Jack Renton: The 19th-century sailor who became a South Seas headhunter by Nigel Randell Evans

 

 

A remarkable true-life heart of darkness story.

In 1868, Jack Renton, a teenage Scots sailor, was shanghaied in San Francisco. In 1876, he was rescued from captivity on the Pacific island of Malaita, home to a tribe of headhunters.

After the rescue, in a sensational best-selling memoir, Renton recounted his eight-year adventure: how he jumped ship and drifted two thousand miles in an open whaleboat to the Solomon Islands, came ashore at Malaita, was stripped of his clothes, possessions and his very identity, but lived to serve the island’s tribal chief Kabou eventually as his most trusted adviser. For all the authenticity and riveting detail, however, it turns out that Renton’s chronicle glossed over key events that made him the man that Kabou said he loved, "as my first-born son."

Mining the oral history passed down in detail from generations of Malaitans, documentary filmmaker Nigel Randell Evans has pieced together a more complete and grislier account of Renton’s experience - as a man forced to assimilate in order to survive. While Jack Renton is the story of a man transformed by an island, it is also the story of a man who transformed the island as he prepared it for the onslaught of Western civilization.

Praise for Jack Renton:

‘Nigel Randell Evans's extraordinary first book is an utterly compelling story’ - Daily Mail

‘His telling of Renton's story is brilliantly done’ - Sunday Times

'Fascinating and horrendous.' - Publishers Weekly

‘A grisly, fascinating and meticulously spun yarn’ - Good Book Guide

Nigel Randell Evans spent twenty-five years making documentaries in many parts of the world for the BBC and Channel Four. His films won three Royal Television Society Awards and two US Emmy’s. He lived in Vava’u in the Kingdom of Tonga until his death in 2014.