White Native

White Native - The Strange Tale of the Scottish Sailor Who Became a Headhunter

In August 1875, a canoe paddled out from an island in the Lau Lagoon of the Solomon Islands toward an anchored labour recruiting ship. In the canoe was a piece of driftwood. On the driftwood, written in charcoal, were the words: John Renton. Please take me off to England.

The man who wrote those words had been on the island for seven years. He was twenty-seven years old, deeply tattooed, fluent in a Melanesian language that no other European could speak, and, as both the island's oral tradition and his own reluctant admission confirm, one of the most feared warriors on the Malaitan coast. He was the adopted son of the most powerful chief in the Lau Lagoon. He had a wife. He had taken heads.

He was from Stromness, Orkney. He had been a sailor.

In 1868, Jack Renton was shanghaied in San Francisco and pressed into service on an American guano ship. He escaped with four companions in a small boat. After forty days adrift in the open Pacific, watching his companions die one by one of thirst and exposure, he washed up on Malaita, the most feared island in the Pacific, a place notorious for headhunting and the killing of Europeans.

He was not killed. He was absorbed.

Over seven extraordinary years, Renton learned the Lau language, mastered the canoe-building and fishing skills of the lagoon communities, participated in raids into the Malaitan interior, and was formally adopted as the first-born son of Kabbou, the paramount chief of Sulufou. He befriended a young warrior named Kwaisulia, teaching him English in an exchange that would change the political history of northern Malaita for decades. He lived a life so complete and so foreign that when he finally returned to Orkney, his father walked past him on the dock without recognition.

The Brisbane Courier memoir he published in 1875, carefully edited for a Victorian readership, told only part of the story. White Native tells the rest.

Drawing on both the European documentary record and the oral traditions of the Lau Lagoon communities that have preserved Renton's memory for a hundred and fifty years, this book reconstructs the full life: the headhunting, the wife history forgot to name, the friendship that made a future paramount chief, the impossible homecoming, and the death on a New Hebrides beach at thirty that brought three hundred pigs in mourning on an artificial island seven thousand miles from Orkney.

It is a story about what happens to a self when everything it was built from is removed and replaced with something else. About two civilisations encountering each other at close quarters through one improbable young man from the North Sea. About the lies a Victorian memoir must tell, and the truths an oral tradition keeps.

Jack Renton is the only European ever to have been a headhunter. This is his full story.

"A story that the nineteenth century should have known honestly and that the twenty-first finally has the materials to recover, told here with the precision and moral intelligence it has always deserved."

"Renton's story encompasses much more than the fact that no white man had survived for such a length of time in a stone-age culture. His story is also about the onslaught of white civilisation into the Pacific, a remorseless transformation."