by Tim Flannery
As sick at heart as I felt at the sight, my choices were limited: having come all the way from Australia there was no way I could just turn around and leave without knowing what those smaller bats were. So it was either Bat Shit Mountain or Bat Piss Lagoon, and I chose the mountain. I tentatively edged into it and a foul, living broth slopped over the tops of my boots. The hard legs of beetles scratched at my toes, and maggots squirmed at my ankles, as my footwear filled with the shit. Higher and higher up my legs the muck crept, and as it rose above my knees I debated turning back. Then a slight firmness underfoot signalled that the worst was over. I was mistaken, however, and soon the vile, squirming mass reached my thighs and an acrid, ammonia-like stench began to suffocate me. Yet I was still only halfway to the cave’s rear wall.
Then, with dawning horror, I realised that I had not escaped Bat Piss Lagoon after all. An arm of it swept behind Bat Shit Mountain, cutting me off from the cave’s rear wall, and the small bats. And then came the deep bit. Plunging in to the waist-deep bat piss I wondered just how deep the lagoon might be. Relief came as my feet found the squishy, relative solidity of a rising shelf of bat night soil, and within seconds I reached the far side, without having had to undergo full immersion.
The small bats turned out to be a common species of insect eater. One that I had not seen previously on New Ireland, but it was hardly an earth-shattering discovery. I sloshed back, a little sullen-faced. Sanila’s son must have sensed my mood, for he told me that there was another cave nearby that might be worth a look. So, still covered in stink, I went to investigate. This one, thank heavens, was dry, but contained only a few small brown sheathtail bats, of which we caught three. Intriguingly, I could not immediately identify them. Back in the laboratory we discovered that they were a new species. Remembering Lester’s many heroic efforts in the field, and particularly his work on Alcester and the Lelet Plateau, I named them Emballonura serii—Seri’s sheathtail bat.
Sanila Talevat was just about the last person alive who remembered the traditional names for the animals of New Ireland. Each morning I would bring him the animals we had caught in nets and traps the night before, and he would gently pick them up, one by one as if they were the most precious things in the world, and announce their names. Some were so beautiful that they sounded like fairytales. The bat known in English by the cumbersome name of the Bismarck bare-backed fruit bat, he named Amanda Yei Laras, meaning the bat whose fur has been touched by the sea. The creature does indeed have a peculiar, deep green tinge to the fur, as if during its nocturnal wanderings it enters the ocean and somehow carries its colour back with it.
There is another, much smaller bat on New Ireland—about the size of a starling—whose wings are spectacularly black-, orange-and pink-spotted. It is known in English as the Bismarck blossom bat, but Sanila called it Amanda arehwak, meaning poison bat. Sanila assured me that if ever one is heard calling at night, then it is certain there’s a sorcerer about. Hearing the tale I could imagine Sanila as a kid, listening in the darkness for the call that announced an evil act—perhaps a spell to make somebody ill or to blight a crop. I was disappointed that I never heard one in the forest. In fact its call has never been recorded by a western scientist.
One morning we found a bat entangled in our nets, the likes of which I’d never seen. It was a fruit-eating species, with a body about the size of an eight-week-old kitten, and it was so subtly beautiful that I wanted to dash immediately to Sanila to learn its name. Its face bore indistinct stripes running along the snout, but its most striking features were its wings. They bore a brownish, vein-like pattern that covered a wonderfully translucent wing membrane. Amanda ila wana aflas Sanila pronounced slowly and deliberately, as he raised it in his hand. He had not seen one for a long time, he said, and as he looked at it he seemed to drift back in time, perhaps to when he was an adventurous young boy on the hunt investigating thickets and tangles without a care for danger. To him it was the bat with wings like the leaf of the aflas tree. I never discovered what the aflas tree was, but I suspect it was a kind of banana or near relative, for wilting banana leaves can take on the colour and venation we could see in the wings of this bat.
Suspecting that this beautiful creature might be something special I made it a priority for study. It was a kind of fruit bat new to science. Because I’m a cautious taxonomist I named it as a subspecies rather than a full species. Pteropus capistatus ennisae was named after Tish Ennis, whose work had done so much to ensure the success of our expeditions. Today, following further study, it’s known as Pteropus ennisae—a distinct species in its own right. Ennis’s flying fox and Seri’s sheathtail bat are the only living mammals unique to New Ireland. It was a privilege to be able to name them in honour of my fellow expeditioners.
Ennis’s flying fox and its relative the New Britain flying fox (Pteropus capistratus) are real enigmas. Known from just a handful of museum specimens, they are among the most striking of bats, having striped faces and brightly marked wings. Their nearest relatives—bats that also have striped faces—are found on the Moluccan islands about a thousand kilometres to the west of the Bismarck Archipelago. How did these creatures come to inhabit islands lying to the west and northeast of New Guinea, but nowhere in-between? It’s a mystery only matched by their peculiar biology—males of the New Britain flying fox have been found lactating. They are, it seems, one of the very few mammals whose males feed their young with milk. With such phenomena still obscure, there is still much to be learned by biologists in the Melanesian islands.
The discovery of endemic bats on New Ireland greatly advanced our understanding of the zoogeography of the region. It was now clear that the island not only lacked the rich land-mammal fauna of New Britain, but that it possessed some bat species not found elsewhere. Because bats can fly over water, this suggested that New Ireland and New Britain were once further apart than they are today—otherwise the bats from the two islands would have mixed and the distinct species not evolved. To learn from a study of bats of the movement of islands over the vastness of geological time was more than enough reward for our trials and tribulations in the Bismarck Archipelago.
Sanila often expressed a culinary as well as an academic interest in the bats we caught and, in gratitude for all he had taught me, I skinned a few of the larger flying foxes we were taking for museum specimens, wrapped them in leaves and gave them to him to cook. It was a kindness not forgotten. When it came time for us to depart Madina, Sanila appeared with four roasted, store-bought chickens in hand—each beautifully wrapped in leaves, and cooked in a stone oven with native spices. They were without doubt the most delicious chickens I’ve ever eaten, and I was deeply touched, not least because they must have cost him a small fortune. One we ate immediately, while the remaining three flew—for one last time—from Kavieng to Port Moresby, where they made a splendid farewell dinner for the team.
Years later, when it came time to name the creatures whose bones had been excavated from Balof Cave, Peter White and I decided to name the extinct rat in Sanila’s honour. Rattus sanila, Sanila’s rat, may be long gone from New Ireland, but it was a true original, one of the first land mammal species to colonise the place, and one of New Ireland’s most distinctive inhabitants.
3
THE SOLOMON ISLANDS
During the early days of our survey we’d concentrated on Papua New Guinea. Yet there was another newly independent Pacific Island state whose biodiversity was both extensive and poorly explored—the Solomon Islands. It consists of nearly a thousand islands which vary greatly in size, elevation, flora and fauna. Since the nineteenth century the Australian Museum had played a leading role in the biological exploration of the Solomons, and its collections held the lion’s share of the world’s reference specimens. Some had been obtained by naturalists working in extraordinary circumstances—while navy frigates, on punitive expeditions to avenge the killing of Europeans, shelled headhunting villagers. Some of these early specimens were unique; nothing like t
hem has been collected since.
By the 1980s the need for more work in the Solomon Islands was becoming urgent. Its virgin rainforests were vanishing as massive, largely unregulated logging operations commenced on island after island. Mining was also opening up once-remote regions with roads and camps, allowing feral rats and cats to spread and devastate native species. In the face of these multiple threats to its biodiversity, the government of the Solomon Islands, which had achieved self-rule only as recently as 1976, could offer almost no protection. I feared that species might disappear before their existence was even known.
Working in the Solomon Islands was challenging. Its colonial history had been less than kind, and the infrastructure and resources left for the newly independent nation were woefully inadequate. Moreover, its history of European contact had been bloody and violent. The Solomons were discovered and named by Europeans long before Australia was. In 1568, at the invitation of his uncle the Viceroy of Peru, seventeen-year-old Spaniard Alvaro de Mendaña left Spain for Lima in South America. The Incas had been conquered just twenty-five years earlier, and Mendaña was surely intoxicated by tales of glory and treasure told by the surviving conquistadores.
Mendaña was only twenty-six when he set out west from Peru’s Pacific coast, determined to discover and conquer his own new world. As he sailed across the widest ocean on Earth he was possibly sustained by legends of the mysterious continent of Terra Australis—a mythical southern land said to abound with cities of gold and other fabulous wealth. His fleet consisted of just two small wooden ships crewed by one hundred and fifty men, and their voyage was perilous. Food and sanitation were rudimentary, and in the fashion of the time they would have consigned any dead sailors to the ballasted holds of the vessels—the ballast rocks passing for consecrated ground—rather than burying them at sea. Running desperately short of water, and with the crew on the verge of mutiny, Mendaña finally sighted land in the vicinity of what is now Bughotu village on the island of Santa Isabel, in the Solomon Islands.
As he named his discovery, Mendaña’s mind must have filled with images of goldmines as rich and forgotten as those of the biblical king. But his reward was to be no El Dorado. Instead, he encountered island after verdant island in a sprawling, northwest to southeast oriented, double chain over a thousand kilometres long. The lands were densely populated with a dark-skinned people, who were at first friendly, but with whom inevitably the Spaniards ended up fighting. Wherever the Spanish landed they left behind corpses and outrage, fleeing to their ships with nothing to show but a few poor provisions and captives. Dispirited, and facing potential mutiny, Mendaña decided to return to Lima. He arrived home penniless and emaciated more than two years after he had set out.
Almost thirty years later, at the age of fifty-four, Mendaña was to make one last expedition across the Pacific—this time to colonise the Solomon Islands. His fleet consisted of four ships, carrying 378 settlers and 280 soldiers, and they struck the island chain—much further south than they had on the first expedition—at the island of Santa Cruz (present-day Nendö). While today these islands are politically part of the Solomon Islands, they share greater biological and cultural similarities with Vanuatu than with the rest of the Solomons.
Conflict with the natives broke out almost the moment the colonists stepped ashore, and it was compounded by a vicious civil war among the would-be settlers, who had divided into factions. Within a month Mendaña had died from malaria, and soon thereafter the survivors packed up and set sail for the Philippines, taking Mendaña’s body with them so that his remains could rest in consecrated ground at Manila.
The Solomon Islands were not lacking the precious metals sought by the Spaniards. Today the nation exports gold. But unlike the Inca and Aztec, who had amassed great hoards of gold and silver, the people of the Solomon Islands had remained in the Stone Age. They had no use for the gold nuggets gleaming in their shaded rainforest streams. So for over four hundred years the gold would lie hidden, and Mendaña’s dreams of riches remained unrealised.
Thirty thousand years before Mendaña’s invasion, Melanesian seafarers had arrived in the island chain. They had travelled on rafts or canoes from New Guinea, or the islands of the Bismarck Archipelago. They must have been at home on the ocean, for they brought with them their families, as well as goods and foodstuffs. The human history of the Solomon Islands is thus almost as long as that of Europe. By the time Mendaña arrived, the Solomons had developed a network of interlinked languages and cultures every bit as diverse and numerous as those of Europe itself.
In the north—in what today is the autonomous Papua New Guinean region of Bougainville—the descendants of those first pioneers evolved to have the blackest skin on Earth. They performed elaborate rituals for transforming boys into men, and lived in a matrilineal society wherein descent was reckoned through the mother’s line and governed the inheritance of land and hereditary status. Further south, cultural evolution took a different twist. On Guadalcanal great terraced gardens were laid out and tended, and in Mendaña’s day the island supported the highest population densities of the region. On nearby Malaita, in contrast, some of the people reclaimed land from the sea rather like the Dutch have done. They built large villages and lived on marine resources, while highly distinctive warrior cultures developed inland. Most islands in fact developed their own distinctive culture, the larger ones supporting several cultures which could differ starkly.
The Solomon Islands rose out of the sea tens of millions of years before the first human arrived. They had never been connected to any continent, yet lay close enough to New Guinea to be settled by many creatures that flew over or floated across the sea. Millions of years before the first human foot left its imprint on a Solomons beach, reptiles, birds, frogs and mammals had all survived the challenging journey and made a home there. And many of these immigrants had given rise to spectacular creatures found nowhere else. Indeed, so rich is the islands’ biodiversity that scientists journeying into their dark forests and high peaks continue to discover new species. I have with my own eyes seen creatures in the dense jungle of the Solomon Islands which, to this day, remain unnamed and utterly unknown to the outside world.
The Solomons were among the last regions on Earth to be colonised by Europeans. In part this was because their inhabitants had a fearsome reputation as cannibals and headhunters, and in part because the islands seemed to produce so very little that was valued in Europe and its colonies. The exception was cheap labour for Queensland’s canefields, and it was a trade in human beings with more than a passing resemblance to slavery, known as ‘black-birding’, that led to colonisation.
Blackbirding operated on the very fringes of legality. Carried out by some of the toughest captains and crews in the Pacific, it often involved kidnapping young Solomon Islanders who were then forced to work as indentured labourers for a number of years. Many died during kidnapping or in escape attempts. Those that survived were locked in holds like those of slave ships, then sold to sugarcane planters who set them to work in the canefields of northern Australia. When their time was up they were supposed to be transported back to the Solomons. But all too frequently they were not dropped at their home village, thus placing them in grave danger of being killed by people who were their traditional enemies.
The twentieth century was just seven years away when, in 1893, British colonial rule was established in the Solomons. Indeed it was with considerable reluctance that the British government declared the Solomon Islands a protectorate, their principal motive being the suppression of blackbirding. Despite the good intentions, the European impact on the islands was particularly fatal. By the 1920s blackbirding, along with the introduction of guns and disease, had left some islands, such as the 200-kilometre-long Santa Isabel, all but depopulated.
The region’s reputation for savagery goes back as far as Mendaña. He records being offered a child’s arm and shoulder as food on Guadalcanal—his revulsion sparking yet another clash. And it
was not helped by the fatal shooting by bow and arrow of Commodore Goodenough, after whom Goodenough Island is named, on Santa Cruz Island in 1875. ‘Holy Joe’ as he was known to his colleagues had been on a mission to stamp out blackbirding. The death of this deeply religious and moral naval officer who had the welfare of the natives at heart left a lingering suspicion in the minds of European visitors for decades. When Ellis Troughton visited Santa Cruz in 1927 to collect mammals, he reported in the Australian Museum magazine that the people of the island’s west coast were ‘still dangerous’ and refused to come aboard European vessels.
Although Troughton did not visit the main islands of the Solomons, which lie further north, he was told by European residents that until recently a particularly horrifying form of cannibalism had been practised there. It was said that an enclave of Malaitans had established themselves on the adjacent island of Guadalcanal, and that they would raid surrounding districts for children, whom they would then:
feed and rear … to about the age of sixteen and sell to the natives of Malaita. The District Officer intercepted a party of these doomed ones in 1906 and found them to be absolutely without training or mental reaction, apparently quite unconscious of their fate, like any beasts for slaughter, and we were glad to hear that the abominable trade was wiped out about 1914.8
Cannibalism may have a long history in parts of the Solomons, as it does in much of the Pacific, but the ‘savagery’ of the natives towards visiting Europeans was almost certainly a result of European brutality. Mendaña found the islanders to be initially friendly—until the depredations and killings by his crew soured relations. And as the practice of blackbirding illustrates, most later contacts continued to be brutal. It was in this environment that the pioneering naturalists of the Solomon Islands worked. And none was more diligent or more successful than the English collector of natural history specimens Sir Charles Morris Woodford.