THE title is misleading. Miss Mytinger and her friend only
hunted the heads of primitive negroids in the South-West pacific to draw, not to scalp them. The two girls started with none of the usual expeditionary paraphernalia (only a ukulele, a little money and good health), and it took them over a year to earn their way, by painting commissions, to the heart of Melanesia. The story of their adventures increases the reader's respect for the forces fighting on this front, and will dissipate any Gauguinesque day-dreams he may have accu- mulated. The islands seem invariably to be glaring hot, always primi- tive, sometimes volcanic, and infested with dysentery and malaria. Most vivid, perhaps, are the descriptions of Rabaul and of Bougain- ville, where the natives not content with lopping off the heads of their foes, try to remodel their children's skulls to the shape of water-Melons by binding them with bark fibres. Miss Mytinger has studied anthropology, and her book has value as a permanent record of human beings rapidly disappearing from the earth. It is written in a lively way, which is frivolous without any of the usual traveller's clichés and facetiousness. The drawings are bold and vigorous, hut a serious student of these types would almost certainly prefer photographs.
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