In an age of anxiety men seek a refuge. Because of some deep urge, constant throughout history, troubled men traditionally dream of islands, possibly because the smallness of an island invites the illusion that here the complexities of continental societies can be avoided, or at least controlled. This is a permanent, world-wide dream.
When the island chosen for refuge happens to lie in the South Pacific, a colourful body of romance often helps to make the idea of escape an absolute obsession. Then, if the chosen island is reputed to contain lovely and uninhibited girls, the obsession is apt to degenerate into a monomania. And if the girls are Polynesians, the dreamer is truly lost.
The authors of this book can testify to the allure of the Pacific. One is a college professor who has served as head of a large department at the University of Hawaii. He has learned that three days after a blizzard in Minnesota, or a week after the explosion of the newest horror bomb, or three weeks after the onslaught of general bad news, his mail will be flooded with applications from professors on the United States mainland who think they could be happy only on a Pacific island. The number of Americans who believe that the islands possess some remedy for our day's malady is staggering.
The other author has reported generally upon the Pacific and as a result receives a constant stream of mail from citizens of many nations who have grown weary of atomic bombs, dictators, taxes and neurasthenia. His correspondents are united in their conviction that only in the fabled islands of the South Seas can they find the fulfillment that their society denies them. Were each of the islands a continent, there would still be insufficient room for the defeated people of the world who require refuge.
In fact, this chimerical concept of a haven from the world's dismay is so persistent that the present authors have felt obligated to review the facts. In this book they propose to inspect the histories of certain strong-natured adventurers who actually did flee to the Pacific, and they hope to find from the lives of these worthies some answers to several questions. Was the great ocean ever the refuge it has been popularly supposed to be? Is it such a refuge today? Are those of us who dread the atomic age well advised in seeking haven on some distant atoll?"
So begins the first chapter, "To All Who Seek a Refuge", in James A. Michener's book Rascals in Paradise. It ten sketches the lives of a Spanish lady explorer, a Chinese-Japanese pirate and filibuster, an Australian writer, a British naval officer, a French nobleman, a young English privateersman and four Americans: a slavedriving buccaneer, a politician of the Pacific, an artist, and a young Nantucket whaleman. With the exception of Captain Bligh, these ten adventurers had two things in common. They were convinced that, at least for a while, some other part of the world held richer promise than their homeland. And each settled upon the Pacific as his area of escape.
Of course, many of those who seek to escape their own civilisations are downright delinquents who hope to be free from the complex social forces that govern their societies. In centuries past those adventurers used physical force to gain their riches. In today's technological world, they use the internet and legal (or rather, illegal) contracts and electronic money transfers to live in perpetual ease.
Mostly they get away with it as they prey on other whites who are also escaping but every so often a scheme is so audacious that it stirs even the most comatose island government into action - however, not before the villain has escaped to another laid-back and unsuspecting island paradise. Rascals in Paradise indeed!
