Martin Johnson

CANNIBAL-LAND Adventures with a Camera in the New Hebrides Martin Johnson

CANNIBAL-LAND Adventures with a Camera in the New Hebrides
Twelve years ago, from the deck of the Snark, I had my first glimpse of the New Hebrides.
I was standing my trick at the wheel. Jack London and his wife, Charmian, were beside me. It was just dawn. Slowly, out of the morning mists, an island took shape. The little ship rose and sank on the Pacific swell. The salt breeze ruffled my hair. I played my trick calmly and in silence, but my heart beat fast at the sight of that bit of land coming up like magic out of the gray water.
For I knew that of all the groups in the South Seas, the New Hebrides were held to be the wildest. They were inhabited by the fiercest of cannibals. On many of the islands, white men had scarcely trod. Vast, unknown areas remained to be explored. I thrilled at the thought of facing danger in the haunts of savage men.
I was young then. But my longing for adventure in primitive lands has never left me. News of a wild country, of unvisited tribes, still thrills me and makes me restless to be off in some old South Seas schooner, seeing life as it was lived in Europe in the Stone Age and is still lived in out-of-the-way corners of the earth that civilization has overlooked.
I have been luckier than most men. For my lifework has made my youthful dreams come true.
On my first voyage, in the Snark, I met with a couple of pioneer motion-picture men, who were packing up the South Seas in films to take back to Europe and America. They inspired in me the idea of making a picture-record of the primitive, fast-dying black and brown peoples that linger in remote spots. Into my boyish love of adventure there crept a purpose that has kept me wandering and will keep me wandering until I die.
Two years ago, I again found myself in the New Hebrides at dawn. London had taken the last long voyage alone; and the little Snark, so white and pretty when we had sailed it south, hung sluggishly at anchor in Api, black and stained, and wet and slimy under the bare feet of a crew of blacks. My boat now was a twenty-eight-foot open whaleboat, with a jury rig of jib and mainsail; my crew of five, squatting in the waist, looking silently at us or casting glances, sometimes down at the water, sometimes with sudden jerks of the head upward at the little mast, like monkeys under a coconut tree, were naked savages from Vao; and my companion, seated on the thwart beside me, was my wife, Osa. We were nearing the cannibal island of Malekula.
But to start the story of our adventures in Malekula at the beginning, I must go back and describe the reconnoitering trip we took fourteen months earlier.