Chapter 1 is written in the third person, following Nell’s perspective. On Christmas Eve, Nell and her husband Fen leave the Mumbanyo tribe, who “were singing and beating the death gong for them” (1). In their motorboat, they meet two white couples dressed in evening dresses and dinner jackets. Nell studies the finely dressed women, Tillie and Eva, with an anthropologist’s gaze; they are almost as unusual to her as the tribes she has been studying. Tillie asks Nell what she will write about these tribes, and Nell confesses “it’s all a jumble in [her] head still” and says that she “never knows[s] anything until [she] get[s] back to [her] desk in New York” (5). Nell is still unsure of which tribe’s “genius she would unlock, and who would unlock hers” (8).

Fen tells Nell about Andrew Bankson, an anthropologist that his old professor Haddon favored and awarded a butterfly net to. While Fen had previously sought to avoid Bankson by studying different tribes from him, Fen now says they should go to see him. He is nearby and studying the Kiona tribe, the fiercest of warriors. Nell, however, thinks that Fen’s thinking is a case of “the tribe is always greener on the other side” because until you have gathered the information optimally, “your own tribe looked a mess” (7).