In this travelogue, Matthew Baylis, the novelist and TV critic and former Eastenders screenwriter, goes to Tanna, a Melanesian island, where, he believes, the locals worship Prince Philip. This sounds weird — to worship a man from far away, who knows little about them, about whose life they weave complex myths. But then again, some Melanesian people worship Christ, and yet others follow an American who might or might not have existed and who might or might not have been called John Frum. Baylis sets out to investigate.
Prince Philip, he says, has interested him since he was a boy. Growing up in Southport, near Liverpool, the 11-year-old Baylis was aware of Philip’s visit to Salford university in 1982 and one of his reviled gaffes. The Duke of Edinburgh said that ‘one of the downsides of eradicating disease and hunger was more disease and hunger’. Baylis saw the point that the Consort had been trying, possibly, to make. ‘I thought it made some sense. Drugs lower immune systems. Rising populations lead to epidemics and food shortages.’ The received opinion was that Philip was being crass. But the young Baylis warmed to him.
Three decades later, here he is on this rather muddy and windswept island. Having studied anthropology at Cambridge, he’s aware of the phenomenon of ‘cargo cults’, in which people on small islands in the south Pacific deified western explorers, buccaneers and sailors who arrived with boxes full of food and seemed able to kill people by pointing sticks at them. (I’m aware I’m simplifying things here.) Baylis gives us the history: Captain Cook, the Russian explorer Vasili Golovnin, the English missionaries and the Australian slavers. He’s an excellent storyteller and he writes beautifully.
Even better, I think, is the way he describes his day-to-day life on Tanna.
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