Headhunting in the Solomon Islands Around the Coral Sea

Rating:
Summary: The sun also sets
Review: 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."