DISCOVERY OF THE SOLOMONS 139 



they somehow got identified with the land of Ophir, the 

 land of fabulous richness, whence the ships of Solomon 

 had brought gold to Jerusalem. " The discoverers," says 

 Lopez Vaz, who wrote twenty years later, "named them 

 Solomon, to the end that Spaniards, supposing them to be 

 those isles whence Solomon fetched gold to adorn the Temple 

 at Jerusalem, might be more desirous to go and inherit 

 the same." But, in their original narratives, the dis- 

 coverers did not name them Solomon, and made no 

 suggestion that they were the Land of Ophir. Sarmiento, 

 who wrote later than the others, was the only discoverer 

 who used the name ; and he used it- only in the title of 

 his book: "The Western Islands in the South Ocean, 

 commonly called the Isles of Solomon." Our modern 

 editor finds the explanation in the tavern-talk of the 

 soldiers about the golden war-clubs of the natives, and 

 about the soil that showed colour when you scratched 

 it. In twenty years the story had grown that the Spaniards 

 had brought back with them forty thousand pesos of 

 gold beside "great store of cloves and ginger" from a 

 land from which they had, in fact, brought back not a 

 single ounce. 



