniara himself to the opening in the reef.  They landed in the midst of a group of dark figures, some standing in a brook, some by the side under a large spreading tree, round a fire fed by dry cocoa-nut leaves; and in the background were tall cocoa-nuts with their gracefully drooping plumes, and the moon behind shining through them made the shade seem darker and deeper as the flashing crests of the surf, breaking on the reef, made the heaving sea beyond look murkier.  It was a sight worth going a long way to see,’ so says Mr. Atkin’s journal.

The next sight was, however, still more curious.  The Bishop relented so far towards ‘the Net,’ as to write an account of it on purpose for it.  Ysabel Island is, like almost all the rest, divided among many small communities of warlike habits.  And some years previously the people of Mahaga, the place with which he was best acquainted, had laid an ambush for those of Hogirano, killed a good many, and, cutting off their heads, had placed them in a row upon stones, and danced round them in a victorious suit of white-coral lime.  However, a more powerful tribe, not long after, came down upon Mahaga and fearfully avenged the massacre of Hogirano.  All were slain who could not escape into the bush; and when the few survivors, after days and nights of hunger, ventured back, they found the dwellings burnt, the fruit trees cut down, the yam and taro grounds devastated, and more than a hundred headless bodies of their kindred lying scattered about.

This outrage had led to the erection of places of refuge in the tops of trees; and Bishop Patteson, who had three Mahagan scholars, went ashore, with the hope of passing the night in one of these wonderful places, where the people always slept, though by day they lived in the ordinary open bamboo huts.

After landing in a mangrove swamp, and wading through deep mud, he found that the Mahaga people had removed from their old site, and had built a strong fortification near the sea; and close above, so as to be reached by ladders resting on the wall, were six large tree-houses.

It had been raining heavily for a day or two, and the paths were so deep in mud that the bed of a water-course was found preferable to them.  The bush had been cleared for some distance before the steep rocky mound where the village stood, surrounded by a high wall of stones, in which one narrow entrance was left, approached by a fallen trunk of a tree lying over a hollow.  The huts were made of bamboo canes, and the floors, raised above the ground, were nearly covered with mats and a kind of basket work.