Anyway, his brothers got him to New Caledonia. Noumea’s a neat French city of wide streets and tin-roofed buildings, fronting on a big harbor lined with mountainous dumps of nickel and chromium ore from gigantic mines up-island. The place is about one-third Free French (there’s pictures of de Gaulle all over the place), one-third American servicemen, and one-third cannibals. Word on the street is that the cannibals have not eaten any white people in twenty-seven years, so Bobby Shaftoe, sleeping out on that beach, feels almost as safe as he did in Sweden.