A ship's captain, his vessel ready to explode from a fire within its cargo hold, desperately searches for a way to save his crew. A missionary in Fiji is clubbed to death by a cannibal chief to satisfy a debt of honor. A scientist agrees to have his head chopped off in return for a last glimpse of a huge alien object half-buried in the jungles of Guadalcanal. A Melanesian youth, sold into slavery, gains revenge against his sadistic white overseer. With unbridled barbarity, the crew of a European ship massacres scores of islanders.
These are some of the incidents in the action-filled short stories found in Jack London's Tales of Cannibals and Headhunters. Though London's bestsellers about the frozen Northland are known to most, few readers are familiar with his tales set in the romantic and dangerous South Seas - an area of the world with which Jack London became intimate while traveling aboard his yacht, The Snark, in the first decade of the twentieth century.
For the first time these stories are collected in a single volume with notes, an introduction, and an afterword that help to illuminate the racial tension of the colonial period in the Pacific. The stories are illustrated with the original artwork, several maps (including one of London's own), and photographs of the region.
