South Sea Authors

By Robert Dean Frisbie

A BOOK of travel should give the reader a feeling of the spirit of place. If this is accomplished, the author has achieved his end far more effectively than could have been done by giving a factual description. For the student, in search of geographical or anthropological facts, there is the En cyclopedia Britannica and, if his subject is the South Pacific, the memoirs of the Bishop Museum.

Only a few geniuses among the South Sea authors have succeeded in marrying facts and readableness. Outstanding are Nordhoff and Hall in their classic of modern Tahiti, “No More Gas”; and Eric Muspratt in his story of the Solomons, “My South Sea Island.” These books are like good photographs, interesting, full of action, and true to life.

In the South Pacific, from Easter Island to the Marshalls, are lands as dis similar as Siberia and Panama; but in the books about them two notes prevail; first, that of lushness, sensuality, and security: second, that of disease, hard ship, and danger. This is unavoidable, for the reader will accept only the brown maidens and free lunch of Polynesia or the cannibals and square-face gin of Melanesia. If a South Sea author wishes his book to sell he must emphasise either the amenities or the asperities of island life, seasoned with love and thrills; for a good South Sea book is avowedly escape reading, and as such it exerts a healing effect on the frayed nerves of civilised man.

Take the highly emotional books of Beatrice Grimshaw. In 1935 she told me they had sold some quarter-million copies. No one—Miss Grimshaw least of all—would claim her books exemplify fine literary qualities; but they are excellent relaxation reading. Set in New Guinea, they give me a feeling of the spirit of the place; when I need facts I will turn to “The Pacific Islands Year Book.” I can understand Miss Grimshaw’s enthusiasm for that hard-bitten, perilous, fantastic ally beautiful island, for effeminacy is not among her weaknesses.

After this war, aspiring authors will find a fertile field in the South-west Pacific. Save for Miss Grimshaw’s romances and Muspratt’s “My South Sea Island” these amazing islands have been virtually untouched by popular writers.

Likewise, the Gilbert, Ellice, Caroline, and Marshall Islands to the north-east.

Most of these are coral atolls, scarcely more than 10 feet high, over-populated, poverty-stricken from a European’s view point, and figuratively begging for some one with a supple pen and an artistic eye to describe them to the world-at-large.

Robert Louis Stevenson gave a living pic ture of Apemama in “In the South Seas,” and Louis Becke wrote fine stories of the Marshalls and Carolines, but I know of no outstanding modern writer who has touched them.

PERHAPS the writers of to-day are not hardy enough to stray so far from the comforts of the island ports. I wonder if nine-tenths of the aspiring Odyssean-authors are not beguiled by the lotus-eaters in the Bougainville Club of Papeete, or by Circe in the International Club of Apia, or by Calypso in the Bel mont Bar of Suva? And is not this the reason that there is such a surfeit of books about the island ports but scarcely a murmur from the truly romantic islands in remote Micronesia?

To this layman’s eyes the Micronesians

, , .. . are at least part Mongolian. There is a slant to their eyes, their hair is straight and black, their temperament unrespon sive, brooding. Believing them phlegmatic, one hears with surprise that in cases of adultery the offender is gaoled at once — solely to save his life from the injured husband. In Polynesia the husband might slap his faithless wife or shrug his shoul ders and forget it; in Fiji he would take the offender to Court. A human study of Micronesia, in distinction to an

ethnological study, awaits an author with a fine sense of values.

Samoa, with its three overworked words —falavelave, famolemole, and fafitai (trouble, please, and thank you)—pos sesses no literature worthy of the name except Stevenson’s “Vailima Letters” and, if you are serious-minded, Keesing’s “Modern Samoa.” “Vailima Letters,” in my mind, is the work of an incurable romanticist seeing the island as he would like it to be. But who save a pedant would decry Stevenson’s book because it is coloured by the author’s rosy vision?

Tonga, too, awaits its modern author.

For something really fine you will have to turn to Mariner’s “Tonga”; and turn to it, by all means, if you wish to escape to

the Great South Sea in its Golden Age.

And if Mariner only whets your appetite, then I recommend the “Journal” of

Captain J. E. Erskine. With him you can sail to Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, New Hebrides and New Caledonia. By the time you

have read the last appendix in this vivid account of the South Seas in the 1850’s you will probably be as avid for books on the great voyagers—Cook, Bougainville Beechy, Wallis, BUgh, Byron—to name a few.

The Cook Islands likewise have been virtually untouched, yet in this Group there are coral atolls of exquisite charm; upheaved coral islands bored by laby rinthine caves and inhabited by a people with traditions to awaken the spirit of the weariest writer; Rarotonga, with its fantastic mountains and its even more fantastic people, half puritah, half pagan John Williams, in his “Missionary Enter prises,” gave a readable account of these islands in the 1820’s; but in modern times only Charles Nordhoff has written vividly of them, in his half of “Paerylands in the South Seas.” rE Society Islands I pass over, for most readers know more about this Group than about their next-door county. The Tuamotu—or Dangerous Archipelago, so named because of its reefs, its hurricanes, and its formerly savage people—has been described fairly well by Frederick O’Brien in “Atolls of the Sun,” and very well indeed by James Norman Hall in numerous essays and in “Faerylands in the South Seas.”

South of the Tuamotu are the Gambiers and Australs. You will enjoy reading Robert Lee Eskridge’s “Manga-reva” and delight in his fine water-colours; but he has only brushed the surface of these 'little-known islands; and no one, among the popular writers, has touched Rapa-iti and Rapa-nui.

There is finally the Marquesas, which can be compared with Arabia insofar as it has been fortunate in its authors. The three best-known are Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frederick O’Brien. The last of these, I am afraid, is at a disadvantage due to the fine com pany he keeps. “White Shadows in the South Seas” is in the class I spoke of at the beginning of this paper: a book that introduces the reader io the spirit of a strange place at the expense of unimport ant details. Because it is such a book I heartily recommend it.

But perhaps you are searching for a book of poetry about these islands. Cor rect me if I am wrong in believing it does not exist. Poets, spread your wings!