These other passengers inspired the characters of Maugham’s
contemporary morality play.
Rain is the story of Miss Sadie Thompson, a smoking,
drinking, jazz-loving young prostitute arriving in Pago Pago to
begin work for a shipping line. But her paths cross with a smit-
ten military sergeant who wants to help her jump-start a new life
in Australia, and a zealous missionary couple who want her to re-
turn to the States and repent for her sins. The short story is lush
in its South Pacifi c setting and was immensely infl uential. Sadie
was three times depicted on the silver screen by the likes of
Gloria Swanson, Rita Hayworth and Joan Crawford.
JAMES A. MICHENER
( 190 7- 1 997), United States
Raised a Quaker in rural Pennsylvania, James
Michener was the benefi ciary of circumstance
when drafted into the service in the Pacifi c theater
during World War II. Somehow, his base command-
er mistakenly assumed he was the son of Adm. Marc
Mitscher, whose name was only similar. Of course,
this resulted in plum assignments for Michener,
who eventually worked during the war as a naval
historian.
But it’s also lucky for us because the time
Michener spent in the Pacifi c left an impression, and
after the war Michener wrote Tales of the South Pacifi c,
for which he won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,
along with extraordinary commercial success. In
Return to Paradise, Michener wrote, “The great writ-
ers, Conrad, Maugham and Melville, spent only a few
years in the South Seas, but their memory of those
waters was indestructible; for the nature of life in the
islands commands attention to the vivid world and its
even more vivid inhabitants.” The same could be said
of Michener himself.
STERLING HAYDEN
( 191 6- 198 6), United States
Like Robert Dean Frisbie and Tom Neale before
him, Sterling Hayden sailed to the South Pacifi c in
a bid to escape the trappings of Western life. He’d
come of age as a deckhand on schooners, reached the
ranks of mate and then skipper as a young man, and
had sailed around the world several times before be-
ing discovered by Hollywood, fi rst as a model and
then as a leading man. As his lights-camera-action
career took off, Hayden acquired wealth and fame
at the cost of a life he found complicated and litigious. He grew
unhappy, and when a divorce judge forbade him to take his kids
sailing across an ocean, he did just that, fi ring up the tabloids and
ending his career. His 1962 memoir, Wanderer, captures Hayden’s
inner philosophical monologue around this turbulent time and
has since been adopted by cruising sailors as a manifesto of the
motivations that underlie their passion to cast off.
In 1976, having returned to Hollywood with a role in The
Godfather, Hayden followed up on the success of Wanderer with a
novel, Voyage.BERNARD MOITESSIER
( 192 5- 1 994), France
Up until his 40s, Bernard Moitessier was an
experienced, well-known and well-regarded sailor
among the French sailing community. Famously, in
1965, in a hurry to get back to France from Tahiti
before their kids were discharged from boarding
school, Moitessier and his wife, Francoise, sailed
their 39 -foot steel ketch, Joshua, direct and east-
bound, more than 14,000 nautical miles in 126 days.
At the time, it was the longest nonstop passage ever
conducted on a yacht.
Moitessier’s most notable story is a twist of
Sterling Hayden’s before him. On the verge of pos-
sibly winning the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe
Race (the fi rst race of solo, unassisted, nonstop
circumnavigators), for which he stood to gain enor-
mous fame and a sizable purse, Moitessier changed
course and continued on, turning his back on the
prize. “Because I am happy at sea and perhaps to
save my soul,” is the oft-quoted translation of the
Frenchman’s reasoning. He continued sailing two-
thirds of the way around the world again, returning
to French Polynesia’s Tahiti.
His book, The Long Wa y, is a memoir of the
experience and a modern classic of sailing litera-
ture. Additionally, Moitessier wrote several other
nonfi ction sailing books that have been translated to
English. Moitessier’s passions were tied to the South
Pacifi c, and this is evident in his writing. During
his life, he spent much of his infl uence protesting
the testing of nuclear weapons in the area and the
overdevelopment of French Polynesia in particular.Michael Robertson is cruising with his family aboard Del
Viento, a 1978 Fuji 4 0. He is the editor of Good Old Boat
magazine, author of Selling Your Writing to the Boating
Magazines and co-author of Voyaging with Kids.SOUTH PACIFIC WRITERS: THEN AND NOW
A list of writers such as this cannot exist as a discrete entity. There are too many questions raised that must be addressed, if not answered.
I’ll try and cover the most glaring. § Notably, my list is of non-Pacifi c Islanders writing about the Pacifi c Islands. This is because, prior to
the formation of the University of the South Pacifi c in Suva, Fiji, in 1967, storytelling among South Pacifi c island cultures was largely oral.
Today, perhaps the most widely known Pacifi c Island novelist is Samoan Albert We ndt. He is the author of more than two dozen novels
and collections of stories and poems, and is a professor of English at the University of Auckland. § My list also stops short of including
contemporary writers, Western or indigenous, such as Lloyd Jones, Thor Heyerdahl and Paul Theroux. My aim was to restrict the scope
of this story to those authors who laid the foundation for the mythology of the South Pacifi c geography and culture, the primary ele-
ments, absent the complexities that more recent writers appropriately bring to light. § Finally, I ignored the critical role of philosophers
in shifting the Western mindset toward acceptance of a tropical paradise. It’s diffi cult to imagine now, but prior to the idea of the “noble
savage,” people “untamed” by civilization were assumed to be barbaric and were feared. But as the idea of the “noble savage” gained cur-
rency in the 1700 s, explorers’ accounts of warm receptions by remote Pacifi c Islanders made sense to the collective consciousness and
made it possible for novelists to lure readers with descriptions of an otherworldly paradise over the horizon.
W. Somerset MaughamJames A. MichenerSterling HaydenBernard Moitessier FROM TOP: COURTESY NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY; MACMILLAN BOOKS; THE TOMORROW SHOW; SHERIDAN HOUSE