文档介绍：Jerry of the Islands
Jerry of the Islands
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Jerry of the Islands
FOREWORD
It is a misfortune to some fiction-writers that fiction and unveracity in
the average person's mind mean one and the same thing. Several years ago
I published a South Sea novel. The action was placed in the Solomon
Islands. The action was praised by the critics and reviewers as a highly
creditable effort of the imagination. As regards reality--they said there
wasn't any. Of course, as every one knew, kinky-haired cannibals no
longer obtained on the earth's surface, much less ran around with nothing
on, chopping off one another's heads, and, on occasion, a white man's head
as well.
Now listen. I am writing these lines in Honolulu, Hawaii. Yesterday,
on the beach at Waikiki, a stranger spoke to me. He mentioned a mutual
friend, Captain Kellar. When I was wrecked in the Solomons on the
blackbirder, the Minota, it was Captain Kellar, master of the blackbirder,
the Eugenie, who rescued me. The blacks had taken Captain Kellar's
head, the stranger told me. He knew. He had represented Captain
Kellar's mother in settling up the estate.
Listen. I received a letter the other day from Mr. C. M. Woodford,
missioner of the British Solomons. He was back at his
post, after a long furlough to England, where he had entered his son into
Oxford. A search of the shelves of almost any public library will bring to
light a book entitled, "A Naturalist Among the Head Hunters." Mr. C. M.
Woodford is the naturalist. He wrote the book.
To return to his letter. In the course of the day's work he casually and
briefly mentioned a particular job he had just got off his hands. His
absence in England had been the cause of delay. The job had been to
make a punitive expedition to a neighbouring island, and, incidentally, to
recover the heads of some mutual friends of ours--a white-trader, his white
wife and children, and his white clerk. The expedition was essful,
and Mr. Woodford concluded