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. In his account, Gallego chief pilot of Mendaña's expedition, establishes that they called the island Malaita after its native name and explored much of the coast, though not the north side. The Maramasiki Passage was thought to be a river. At one point they were greeted with war canoes and fired at with arrows; they retaliated with shots and killed and wounded some. However, after this discovery, the entire Solomon Islands chain was not found, and even its existence doubted, for two hundred years. Labour trade and missions After it was re-discovered in the late 18th century, Malaitans were subjected to harsh treatment from whaling boat crews and blackbirders (labour recruiters). Contact with outsiders also brought new opportunities for education. The first Malaitans to learn to read and write were Joseph Wate and Watehou, who accompanied Bishop John Coleridge Patteson to St John's College, Auckland.<ref>Joseph Waleanisia, "Wrigin I," in Ples Blong Iumi, 34-35.</ref> From the 1870s to 1903 Malaitan men (and some women) comprised the largest number of Solomon Islander Kanaka workers in the indentured labour trade to Queensland, Australia and to Fiji. The 1870s were a time of illegal recruiting practices known as blackbirding. Malaitans are known to have volunteered as indentured labourers with some making their second trip to work on plantations, although the labour system remained exploitative. In 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia enacted the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901 which facilitated the deportation of Pacific Islanders that was the precursor to the White Australia policy. However, many islanders remained and formed the South Sea Islander community of Australia. Many labourers that returned to Malaita had learnt to read and had become Christian. The skills of literacy and protest letters as to being deported from Australia was a precedent for the later Maasina Ruru movement. Many of the earliest missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, were killed, and this violent reputation survives in the geographic name of Cape Arsacides, the eastward bulge of the northern part of the island, meaning Cape of the Assassins. The cape was even mentioned in Herman Melville's epic novel Moby Dick by Ishmael, the novel's narrator. Ishmael talks of his friendship with the fictional Tranquo, King of Tranque. However,