In a past inconceivably remote it must have been the peak of a volcano, jutting from the midst of a sea whose solitude was broken only by flocks of migrating birds, a pod of sperm whales lumbering down from the Austral ice fields, or the intangible things of the mythic world; the spirits of Storm, Fair Weather, Night, Day and Dawn.
Coral polyps attached themselves to the steep walls of the volcano to build their submarine gardens a mile or more to sea, surrounding the island with a reef and shallow lagoon; then erosion, the battering of the Pacific combers, and subsistence, until finally the volcano had disappeared, leaving a blue lagoon shimmering in the sunlight, a barrier reef threaded with islets and sand cays; Danger Island, or PukaPuka - Land of Little Hills.
So it was called by the first Polynesians who came here, centuries ago. It appears now much as it did then: a tiny place compared with the vastness of the sea surrounding it. The low hills, scarcely twenty feet high, are shaded by cordia and hernandia trees, groves of coconut palms, thickets of magnolia bushes; and between the hills lie patches of level land where taro is grown in dikes swamps and where the thatched houses are half obscured by clumps of bananas, gardenia bushes, and gawky-limbed pandanus.
There are three islets on the roughly triangular reef: Ko to the southeast; Frigate Bird to the southwest; and the main islet of Wale to the north. Ko and Frigate Bird are uninhabited eight months of the year, while on the crescent-shaped bay of Wale, facing southward toward the lagoon, are the three villages: Ngake, Roto, and Yato - or Windward, Central, and Leeward.
The trading station is in Central Village. I, Ropati, live in its upstairs rooms, while the two downstairs rooms have been vacant since the station was closed. The building is glaringly white, shaped like a packing case, has an asbestos-cement roof, balconies in front and back, and, leading from the balconies to the living quarters, doorways just high enough so I can crack my head against the lintels. [Continue]
So begins Robert Dean Frisbie's book "The Island of Desire", a seemingly melodramatic title which is a pun on the name of his Polynesian wife, Desire. It is divided into two parts: the first describes his courtship and early family life with his wife, Desire; the second part follows the family's move to remote Suvarrow in the Cook Islands where they survived a severe hurricane that obliterated 90 percent of the atoll.
Robert "Ropati" Frisbie was a nineteenth-century man living in the middle of the twentieth-century. He longed to make life more than mere existence. He wanted to capture meaning in it, and Puka-Puka, the island of Desire, served that goal. For although its readership has always remained small, it has remained consistent. Frisbie will still be read with the same appreciation a hundred years from now, while more contemporaries, much more popular at the time, fade into oblivion.
