Jerry of the Islands | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1917 Mills and Boon edition by
David Price, email [email protected]

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,
Resident Commissioner 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
successful, and Mr. Woodford concluded his account of the episode
with a statement to the effect: "What especially struck me was the
absence of pain and terror in their faces, which seemed to express,
rather, serenity and repose"--this, mind you, of men and women of his
own race whom he knew well and who had sat at dinner with him in his
own house.
Other friends, with whom I have sat at dinner in the brave, rollicking
days in the Solomons have since passed out--by the same way. My
goodness! I sailed in the teak-built ketch, the Minota, on a blackbirding
cruise to Malaita, and I took my wife along. The hatchet-marks were
still raw on the door of our tiny stateroom advertising an event of a few
months before. The event was the taking of Captain Mackenzie's head,
Captain Mackenzie, at that time, being master of the Minota. As we
sailed in to Langa-Langa, the British cruiser, the Cambrian, steamed
out from the shelling of a village.
It is not expedient to burden this preliminary to my story with further
details, which I do make asseveration I possess a-plenty. I hope I have
given some assurance that the adventures of my dog hero in this novel

are real adventures in a very real cannibal world. Bless you!--when I
took my wife along on the cruise of the Minota, we found on board a
nigger-chasing, adorable Irish terrier puppy, who was smooth-coated
like Jerry, and whose name was Peggy. Had it not been for Peggy, this
book would never have been written. She was the chattel