ABSTRACT
In the words of H. E. Maude: ‘No one who has lived in the Gilberts can ever forget them, for they are unique—the ultimate citadel-heart of Oceania.’ My father thought of them in this way too, and also as a meeting point of migrating races, where five and possibly six different peoples had come together and combined. Fortunately hurricanes, which can sweep right over an ocean atoll, destroying whole villages with all their inhabitants, do not visit the Gilbert Islands. So life continues and has continued from century to century, ever since voyagers from the west came on rafts or canoes to cultivate trees and so bring life to the sun-scorched coral. Who these first settlers were, and where they came from, were questions to which my father devoted many years of patient research, and in the following pages I have endeavoured to summarize his conclusions as I remember them.
