In Borneo jungles, among the Dyak headhunters

In 1927, forensic doctor William Krohn set off for Borneo to collect ethnological specimens for Chicago's Field Museum, a journey he describes in this illustrated volume. A member of the Circumnavigator's Club of New York, he was an American version of the men who ran the outposts of empire in Asia, gathering together at places like Raffles in Singapore and the Yingling Golf Club in Shangai, and one of the pleasures of this book is its glimpses of a vanished colonial culture. Arriving in Borneo, Krohn enters a dangerous world in which even the lush flora seemed menacing. Nothing had prepared him for the physical experience of Borneo -- towering trees so dense that the crocodile infested river is the only possible highway, shrieking show more monkeys everywhere, pitch dark nights lit only by the wings of luminous moths. This is the home of the fierce and feared Dyaks, headhunters who are the original inhabitants of the island and Krohn settles among them, to learn everything he can about their beliefs and way of life. Little has been written about Borneo, and this is an accessible and enjoyable account of a people still practicing their traditional culture in an unspoiled natural paradise, described by a man with the highest regard for both. show less