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Most people have heard of Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall who came out to Tahiti and wrote Mutiny on the Bounty and its sequels, as well as Faery Lands of the South Seas, another installment in the Resnick Library of Worldwide Adventure. But there was another American, all but forgotten today, who traveled to the South Seas, fell in love with what he saw, and took pen to paper to share his experiences with those back home. His name was Frederick J. O'Brien, and, after working for a time for the Manila Times, he wrote a trio of books about what he had seen and experienced. Before the dust had cleared, he had written White Shadows in the South Seas, Mystic Isles of the South Seas, and Atolls of the Sun -- all classics in the field, and until now all long out of print.
Not meant to be in any way academic, these books are quite simply love poems written to the tropical paradise that was French Polynesia in the early years of the 20 "th" Century. As the author himself puts it in his foreword: "It is for those who stay at home yet dream of foreign places that I have written this book, a record of one happy year spent among the simple, friendly cannibals....There is little of profound research. Nothing, I fear, to startle the anthropologist or to revise encyclopedias; such expectation was far from my thoughts when I sailed from Papeite on the Morning Star. I went to see what I should see, and to learn whatever should be taught me by the days as they came. What I saw and what I learned the reader will see and learn, and no more."
With plenty of photographs to illustrate his text, O'Brien has given readers a glimpse of South Seas life the way it used to be -- and through hisown words, we feel as though we have been there.
