Canberra: ANU Press, 2014. xiv, 420 pp. (Figures, plate, maps.) US$33.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-9250-2203-2.
Environmental anthropologist and Melanesia scholar David Russell Lawrence draws on his additional expertise in museum curatorship and librarianship to shape his narrative of Charles Morris Woodford’s life and work as naturalist and British resident commissioner of the Solomon Islands between 1882 and 1915. Adeptly fusing anthropology and history, Lawrence writes the history of British colonialism in the Pacific, the story of late Victorian scientific imperialism, and of nation-state formation in the Solomon Islands through his detailed, expansive, and empathic portrait of Woodford. He sees through Woodford’s eyes seamlessly as ethnographer, naturalist, and colonial administrator while placing the Solomons at the centre of Pacific processes of exploration (37).
Woodford was first a naturalist who combined exploration, scientific discovery and ethnographic collecting as he engaged in “bringing the unknown home, of opening up the world” (22). In his longest and most engaging chapter, Lawrence devotes sixty-six pages to Woodford’s contribution of 483 material objects to such collections as the British Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers Museum, and the Australian Museum as well as his collection of 17,000 specimens including new genera and species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and Lepidoptera. The chapter encompasses a review of the relationship of science and empire, natural and cultural history, the role of the scientific societies, and photography as a form of “virtual witnessing” as formulated by Elizabeth Edwards. Woodford’s publications include his extensively reviewed A Naturalist Among the Headhunters, (reviewed by even Alfred Russel Wallace), contributions to the Royal Geographical Society’s Proceedings, and articles in The Illustrated London News, and Popular Science Monthly, among others.
Woodford was also a colonial administrator who created a new social order in which the British Protectorate would be self-supporting through a plantation economy, one dependent on pacification. From the perspective of a materialistic Western Pacific High Commission, the protectorates were not to impose an expense on Britain. Lawrence documents that 8,000 of the 27,000 indentured labourers in Fiji between 1865 and 1911 were from the Solomon Islands. In the Queensland plantations, more than 17,000 labourers were recruited (44). Woodford condemned the concomitant colonial promotion of an external labour trade that brought back weapons, disease, and social destabilization (287), and Lawrence’s voice merges with Woodford: “It was capitalism that created rich and poor Solomon Islanders” (197). From Woodford’s perspective—in constant conflict with his superiors—naval or “Commodore Justice” (147) and the violent and ruthless suppression of headhunting by Arthur William Mahaffy and his police force (202) inflicted violence that far exceeded that attributed to the Solomon Islanders so in need of “pacification.”
Lawrence illustrates and underscores two aspects of Woodford’s legacy, the first rooted in his passion for the place and its diverse peoples encapsulated in his sense of the islands as “beautiful.” The title of his book prompts us to ask what constituted this beauty for Woodford. He recognized physical (128) and ethnological wonder in an archipelago perceived by traders, missionaries, the Royal Navy, and the colonial office as particularly “savage” because of its headhunting traditions and practices of ritualized warfare; and he understood the elegance of the indigenous logic of headhunting and its link to retribution cycles, thus challenging the one-dimensional British imperative for pacification. He saw beauty also in his vision of a prosperous future for the Solomons, a goal to be achieved through the pacification of headhunting and the advancement of a plantation economy. This was best “achieved when European military, naval and policing actions intersected with the local people’s perception of that power and with the new social, religious and economic forces that grew up around colonialisation” (330).
The second aspect of Woodford’s legacy is embodied in his own writings in a quotation cited twice by Lawrence: “I know of no place where firm and paternal government would sooner produce beneficial results than the Solomons. The numerous small tribes into which the population is split up would render any organized resistance to properly constituted authority quite futile, while I believe the natives themselves would not be slow to recognize the advantages of increased security to life and property. Here is an object worthy indeed the devotion of one’s life” (5, 349). Woodford’s devotion spanned thirty-three years, concluding with honours that recognized his role in establishing the framework of the first colonial state between 1897 and 1915.
Although seemingly colonialist in this viewpoint, Woodford recognized remarkable internal variation across the six main continental islands, twenty smaller islands and the 900 coral reefs and small islets comprising the Solomon Islands. Of these 347 were inhabited. By mining Woodford’s primarily official, archival papers, David Lawrence illustrates his understanding of customary trade as “a successful, functioning, integrated system with its own internal dynamism” (56). Equally significant was Woodford’s insight into the logic of headhunting and ritualized warfare as fulfilling the dual desires of a man for prestige and to “propitiate spiritual powers” (59)
Forty-three carefully prepared images, mostly Woodford’s, convey the richness and perceptivity of his ethnographic record; they are concentrated in the chapters on his three natural history expeditions (nineteen images), the British Protectorate of the Solomon Islands (eight images), and the plantation economy (six images). A listing of the figures, the three maps, and the inclusion of an index would be a helpful aid to readers in navigating the text, as would larger maps. Source materials for all of the chapters are comprehensive and broad in chronological, archival, and disciplinary scope.
The Naturalist and his ‘Beautiful Islands’ is clearly written, with attention to historical and statistical detail while also conveying the shared and complex tensions for Woodford and Lawrence in conveying both indigenous and colonialist understandings of their Pacific encounters in the Solomons during the height of British colonialism and indigenous resistance.
Michèle D. Dominy
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, USA
pp. 737-739