Adaro

A flying fish skims out of a calm sea on the wrong angle, strikes a man on the temple, and stops his breath. On the reefs off Makira this was never read as accident. Someone had aimed it. Somewhere below the surface, or above it on a path of light, an adaro had nocked the silver body like an arrow and let it fly.

The Arosi people of San Cristobal, the island the Solomon Islanders now call Makira, keep two souls inside every person. The aunga is the kinder half. After death it leaves cleanly, gone into the world of the ancestors, and is finished with the living. The adaro stays. It is the malignant residue, the spite and grievance that does not dissolve when the body does, and it lingers in the surf and the air to harry those it once knew. Around this domestic ghost, the same word stretches outward to cover a larger order of beings, the wild adaro, primordial sea-spirits never born of any human, who live in the sun itself and travel down to the world on rainbows and waterspouts.

To look at, an adaro is a man until he isn’t. Gills curve behind the ears like the scrolls of a shell. The feet end in long tail fins, set so that he moves through water rather than across it. A shark’s dorsal horn rises from the back of the skull, and a second projection grows straight out from the brow, slender and polished, sharp as a sawfish bill or a swordfish’s beak. The combined effect is closer to a small reef predator than to a man. Stories that try to picture the chief, Ngorieru, give him scale to match. A great adaro, larger than the rest, who rides a seahorse the size of a war canoe and patrols the coast off San Cristobal as a sort of standing army.

The way they come and go is the part the missionary Charles Fox could not stop returning to in his 1924 ethnography of Makira. He recorded fishermen who would not work during sun showers because the adaro use that crossing, the brief overlap of sunlight and rain where a rainbow stands clean against the sea, as a road down from their home in the sun. A waterspout was the same thing in a faster mood. Children were kept from playing on bright wet sand for fear that something would walk out of the glare and select one of them.

When an adaro hunts, the weapon of choice is borrowed flesh. The creature animates a flying fish or a gar, holds it like a thrown spear, and drives it at a man working a reef or sitting low in a canoe. The fish itself is not the murderer. It is the dart, and the adaro is the hand. A bruise on the throat, a stunned moment, a body sliding off the platform of a canoe and not coming back up: this is the everyday signature. There is also the older method of simple shipwreck, the canoe gone over in water that was glassy a minute before, the swimmer pulled down by a hand he cannot see.

Not every encounter ends like that. The same tradition that fears the adaro also tells of men who befriended one. The accounts Fox heard usually involve a song or a dance taught in a dream, brought back the next morning as a new festival piece. The spirit gives the gift, the human community accepts it, and the song enters the repertoire. This is the part of the adaro picture that English summaries tend to flatten. They are dangerous, yes, but they are also a source of new ceremony and new music, the kind of pact-spirit a coastal people negotiates with rather than simply fights.

The line between the two classes of adaro blurs in practice. A particularly violent man might leave behind an adaro strong enough to behave like one of the wild sea-spirits, prowling reefs his family used to fish. A wild adaro might pick out a particular village and harass it across generations. Both kinds answer in some measure to Ngorieru off the coast, and both kinds slip back and forth between sea and sun on the same rainbow road.

Their powers track the medium they live in. They control flying fish and gar and other surface-swimmers as projectiles. They capsize canoes. They walk along rainbows and through waterspouts as casually as a man walks a beach. They can be invisible, and they often are. They cause sudden illness in those who have offended them. And they bring, when they choose to, a melody that the recipient wakes up still remembering.

Their weaknesses are the weaknesses of any spirit pinned to one element. The adaro belongs to the sea and the sun-shower. He has no business in the deep bush or in the cleared ground of a village shrine, and ritual practitioners on Makira knew which spaces were safe and which were the spirit’s own. Charms and offerings could turn an adaro aside. So could simply not being on the water at the wrong hour. The fishermen who waited out a sun shower on shore were not being timid. They were observing a treaty.

What survives in the Arosi accounts is a Pacific cosmology in which the sun is not a distant disk but an occupied place, and the rainbow is a working road between it and the reef. The adaro is the traffic on that road. He is the half of a dead neighbour that did not let go, and he is the older thing that was never anyone’s neighbour at all, and the two of them share a name because, from the canoe, the difference is academic.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an adaro?

An adaro is a malevolent sea-spirit from the mythology of the Arosi people of Makira, in the Solomon Islands. The word covers both a class of primordial fish-men who live in the sun and a malignant ghost-half left behind when a person dies. In both forms the adaro is dangerous to people who go out on the water.

What does an adaro look like?

An adaro has the body of a man with gills behind the ears, tail-fins instead of feet, a shark-like dorsal horn rising from the back of the skull, and a long spear projecting from the brow like a swordfish or sawfish bill. The overall impression is closer to a small reef predator in human shape than to a fish or a man alone.

How does an adaro kill people?

Adaro hunt fishermen by animating flying fish or gar and hurling them like thrown spears at men in canoes or working the reefs. A solid strike to the head or throat can stun or kill, and the victim slips into the water and is not seen again. Adaro are also said to capsize canoes outright and drag swimmers under.

How do adaro travel between the sun and the sea?

Adaro live in the sun and descend to the world along rainbows and inside waterspouts, which is why their appearances are tied to sun showers. The Arosi avoided fishing during sun showers for exactly this reason, since the rainbow road stands open at those moments and the adaro use it freely.

Who is Ngorieru?

Ngorieru is the chief of the adaro, a great spirit who lives off the coast of San Cristobal and rides a seahorse said to be the size of a war canoe. He is the largest and most powerful of his kind, leading the sea-adaro as a standing force along the Makira coast.

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