Choiseul Island

Choiseul Island, native name Lauru, is the largest island () of the Choiseul Province, Solomon Islands, at . The administrative headquarters of Choiseul Province is situated in the town of Taro, on Taro Island. In 1768, the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville named the island after the then French foreign minister, Étienne François, duc de Choiseul. The first recorded sighting by Europeans was by the Spanish expedition of Álvaro de Mendaña in April 1568. More precisely the sighting was due to a local voyage done by a small boat, in the accounts the brigantine Santiago, commanded by Maestre de Campo Pedro Ortega Valencia and having Hernán Gallego as pilot. They charted it as San Marcos, and also named the narrow channel separating San Jorge from Santa Isabel Island as the Ortega channel after the commander of the expedition. In the nineteenth century Choiseul islanders suffered attacks from blackbirding (the often brutal recruitment or kidnapping of labourers for the sugar plantations in Queensland and Fiji). In April 1885, the German Empire declared a Protectorate over the North Solomon Islands, including Choiseul. In 1900, under the terms of Treaty of Berlin, signed on 14 November 1899, Germany transferred the North Solomon Islands (except for Bougainville and its surrounding islands) to the British Solomon Islands Protectorate in exchange for the British giving up all claims to Samoa. Missionaries settled on Choiseul under both protectorates, converting most of the population to Christianity. In the early 20th century several British and Australian firms began large-scale coconut planting. The Austrian anthropologist and photographer Hugo Bernatzik visited Choiseul in 1932. Bernatzik documented some of the few remaining ancestral customs of the island people and described them in an ethnography that he published a few years later. He also took some photographs of the islanders and brought back a stone urn with carvings, reflecting a culture that he deemed was dying in contact with the modern world.