The White Headhunter
By Nigel Randall

      It sounds like something out of a Victorian adventure story – a white man shipwrecked on a cannibal island and forced to live there for eight years until his rescue. But it is a true tale, and documentary maker Nigel Randall has done plenty of research in the remote Solomon Islands to come up with this extraordinary narrative, showing that truth is indeed stranger than fiction. The earlier chapters tell the thrilling story of Jack Renton’s exploits, from his ordeal floating two thousand miles in an open whaleboat to his landing on the notorious island of Malaita and becoming gradually integrated with the native people. They were head-hunters and sometimes cannibals, but Jack’s skills enabled him to survive amongst them and become the chief’s favorite. After his rescue he narrated his story to an Australian newspaper. Nevertheless, it was a carefully edited account, leaving out his participation in their less civilized customs.

     The real fascination with this book is how recently the world was a vastly different place, and some of the protagonists stare out at the reader from their photographs, making it seem even more immediate. The fact that Randall shows us not only the “white” side of the story but also the local people’s own oral traditions add to this. Perhaps the book’s main strength lies in the psychological portrait of an untouched Stone Age culture and its (destruction?) ruination by the white men. Whether they were slavers, recruiters for the Queensland cane fields, traders or missionaries, many of them thought that they brought salvation or progress. Instead, their diseases decimated the population of these islands and their failure to understand the “natives” or class them as fellow humans brought war and murder. This makes it sound rather gloomy but Randall’s compelling portrait of a world as alien to us as anything dreamed up by SF writers is fascinating reading, and Jack Renton is revealed as being, in effect, the first and last white man to see the Malaitians as they had lived for centuries. Gripping and powerful, this book ought to appeal to anybody who, like this reviewer, has ever stood dreaming in front of the exhibits in an anthropological museum.