Randell, Nigel

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RANDELL, Nigel

PERSONAL: Male.

ADDRESSES: Agent—Author Mail, c/o Carroll & Graf, 245 West 17th St., 11th Fl., New York, NY 10011.

CAREER: Documentary filmmaker and author.

WRITINGS:

The White Headhunter: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sailor Who Survived a Heart of Darkness, Carroll & Graf Publishers (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: A documentary filmmaker, Nigel Randell turned his storytelling talents to writing The White Headhunter: The Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sailor Who Survived a Heart of Darkness, "a fascinating look at Jack Renton's experience as a castaway in the Solomon Islands during the 19th century," in the words of Academia reviewer Colleen Duggan. Shanghaied in San Francisco in 1868, Renton soon found himself on a guano ship in the South Seas. Managing to jump overboard one night with several companions, he washed up on the island of Malaita. Unfortunately Renton's shipmates were killed by a tribe of headhunters, while Renton himself was taken in by the chief and gradually found a place in the tribe. First treated as a slave, he eventually grew to be a valued member of society, prized for his skills as both a boatmaker and a soldier.

In addition to Renton's own memoir, Randell draws on native oral traditions to recapture the events Renton left out, such as his relationship with a native woman that was omitted because it would have offended Victorian readers and his own participation in headhunting raids. Eventually returned to the company of white men, Renton became a government agent and helped kidnap natives for use on European plantations. He was eventually killed by his victims' relatives, a fact Randell uses as a springboard to describe the brutal European incursion into the South Seas. In praise of The White Headhunter, a Kirkus Reviews contributor praised Randell's work as "a fabulous ethnographic tale inside a larger tragedy of cultural genocide and retaliatory murders."