In Risky Shores, George Behlmer explores how “the savage” and related concepts such as cannibalism and headhunting were used to characterize native peoples from places such as Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands in the historical period bookmarked by the death of Captain Cook (1779) and the end of the Second World War (1945).

Behlmer's introduction includes a terse discussion of the term savage, which was used from the early fourteenth century to describe rugged landscapes (2) and only later to describe people. Unfortunately, no expansive or systematic analysis of the term's history or its promoters is offered. The only mention of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for instance, follows Ter Ellingson's claim that Rousseau never used the term “noble savage” (11). Even if technically accurate, Behlmer uses this claim to dismiss what should be part of his discussion: Rousseau's famous reference to the “good children of nature” (the Maori of New Zealand) and his criticism of civilization based on its contrast with a “state of nature.” Much of Rousseau's thought depended on the idea of a noble savage, even if the specific words were never used. Adopting a restricted understanding of the “savage” concept means that some texts and people from the period, otherwise obvious candidates for attention, do not fit in Behlmer's study. These include Paul Gauguin and Robert Louis Stevenson (the latter referenced but only selectively).

Behlmer's treatment of John Hawkesworth's edition of Cook's first voyage is likewise problematic. While Behlmer focuses on the published descriptions of native sexuality to explain the missionary's zeal to convert, Hawkesworth is also known for skewing Cook's accounts of natives toward a noble savage akin to the pastoral images of ancient Greece. Thus, while the introduction focuses the later discussion of savages, Behlmer does so at the cost of simplifying the concept itself. In the remaining chapters, however, he focuses on how the concept was used during the period rather than on the history of the concept to that point, and so his circumscribed analysis in the introduction neither substantially undercuts nor supports his primary discussion.

In the first chapter, Behlmer focuses on cannibalism, which for him is a metonym for “savagery.” An extended discussion of an encounter in New Zealand during Cook's second voyage introduces the topic (25). Equally relevant episodes from Cook's first voyage are not discussed. Instead, Behlmer moves through later sources, primarily those created by missionaries or songwriters, such as A. W. Humphreys, whose racist comic song “The King of the Cannibal Islands” (circa 1830) is discussed in detail. The variety of material included is notable.

Behlmer's second chapter discusses missionary martyrs in Melanesia and the impact of images of savagery on popular opinion in Britain. One section relates the story of the Reverend John Williams (1796–1839), whose death in Vanuatu was a core event in forming attitudes toward South Pacific peoples. Behlmer spends considerable time working through archival material to describe how Williams created his public image and how accounts of his death were likewise crafted for public consumption.

In chapter 3, Behlmer describes the savagery of Europeans in the South Pacific, such as those who engaged in blackbirding (that is, acquiring South Pacific islanders to work on distant plantations). The European excesses expand the discourse of savagery beyond the correlation between race and savagery discussed in the first two chapters. The debates at the time are interesting: Who has legal status? How should different crimes be punished? Behlmer likewise challenges the humanitarian view of natives as victims, offering instances where natives willingly participated in the labor market (119). Typically, however, the labor trade, whether supported by or flaunting the law, was more akin to slavery. This is the book at its best: recapturing the fragmented texts used in political debates where conflicting accounts of savagery help form patterns of human behavior.

The fourth chapter considers headhunting and the Solomon Islands. Behlmer begins with Joseph Banks trading for a tattooed head while in New Zealand and turns to the debates over how to stop headhunting. After discussing the different attempts to end the practice, Behlmer claims that it ended largely because it was no longer advantageous. The rise of copra as a cash crop meant that economic interests outweighed the symbolic and political value of hunting heads (185).

In the final chapter, Behlmer focuses on the political, economic, and anthropological work that began in the New Hebrides and Papua New Guinea in the late nineteenth century. He traces the careers of Martin and Osa Johnson, who created “ethnographic fantasies” for movie theaters around the world (206). Another theme is the rise of scientific administration, primarily in the British colonial offices. The story of Michael Leahy, a gold prospector who explored the interior of Papua New Guinea, is particularly notable (238). The chapter then considers how the presumed savagery of Pacific Islanders appealed to the Allies during the Second World War because they could be mobilized against the Japanese, at that point seen as equally savage. “The savage” had become an ally against savagery.

The diverse sources engaged throughout Risky Shores are often useful, such as when Behlmer contrasts official accounts of a massacre with journals written by people involved. However, when considering the social life of ideas, personal, unpublished journals have a different status than do newspaper articles, government reports, or books printed for popular audiences. Themes might be traced and statements compared across a wide variety of materials, but using so many different types of sources raises concern over the process for weighing and selecting them. Bluntly, the coherence of the narrative raises the possibility that the evidence was chosen to fit it. Are there counterexamples? Do limited quotations capture the subtleties of the entire text? Behlmer covers so much ground, however, that he rarely focuses on a particular text or event for very long.

Risky Shores is an ambitious attempt to understand the idea of savagery in the South Pacific. Behlmer excels in the discussion of specifics, which he often supports with both archival and printed materials. He offers a narrative in which Europeans construct a clear moral divide between themselves and “the savages” and then act in ways that undermine or flaunt that divide. The topic of each main chapter merits an entire book. Indeed, Behlmer's claims in the introduction notwithstanding, it is easy to imagine an entire book on the “noble savage” in the South Pacific. Perhaps the greatest limitation of the book is that there is so much complexity to cover that the book's need to maintain the overall progress of the narrative leads to simplified or hasty coverage. There is much that is valuable in this book, and anyone studying South Pacific history should find it interesting. But it is a whirlwind tour.