There is in the nature of every man, I firmly believe, a longing to see and know the strange places of the world. Life imprisons us all in its coil of cicumstance, and the dreams of romance that color boyhood are forgotten, but they do not die. They stir at the sight of a white-sailed ship beating out to the wide sea; the smell of tarred rope on a blackened wharf, or the touch of the cool little breeze that rises when the stars come out will waken them again. Somewhere over the rim of the world lies romance, and every heart yearns to go and find it.
It is not given to every man to start on the quest of the rainbow's end. Such fantastic pursuit is not for him who is bound by ties of home and duty and fortune-to-make. He has other adventure at his own door, sterner fights to wage, and, perhaps, higher rewards to gain. Still, the ledgers close sometimes on a sigh, and by the cosiest fireside one will see in the coals pictures that have nothing to do with wedding rings or balances at the bank.
It is for those who stay at home yet dream of foreign places that I have written this book ..."
This foreword in Frederick O'Brien's "White Shadows in the South Seas" would be a fitting introduction to scores of books about the "paradise" version of the South Pacific, and none more so than the similarly-named "White Savages in the South Seas" by Mel Kernahan.
It's a book about Polynesia after the cruise ship has left, the jet has flown off into the sunset, and the mai tai curtain has dropped on a dream that was more performance than reality. It is set in the decades leading up to the 1990s when I had still the good fortune to experience Polynesia (and live and work in Samoa) before easier air travel to the region changed everything due to the impact from the west.
Not that Mel Kernahan - or I - found paradise, although we both had been looking for it. To quote from her book:
"'Damn you, Robert Dean Frisbie', I say aloud, ' and all the rest of your motley crew of misfit dream spinners, including you, James Norman Hall and Charles Nordhoff; Beatrice Grimshaw and Frederick O'Brien; damn you Robert Louis Stevenson and W. Somerset Maugham - I wish I loved you less'...
'Damn you for making such a glory out of unrequited love. Damn your loneliness, damn your pain. Damn your longing, damn your books, your words, your sirens' words - which can be the only mates of people like us who yearn to belong to an image of the South Seas...'"
Still, it has been worth it because even now, after the ledger has been firmly closed on my former life that had "nothing to do with wedding rings or balances at the bank", and "life imprisons [me once again] in its coil of circumstance", the dreams of romance that coloured my boyhood are not forgotten, and will never die. Thanks for the memories!
