TALES FROM THE SOUTH PACIFIC
june/july 2018
cruisingworld.com
67
Two years after his death, In the South Seas was published. It’s
part autobiography, part anthropology, and chronicles his travels
with his wife, Fanny, and their family in the Marquesas and Tua-
motus from 1888 to 1889. Today Stevenson’s home and gravesite
in Vailima are a tourist draw, but also a place revered by Samoans.
JAMES NORMAN HALL
( 188 7- 1951 ), United States
CHARLES BERNARD NORDHOFF
( 188 7- 1 947), United States
Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall were
Americans who both served as pilots in the Army in Europe
during World War I. But it was not until after the war that they
met, when commissioned to together write a history of their Ar-
my unit. The collaboration was successful, and when Harper’s
magazine commissioned the pair to write travel articles about
the South Pacific, they both moved to Tahiti.
When the Harper’s assignment was completed, they continued
living in Tahiti, working on assignment for The Atlantic during
the 1920s and 1930s. Both Nordhoff and Hall mar-
ried Polynesian women and raised families. At the
same time, Hall suggested they collaborate on a tril-
ogy: Mutiny on the Bounty, Men Against the Sea and
Pitcairn’s Island.
Their partnership is one of the most successful in
literary history and spans many more novels, includ-
ing The Hurricane, a romantic tale of Polynesian life
in the South Pacific that was later adapted to film by
director John Ford.
ROBERT DEAN FRISBIE
( 18 96- 1948 ), United States
Influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson, and spurred
by his doctor, who advised him to seek a warmer cli-
mate, Robert Dean Frisbie moved to Tahiti in his
20s. Shortly after arriving, he met Charles Nordhoff
and James Norman Hall, who both encouraged him
to write.
In a search for solitude, Frisbie moved to the Cook
Island of Pukapuka, where he met his Polynesian
wife, Ngatokorua. Despite seeking peace and qui-
et (the pursuit of which was a theme throughout his
writings), the couple had five children before the
family relocated to Tahiti in the 1930s. Less than a
decade later, Frisbie’s wife passed away and he and
his five children relocated to uninhabited Suwarrow
Island. They lived on the shallow atoll for a full year
on their own, surviving a direct hit by a cyclone. The
story of their survival was serialized in The Atlantic
and was the subject of his third book, The Island
of Desire.
In 1943, Frisbie was diagnosed with tuberculosis
and evacuated from the Cook Islands to a hospital in
American Samoa by a young Navy lieutenant, James
Michener. Frisbie recovered, only to die in the Cook
Islands a few years later, of tetanus. In all, Frisbie
wrote 33 magazine stories and six books, including
My Tahiti.
TOM NEALE
( 1902 - 1 977), New Zealand
Tom Neale was a New Zealander who traveled the Pacific islands
for decades as a young man, first in the navy and then aboard any
boat or ship that would have him. He eventually settled in Tahiti,
where he lived until 1943, when the urge to explore hit again. In
the Cook Islands in 1948, Neale met Robert Dean Frisbie, who
regaled him with tales of his time spent on Suwarrow Island.
Inspired, and likewise in search of solitude, Neale landed on
Suwarrow in 1952 with only the supplies he could scrape together.
In three separate stints, punctuated by illness, marriage
and government edicts, Neale spent 16 years on Suwarrow.
Out of this experience came the classic An Island to Oneself. In
this memoir, Neale recounts long months in blissful isolation,
extreme physical and emotional hardship, and a parade of inter-
mittent visitors, including a cruising family in the early 1960s
who stopped by only to lose their yacht on a reef during an over-
night squall. The couple and their daughter ended up living with
Neale for months before they were able to signal a passing ship.
JACK LONDON
( 18 76- 191 6)
Jack London was one of the first fiction writers to
obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from
fiction writing alone. Though he is known mostly
for his stories unrelated to the nautical life, he wrote
10 books on the Pacific, set in places such as the
Marquesas and Solomon Islands. Tales of the Pacific is a
collection of stories that some consider London’s
best writing.
London and his second wife, Charmian, were
sailors and Pacific cruisers. In 1906, he commissioned
a 45-foot ketch, Snark, for a planned circumnaviga-
tion. In April 1907, he and his wife and small crew
set sail out of San Francisco. London taught himself
celestial navigation and seamanship underway, and
visited Hawaii, French Polynesia, Samoa, Fiji, the
Solomon Islands and Australia.
London was inspired by Herman Melville’s Typee
and was dismayed to find what he described as “a dis-
mal swamp” when he visited the setting of that book,
Taipivai in the Marquesas.
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
( 18 74- 1 965), U.K.
Writer W. Somerset Maugham was not a sailor, but
was drawn to the South Pacific by his interest in one
of the Marquesas’ most famous (and infamous) res-
idents: artist Paul Gauguin. His time in the Pacific
yielded not only his book on Gauguin (The Moon and
Sixpence) and A Writer’s Notebook, chronicling his is-
land travels, but a remarkable short story titled Rain.
In December 1916, traveling via the steamer
Sonoma, Maugham got held up in Pago Pago,
American Samoa, for a quarantine inspection. De-
layed for several days of torrential rain, he and the
other few passengers holed up in a lodging house.
Hall and Nordhoff
Robert Dean Frisbie
Tom Neale
FROM TOP: COURTESY LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY; KAF PUBLISHING; OW BOX PRESS; L C PAGE AND COMPANYJack London