The White Headhunter: A remarkable true-life heart of darkness story

In 1868, Jack Renton, a teenage Scots sailor, was shanghaied in San Francisco. In 1876, he was rescued from captivity on the Pacific island of Malaita, home to a fearsome tribe of headhunters. After the rescue, in a sensational best-selling memoir, Renton recounted his eight-year adventure: how he jumped ship and drifted two thousand miles in an open whaleboat to the Solomon Islands, came ashore at Malaita, was stripped of his clothes, possessions and his very identity, but lived to serve the island’s tribal chief Kabou eventually as his most trusted adviser. For all the authenticity and riveting detail, however, it turns out that Renton’s chronicle glossed over key events that made him the man that Kabou said he loved, "as my first-born son."

Mining the oral history passed down in detail from generations of Malaitans, documentary filmmaker Nigel Randell has pieced together a more complete and grislier account of Renton’s experience—as a man forced to assimilate in order to survive. While The White Headhunter is the story of a man transformed by an island, it is also the story of a man who transformed the island as he prepared it for the onslaught of Western civilization.



Publishers WeeklyFirst-time author Randell, a veteran British documentary filmmaker, demonstrates his skilled storytelling in this account of the life and times of Jack Renton, a teenage Scottish sailor who, in 1868, jumped ship near the Solomon Islands and was rescued by a tribe of headhunters from the Pacific island of Malaita. Combining a close reading of a biography of Renton published after he was found eight years later, oral histories from Malaitians and original research, Randell shows that Renton's story encompasses much more than the fact that "no white man had survived for such a length of time in a stone-age culture and no one had ever become so acculturated." He shows how the Malaitian culture was far more complex than the simple image of "headhunters" popularized after Renton's recovery, a society "where the relationship between the living and the dead was a life-long dialogue." Randell also shows that Renton airbrushed his own story to hide just how well he had adapted to his surroundings-killing and headhunting to survive and achieve acceptance among the Malaitians. The most fascinating and horrendous part of Randell's work, however, deals with "the onslaught of white civilization" into the Pacific after Renton's story, as well as that of Captain Cook, became popular-a "remorseless haemorrhaging of population" as thousands of Pacific islanders died from diseases brought by Christian missionaries and syphilis-wracked sailors.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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