Transcribed from the 1917 Mills & Boon edition ,email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
It is a misfortune to some fiction-writers that fiction and unveracityin the average person’s mind mean one and the same thing. Several years ago I published a South Sea novel. The action wasplaced in the Solomon Islands. The action was praised by the criticsand reviewers as a highly creditable effort of the imagination. As regards reality—they said there wasn’t any. Ofcourse, as every one knew, kinky-haired cannibals no longer obtainedon the earth’s surface, much less ran around with nothing on,chopping off one another’s heads, and, on occasion, a white man’shead as well.
Now listen. I am writing these lines in Honolulu, Hawaii. Yesterday, on the beach at Waikiki, a stranger spoke to me. Hementioned a mutual friend, Captain Kellar. When I was wreckedin the Solomons on the blackbirder, the Minota, it was CaptainKellar, master of the blackbirder, the Eugénie, who rescuedme. The blacks had taken Captain Kellar’s head, the strangertold me. He knew. He had represented Captain Kellar’smother in settling up the estate.
Listen. I received a letter the other day from Mr. C. M. Woodford,Resident Commissioner of the British Solomons. He was back athis post, after a long furlough to England, where he had entered hisson into Oxford. A search of the shelves of almost any publiclibrary will bring to light a book entitled, “A Naturalist Amongthe Head Hunters.” Mr. C. M. Woodford is the naturalist. He wrote the book.
To return to his letter. In the course of the day’s workhe casually and briefly mentioned a particular job he had just got offhis hands. His absence in England had been the cause of delay. The job had been to make a punitive expedition to a neighbouring island,and, incidentally, to recover the heads of some mutual friends of ours—awhite-trader, his white wife and children, and his white clerk. The expedition was successful, and Mr. Woodford concluded his accountof the episode with a statement to the effect: “What especiallystruck me was the absence of pain and terror in their faces, which seemedto express, rather, serenity and repose”—this, mind you,of men and women of his own race whom he knew well and who had sat atdinner with him in his own house.
Other friends, with whom I have sat at dinner in the brave, rollickingdays in the Solomons have since passed out—by the same way. My goodness! I sailed in the teak-built ketch, the Minota,on a blackbirding cruise to Malaita, and I took my wife along. The hatchet-marks were still raw on the door of our tiny stateroom advertisingan event of a few months before. The event was the taking of CaptainMackenzie’s head, Captain Mackenzie, at that time, being masterof the Minota. As we sailed in to Langa-Langa, the British cruiser,the Cambrian, steamed out from the shelling of a village.
It is not expedient to burden this preliminary to my story with furtherdetails, which I do make asseveration I possess a-plenty. I hopeI have given some assurance that the adventures of my dog hero in thisnovel are real adventures in a very real cannibal world. Blessyou!—when I took my wife along on the cruise of the Minota,we found on board a nigger-chasing, adorable Irish terrier puppy, whowas smooth-coated like Jerry, and whose name was Peggy. Had itnot been for Peggy, this book would never have been written. Shewas the chattel of the Minota’s splendid skipper. So much did Mrs. London and I come to love her, that Mrs. London, afterthe wreck of the Minota, deliberately and shamelessly stole herfrom the Minota’s skipper. I do further admit thatI did, deliberately and shamelessly, compound my wife’s felo