The Book of Puka-Puka is not about travel; it is about staying in one place. It is about living as a conspicuous stranger and slowly allowing yourself to become absorbed into the strange ways of an ancient, indigenous community.
This book was not composed by a colonial administrator, a missionary or an anthropologist, but by a hedonistic South Sea trader - a young American who fishes, picnics, swims, sleeps and falls in love but fortunately also has an ear for good stories.
Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Ohio in 1896 but his health was crippled after fighting in the First World War and a doctor informed him that another North American winter would be his last. In 1920, he sailed for the Southern Pacific with a library of books, a desire to live and an ambition to write. His first job, aged 24, was managing a plantation in Tahiti from where he began to explore the scattered islands. In 1924 he travelled to isolated and lonely Puka-Puka, where he ran a store for A.B. Macdonald.
Over the next four years he wrote a series of twenty-nine articles for Atlantic Monthly, which were later gathered together to create "The Book of Puka-Puka", a book long out of print and sinfully expensive to buy but, thanks to modern technology, available online by clicking here.
Enjoy!
