RAI Research Seminar
Tuesday 25 March 2025, 4.00-6.00pm GMT
This is a hybrid event.
To join us in person at the RAI (Address), register here.
To join us via Zoom, register here.
Lt. (RN) H.B.T. Somerville and HMS Penguin in Solomon Islands, 1893-1895:
Entanglements of archival, local, anthropological,
and naturalist knowledges, past and present
Prof Edvard Hviding, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
When the Royal Navy screw-and-sail sloop HMS Penguin arrived in the New Georgia Group of Solomon Islands in July 1893 after a voyage from Hong Kong, it was to carry out an ambitious programme of hydrographic surveys of an archipelagic colony-in-the making, in the form of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. Commanded by Captain A.F. Balfour (who was of some exploratory fame from the HMS Challenger expedition), the Penguin was equipped with many boats including small, nimble steam cutters well suited for surveys of the large reef and lagoon systems of this part of Solomon Islands. The cutters were deployed for regular camping ashore around the great Marovo Lagoon, by small parties of men under the leadership of a lieutenant and supplied with tents, provisions, a pile of coal, and other necessities, while the mother ship had to make regular long voyages to the Royal Navy coal depot in the eastern parts of the Solomon Islands, or was occupied with surveys further west in New Georgia. These “shore parties” were notable for their closeness to “native settlements”, which involved daily interaction with lagoon villages still notorious in official British eyes for very recent headhunting expeditions of some scale. The Penguin, as an armed agent of empire, was not tasked with punitive expeditions against headhunting and other “native outrages”.
However, during the Penguin’s almost two years on and off around the New Georgia islands, other Royal Navy ships, including the HMS Royalist, visited for punitive purposes, usually following murders of white traders and planters. In this volatile and unpredictable situation, the men of the Penguin developed a distinctively different kind of relationship with local communities and their leaders, and several lieutenants carried out ethnographically inspired work on the side among the people with whom they lived. Foremost among them was Lt. H.B.T Somerville, who, with the day’s version of The RAI’s Notes and Queries on Anthropology and with knowledge of how to do anthropometric measurements and collect linguistic data, made significant advances in understanding who lived in the areas surveyed, and how they lived. Somerville’s work is notable for branching into metaphysics, crypto-zoology, and ethnomusicology, some of which was reported in two 1897 articles in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
I have myself carried out anthropological field research in the Marovo Lagoon over more than four years since 1986, and back when I started, I was fortunate to meet with very old men and women who were able to remember the HMS Penguin. This fortunate coincidence has led me to carry out long-term archive research in London on the rich and diverse “leftovers” from Somerville and the Penguin, located at the RAI, at the Royal Geographical Society, and at the National Archives in Kew.
In this seminar I will discuss the many strands of inquiry that are emerging from this work, in equally diverse genres of historical anthropology, multi-perspectival ethnography, cartography, naval history, and climate science.
