Hall finished his story in the dark. The last of the diners had gone long since, and, save for ourselves, the broad veranda was empty. "What are your plans?" I asked. "Our year in the South Seas is up. Where are you going now?"
"I have no plans," he said, "except that I doubt if I shall ever go north again. I may be wrong, but I believe I've had enough of civilization to last me the rest of my life. We are happy here. Why should we leave the islands?" I fancy the South Seas have claimed the pair of us.
That's how "Faery Lands" ends and that's how both writers end up: staying on; James Norman Nordhoff for twenty years, and Charles Bernard Hall for thirty-four years until his death in 1951. During their time in the South Seas, they wrote the Bounty Trilogy: Mutiny on the Bounty (1932), Men Against the Sea (1934) and Pitcairn's Island (1934).
However, first came "Faery Lands of the South Seas", published, as the coversheet suggests, in MCMXXI, which contains a memorable passage of Hall's 1920 encounter with Cridland, a British hermit in search of a lonely islet on which to live out his life. In "Faery Lands", we last see Cridland from Hall's perspective aboard a trading schooner, waving in the distance, his fate and life a mystery with an unknown ending. But there were two more encounters that took place. First, some ten years later, when Hall visits the hermit, he finds a Cridland whose mind is disintegrating amidst the vast loneliness of the Pacific and his desert island. Just over ten years after that visit, the dying Cridland summons Hall to his deathbed to reveal the reason for his desertion to the South Seas. Hall's reaction was to describe Cridland as a discarded life and a "mistake of nature." A veiled reference to Robert Dean Frisbie?
Reading "Faery Lands" takes me back to things that enchanted me early in life and had an impact on me that has lasted a lifetime. Call it wanderlust, if you will, but I was never satisfied with "home". Seeing new places wasn't enough; I had to live in them. And now that I'm in the last years of my life, I'm reading again the books of James Norman Nordhoff and Charles Hall and Noel Barber and Robert Dean Frisbie. It makes me wistful for the past, but I also feel compelled to follow the lesson Hall had learned: never return to a place of which you have happy memories; disappointment and frustration will result if you do.
It's easier to click here and read "Faery Lands of the South Seas".
