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.

[2][3] 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).

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.

[citation needed] A battalion of US Marines carried out a raid on the island in October – November 1943, to divert attention away from the Landings at Cape Torokina.