The evils of the slave trade prompt…
June 1893 CE
The evils of the slave trade prompt the United Kingdom to declare a protectorate over the southern Solomon Islands in June 1893.
Some of the earliest and most regular foreign visitors to the islands had been whaling vessels from Britain, the United States and Australia.
They began coming for food, wood and water from late in the eighteenth century and, later, had begun taking aboard islanders to serve as crewmen on their ships.
Relations between the islanders and visiting seamen have not always been good and sometimes there has been violence and bloodshed.
Missionaries had begun visiting the Solomons in the mid-nineteenth century.
They made little progress at first, because "blackbirding" (the often brutal recruitment or kidnapping of laborers for the sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji) led to a series of reprisals and massacres.
Groups
Commodities
Regions
Melanesia
View →Subregions
