a-Langa and her
sister islets, beautiful beads strung along the lee coast of Malaita,
were as unique as they were unexplored.

Originally these islets had been mere sand-banks and coral reefs awash in
the sea or shallowly covered by the sea. Only a hunted, wretched
creature, enduring incredible hardship, could have eked out a miserable
existence upon them. But such hunted, wretched creatures, survivors of
village massacres, escapes from the wrath of chiefs and from the long-pig
fate of the cooking-pot, did come, and did endure. They, who knew only
the bush, learned the salt water and developed the salt-water-man breed.
They learned the ways of the fish and the shell-fish, and they invented
hooks and lines, nets and fish-traps, and all the diverse cunning ways by
which swimming meat can be garnered from the shifting, unstable sea.

Such refugees stole women from the mainland, and increased and
multiplied. With herculean labour, under the burning sun, they conquered
the sea. They walled the confines of their coral reefs and sand-banks
with coral-rock stolen from the mainland on dark nights. Fine masonry,
without mortar or cutting chisel, they builded to withstand the ocean
surge. Likewise stolen from the mainland, as mice steal from human
habitations when humans sleep, they stole canoe-loads, and millions of
canoe-loads, of fat, rich soil.

Generations and centuries passed, and, behold, in place of naked
sandbanks half awash were walled citadels, perforated with launching-ways
for the long canoes, protected against the mainland by the lagoons that
were to them their narrow seas. Coconut palms, banana trees, and lofty
breadfruit trees gave food and sun-shelter. Their gardens prospered.
Their long, lean war-canoes ravaged the coasts and visited vengeance for
their forefathers upon the descendants of them that had persecuted and
desired to eat.

Like the refugees and renegades who slunk away in the salt marshes of the
Adriatic and builded the palaces of powerful Venice on her deep-sunk
piles, so these wretched hunted blacks builded power until they became
masters of the mainland, controlling traffic and trade-routes, compelling
the bushmen for ever after to remain in the bush and never to dare
attempt the salt-water.

And here, amidst the fat success and insolence of the sea-people, Van
Horn swaggered his way, taking his chance, incapable of believing that he
might swiftly die, knowing that he was building good