Book Reviews
p. 101 · Read in the full issue
Escape Back To The
'Good Old Days'
Both Best Stories of the South Seas, edited by Philip Snow, and Cannibal Cargoes, by Hector Holthouse, can be regarded as escapes into the “romantic” period of the South Pacific. None of the stories has much bearing on today’s Pacific Islands and the abiding interest of Islanders in politics, independence, a viable economy and other
prosaic matters.
Best Stories contains items from eight authors —Thor Heyerdahl, Melville, Grimble, John Martin (Mariner’s biographer), James Michener and A. Grove Day, Robert Louis Stevenson, John W.
Vandercook, and Snow himself.
Philip Snow at one time was a District Commissioner in Fiji and in his own contribution, Near the Beach, he describes some of the eccentrics whom he met—not pre cisely beachcombers but people who felt that the more sophisticated world was well lost to them. None is known to this reviewer although
older Kai Vitis may remember some of them. They seem, the way Snow writes about them, to have belonged to a more meaningful Pacific than the one we have today.
Knew New Guinea
I was glad to see that he included something from a book by a little known American writer, John W.
Vandercook. I remember picking up his Dark Islands in a library in Melbourne during the war, when 1 was homesick for New Guinea and how I enjoyed his ability to capture the atmosphere of a place. This ac complishment seems rare in con temporary American writers, who are apt to let their sentiments rule their commonsense when it comes to writing about anything resembling a Pacific island. (Vandercook, as I remember it, wrote about Papua, and the dark, muddy Gulf country at that.) Cannibal Cargoes is concerned mainly with the skulduggery era in the Pacific—when some Europeans went for sandalwood, cheap labour, women and anything else from which they could make a fast buck.
There’s Bully Hayes and blood in the scuppers, kidnapping and whole sale cannibalism, most of it taking place at the same period as some of Mr. Snow’s authors were writing idylls about the same South Seas.
But this book is not fiction.
The trade in cannibals was mostly between the Solomons and New Hebrides and the plantations of North Queensland and Fiji, and those who enthusiastically engaged in it operated in small vessels from Australian ports.
Taken at its face value, it is a black record of black period in European-Islands relationships and to this extent the savagery of both Islanders and Europeans can be re garded as somewhat out of context.
All skippers of all ships that plied out of Sydney at that period where not double-dyed villains, although Mr. Holthouse’s collection of stories might well convince you that they were.
Compare it!
Some months back we reviewed a small book published by the Aus tralian National University (A Cruize in a Queensland Labour Ves sel) which does not so much pre sent a different angle of the era as a different emphasis. Readers might do well to read the two books to gether.
Mr. Holthouse, a Brisbane journalist, has done a lot of re search to get his stories. Some of it would make hot movie material.
The book is illustrated with repro ductions from old prints and pub lications.—JT.
(Best Stories Of The South Seas
Faber and Faber; UK. oric a Stg.2l/-.