It is also true that the
natives of the Solomons are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for
human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads. Their highest
instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned and to
smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column
at the base of the brain. It is equally true that on some islands,
such as Malaita, the profit and loss account of social intercourse is
calculated in homicides. Heads are a medium of exchange, and white
heads are extremely valuable. Very often a dozen villages make a
jack-pot, which they fatten moon by moon, against the time when some
brave warrior presents a white man's head, fresh and gory, and claims
the pot.
All the foregoing, is quite true, and yet there are white men who have
lived in the Solomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they
go away from them. A man needs only to be careful--and lucky--to live
a long time in the Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort. He
must have the hall-mark of the inevitable white man stamped upon his
soul. He must be inevitable. He must have a certain grand
carelessness of odds, a certain colossal self-satisfaction, and a
racial egotism that convinces him that one white is better than a
thousand niggers every day in the week, and that on Sunday he is able
to clean out two thousand niggers.
Pages:
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439