Arthur William Mahaffy

[2] Following his graduation with a B.A., he accepted a junior position at Magdalene College, then he joined the Royal Munster Fusiliers as a 2nd Lieutenant.

He was accepted into the Colonial Service in October 1895, and was appointed to the British Western Pacific Territories (BWPT), where his first position was as a District Officer in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate.

He was directed to control the coercive labour recruitment practices, known as blackbirding, operating in the Solomon Island waters and to stop the illegal trade in firearms.

[4][5] Mahaffy had a force of twenty-five police officers armed with rifles, who were recruited from the islands of Malaita, Savo and Isabel.

[2] The first target of this force was chief Ingava of the Roviana Lagoon of New Georgia who had been raiding Choiseul and Isabel and killing or enslaving hundreds of people.

[7] Malaita was a difficult island to administer as Mahaffy believed that 80 per cent of Malaitan males possessed firearms in the 1900s.

In 1909, Mahaffy returned to the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorates for 3 months as Assistant High Commissioner, to carry out an inquiry into this allegation.

[10] In 1913, an anonymous correspondent to The New Age journal, published an article under the title "Modern buccaneers in the West Pacific", and described the maladministration of Telfer Campbell, and challenged Mahaffy’s impartiality, because he was a former colonial official in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate.