EVERYDAY LIFE AMONG THE HEAD HUNTERS.
Everyday Life among the Head Hunters. By Dorothy Cator. (Longmans and Co. 5s.)—Mrs. Cater writes freshly and vigorously of Head Hunters and Borneo scenery, and, in the second por- tion of her book, of the Protectorate, "up country" from Sierra Leone, whither her husband was transferred. Her acquaintance with the Romanows of Borneo was most interesting, she being the first white woman they had had among them. But their behaviour, as also that of the Mendis of the West Coast of Africa, was most courteous. Your real savage is a gentleman, and his motto is " Thorough " in all respects. Mrs. Cater appears to have preserved her health fairly well, though she travelled and patrolled incessantly in climates that wreck the white man's constitution, and without the comforts and conveniences many a hunting party take with them. Bathing was one of her greatest difficulties, —a white woman was a fact of intense interest to both the Oriental and the African aborigine. The author, while she notes those incidents of travel that most feminine readers would want to learn, does not forget the scenery, and a few expressive sentences do justice to the Borneo bush and some features of African landscape. Sunrise in an African marsh stirred her imagination and feeling for tropical nature to the depths. But what African traveller has not some scenes in the great continent indelibly impressed on his memory ? Mrs. Cater occasionally preaches a little sermon on the effects of Euro- pean contact with natives ; and the few pages relating to Japan are a summary of Japanese virtues and vices, and a most severe indictment of their morals. But the very fact which she deplores, the responsibility of the European for much that is unsavoury in modern Japan, should have retarded her pen. The Japanese, she says, have a very low standard, but we and others have a high one. Which comes the better out of the compari- son? Let none of us throw stones. Our author's remarks about the example set by the young Westerner, say in Borneo, only strengthen our point. She has many characteristic features of African native life to tell us about in her account of the West Coast Mendis, and she recounts them in a simple, lucid style that has its charm. Probably few ladies have the health and spirits to undergo the travel and hardships she has made light of, and fewer are cheerful enough to write so buoyantly and freshly of them.
Previous page
