Malaita of Malaita began in 1893, when Captain Gibson R.N., of , declared the southern Solomon Islands as a British Protectorate with the proclamation of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, claiming to regulate the local warfare and unfair labor trade, although it coincided with the German acquisition of territories to the west and French interest in those to the east. Auki was established as a government station in 1909, as headquarters of the administrative district of Malaita. The government began to pacify the island, registering or confiscating firearms, collecting a head tax, and breaking the power of unscrupulous war leaders. One
Choiseul pigeon to Choiseul as the island hosts no other endemic species, and the pigeon was never linked ecologically with another species on the island. In January 1904 six specimens and an egg were collected by Albert Stewart Meek, a bird collector for Lord Walter Rothschild, near Choiseul Bay on Choiseul. Several local boys told Meek that the pigeon was also present on the nearby islands of Santa Isabel and Malaita. Though Meek did not travel to these islands, he did search for the Choiseul pigeon on the adjacent Bougainville Island, but did not find any evidence of its presence. No other