This book (which is the first part of a two-part Penguin set from the 1930s) recounts the experiences of a young (20s-ish) man who went to New Guinea first as a gold miner, and then as a government official, in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign. The story is very much a Wild West kind of story, for better or for worse. Complete with a fair amount of gun-play, gold-mining, abusing the natives, the natives fighting the forces of law (or "law"), heroic figures, not-so-heroic figures, natural disasters, and the like. Monckton does not behave in a fashion that would win him plaudits in the 21st century, needless to say, though when this book first came out in 1920, few would have been concerned. As it is, it reads very well, quite grippingly, in fact. Still and all, in the back of your mind, you think that this fellow really isn't a role-model... ( )