Book excerpt: As a bookish child grwoing up on Merseyside in the 1980s, Matthew Baylis identified with the much-mocked Prince Philip as a fellow outsider. Years later, his Philip-worship long behind him, and now studying anthropology, Baylis discovered the existence of a Philip cult on the South Sea island of Tanna. Why was it there? Nobody had a convincing answer. Nobody even seemed to want to find one. His curiosity fatally piqued, Baylis travelled 10,000 miles to find a society both remote and slap-bang in the shipping-lanes of history.