By the end of the 19th century, every university worth its salt had an ethnology or ethnography department on campus, and the graduates of these departments were sent out by the dozens to explore and study in the most obscure corners of the world. It was a legitimate academic discipline, it was still exciting and new, and it naturally attracted some of the most brilliant minds of the day into the field. At the same time, the world was becoming ever smaller, and the leisure classes were growing ever bigger and more restless. So for each genuine scholar you’d find in some faraway backwater there was at least one well-heeled amateur, dabbling as a researcher or a collector or an anthropologist, and serving up pseudo-scientific reports from their adventures when they returned home, augmented with plenty of photos and illustrations and souvenirs. In Une croisière aux Îles Salomon we travel around the Solomon Islands with Martin and Osa Johnson, the American couple whose tales of exotic encounters mixed with specious naturalism completely bewitched the American public from the beginning of the 20th century up until World War II – and whose movies, books, and lecture tours inspired countless others to follow in their wake. But be warned: whilst it is fascinating to see these pioneers of the ‘glamorous adventure travel’ genre at work, when you see how they behave in front of the camera and describe the people they meet, well… that fascination may quickly turn to horror.

Karl Wratschko