Headhunting in the Solomon Islands: Around the Coral Sea [Paperback]

Caroline Mytinger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2001

This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Caroline Mytinger, an artist and amateur anthropologist, set off in the late 1930's with her friend Margaret Warner on an expedition to paint indigenous people in the Solomon Islands. She wanted to record the different types of people before the "civilizing" process and intermarriage made it impossible to distinguish pure island races.

While Mytinger's language does occasionally reveal the prejudices of her time, she respected native people and was very cynical about "civilization" and the pompous attitude of the white people in the Solomon Islands. However, Mytinger is rarely serious, and her book is most notably funny and honest. She never shirks the truth, no matter how shocking or just plain gross it might have seemed to her contemporaries. She seems to relish description of the hideous infections and other maladies that plague the artistic Expedition, as well as the constant presence of insects:

"It was the invisible hordes of mosquitoes in the dark under the table, and those working down our thinly clad backs that absorbed our attention. I was sitting on a cane chair and, so help me, they were stabbing up from below. To make the situation acute our hosts had set a very formal key - we were Miss This and they Mr. That - not an atmosphere sympathetic to easing things as a cow does on a tree."

Headhunting in the Solomon Islands is an incredibly rich sensory experience; you can practically feel the tropical sweat dripping off these pages; smells and tastes and colors spring out of Mytinger's prose:

"All up and down the lagoon...was a labyrinth of little coral-made islands and waterways that had a varying depth and a snow-white coral sea-bottom. That made the blues of the water every shade from deep purplish ultramarine to peacock and robin's-egg blue. And there were streaks of tender green and yellow where the coral castles reached near the surface. The blue of this water was the first distinct palette color we had seen in this blinding dark and light world."

Most of the island experience is not this idyllic, however, and each new location brings a host of fresh obstacles: days of stifling uninterrupted heat, fevers, terrible faux pas with the natives (like entering the 'men's garden' where no women are allowed), foolish mistakes (like giving one of her models a piece of melted gum, which ends up strung all over the woman and her baby), constant skin infections, and of course the ever-present mosquitoes. Not exactly the best circumstances for painting portraits, but the two friends meet it all with good humor and energy.

Mytinger and Warner went chasing adventure in the name of science - something rarely done by women at the time, and they did it in the face of universal disapproval and even terror on the part of their families, who didn't expect them to come back alive. Not only that, but they had virtually no money and no scientific support. But live they did, and they brought back beautiful paintings and the captivating stories contained in this fine book.

Product Details

• Paperback: 372 pages
• Publisher: The Narrative Press (June 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1589760425
• ISBN-13: 978-1589760424
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,348,624 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #63 in Books > Travel > Australia & South Pacific > South Pacific

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Saddly no illustrations...., May 2, 2005

By 

Patk (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands: Around the Coral Sea (Paperback)

Even though this is the journal of Caroline Mytinger, her travels, and one would expect her illustrations... which played a big part in the journey. Her illustrations were not included. They are now considered a rare antropological study of what was in the South Pacific at that time.... no mention, in any of Amazons reviews that the illustrations were not included in this paper back.... a very bold omission.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The sun also sets, March 21, 2002

By 

David Butterfield "botteville" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Headhunting in the Solomon islands around the Coral sea (Hardcover)

Two women travel about the Coral Sea painting portraits of natives and visiting plantations there in the late '30's. To us, the names of these then and now peaceful tropical places are loaded with horror and regret: Guadalcanar, Rabaul, Bougainville. Prophetically Mytinger details an incident on a British copra plantation in a world vanished away like smoke: the missus kicks a bush boy for using cocoanut husks on the fire, which burn too brightly. "Can every English clergyman's daughter kick like a kangaroo?" asks Caroline. Later the copra shed burns down mysteriously, ruining the missus. Her husband had died some time before and her thumb was infected. "It was the fact that she did not throw her head on the table and sob like any woman that undid me. I went for a walk down on the beach and did it for her."

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Expotition, February 2, 2005

By 

Erika Mitchell (E. Calais, VT USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Headhunting in the Solomon Islands: Around the Coral Sea (Paperback)

This book tells the story of two young American women who set off on an independent "Expotition" to the South Seas in the 1930s. They had the lofty goal of painting "the portrait of a race of primitive negroids living in the Southwest Pacific." Of the two young women, Mytinger was the painter, and her friend Margaret was her faithful companion and assistant. They started off from San Francisco with four hundred dollars in their pockets and a cigarette tin containing supplies for doing charcoal drawings. The idea was to supplement their meager cash and support themselves along the journey by drawing portraits of people they met. Despite the odds, which spared them no end of adventures, from capsizing, to fistfights, to malaria, they survived the journey and made it back home with a story to tell.

The book is somewhat of a period piece, in that the author comes across as living her life through whimsy in a feminine sort of way-but at the same time, she is also a feminist, proud of the fact that she is traveling together with her friend in wild places that many men from back home would deem too dangerous to visit. Mytinger writes from a time before the word "politically correct" was invented, and much of the terminology that she uses to describe the local people that she meets would not be considered acceptable today. However, the manner of her descriptions are not at all out of line with the standards of her time. Modern readers interested in living conditions in the South Seas, especially in the Solomon Islands and New Guinea during the time just before the Second World War will find this a treasure trove of information. Mytinger tells us about life on the plantations, and life in native villages. She tells us who was getting along with whom, the Americans, the British, the Germans, Japanese, and of course, members of all the various local tribes.

During the two years of their Expotition, Mytinger did indeed find many heads to paint. But the conditions of the journey were not conducive to assembling a large collection of portraits. All of her painting supplies were destroyed in the first watery landing on the islands. She was eventually able to get enough paints together from various sources to be able to cob a paint kit together and get some heads on canvas. Unfortunately, most of the collection was lost and never made it back home. Nevertheless, apparently, she had copies of a few of the portraits, which appear reproduced in black-and-white in several places throughout the book.