Headhunting in the Solomon Islands: Around the Coral Sea

Rating:
Summary: The Expotition
Review: 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.


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."