Islands of Beauty, Love and Cannibals – Part Two

Following his first expedition to the legendary islands of the Pacific, in the region of Polynesia, or Many Islands, the famous explorer and ethnologist Miloslav Stingl ventures into even more mysterious corners of the world... In the second volume of his travel memoirs from the southern lands, where cannibals lived and people made love even on tiny atolls, he heads to two regions at once. First, he recalls his wanderings through Melanesia, the “land of dark-skinned people,” before guiding the reader through Micronesia, a vast expanse of the world with hundreds of micro-islands, which the author reached before the ravages of globalisation took hold.

“The sea rears up. The sky is on fire. And on the azure waters of the west of this greatest ocean on our planet, heavy islands float. The world here is different. In many places, the world here is ten thousand years behind. Has time stopped here? No, time runs on even here. But before it bridges the distance between the individual cultures that an ethnographer finds on our planet today, this world, Melanesia—distant and forgotten, distant and mysterious, distant and silent—will be a reflection of our own past,” wrote Stingl in the introduction to his completely sold-out 1970 book.

To the memories of the Solomon Islands, Fiji, the New Hebrides, and New Britain, where curly-haired peoples live, this updated and annotated edition adds Micronesian stories from 1976. Tales of the first tattooed white man on Pohnpei, of stone coins on Yap as tall as a man, of the mysterious structures of the oceanic “Venice” in Nan Madol, and also of people whose social status is determined by—yes—an ordinary comb.

Stingl writes: “I would like to understand the world in which I live. The whole world. To see, to comprehend all its faces and every one of its ages. That is why I travel. The journey I want to tell you about was my greatest journey. I travelled all the way around the world. And on this journey, I wished to visit all the inhabitants of the globe most distant from us in time and space.” Will you travel too?