In Central Guadalcanal?

Is There an Undiscovered People In Central Guadalcanal?

From Our Own Correspondent

Honiara, Feb. 1.

NATIVES of Guadalcanal still believe that in the mountainous interior of the island there lives a race of

naked, brown, prehistoric savages who have never even learned the use of fire.

They are said to be small and straight haired with long beards and nails, and to live in caves and gaps in the rock, knowing no weapons and using no tools.

They have a strong, disgusting smell, and in the past are said to have taken and eaten stray bushmen. This story was told recently to a District Commissioner on a tour of Central Guadalcanal.

The belief of Guadalcanal and San Cristoval natives in this utterly primitive race is recorded in Dr. C. Fox’s “The Threshold of the Pacific” (unfortunately now out of print) in which a similar description of them is given. According to Dr. Fox, they are called the Kaka mora in San Cristoval.

Nobody can say for certain whether these stories are only a distant memory of some race which once existed and is now' extinct, or whether such people do still exist in the almost inaccessible moun tains of San Cristoval and Guadalcanal.

Dr. Fox records that once when travelling with a party of natives on San Cristoval they told him that they had seen a Kakamora in a river they were about to fcrd. Dr. Fox himself did not sight him, but when they came to the river he saw on a dry stone in the middle of the stream a raw, half-eaten fish, and a few small wet footprints on the stone. The natives, who recognise footprints as we do faces, were certain that these were not made by the foot of any known man in the area.