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Mystic Isles of the South Seas
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.
- GenresNonfictionClassicsTravel
534 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1921
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 17, 2025
One of Gauguin's shacks still remained in sight along the road. Several people remembered Robert Louis Stevenson, and a few still had gifts he had presented to them. Tahitians, albeit converted to Christianity, held traditional feasts, lived if not a pastoral life, then one that still had connections to the sea and ancient myths. Papeete, meanwhile, kept a certain excitement about it, although foreigners dominated the port and its increasingly messy and polluted environment. A trip to Moorea could isolate you from French influence. And a trip to the Tahitian hinterlands allowed anyone willing to spend the time, that would be months and months and months, to get as close to ancient Polynesian ways as possible.
That's what things were like for Frederick O'Brien, when he spent part of the years of 1913-1914 in Tahiti. O'Brien seems to have been heavily influenced by James G. Frazer, although he makes no mention of him in this book. But his claims for common roots among Christianity and other religions with Polynesian beliefs could well come from early editions of The Golden Bough. For O'Brien gives over many pages of Mystic Isles to religion, philosophy, anthropological musings, as well as the personal romance of traveling to a remote and relatively untouched part of the globe. He sometimes gives in to purple prose, so it's a good thing I'm something of a connoisseur of writing that is sometimes overstuffed and overflowing with descriptive passages. Give me more!
As stated, almost all the book tells of O'Brien's journey to the South Seas right before World War I--the book itself was published in 1921. There are some German-French-British tensions (not American, however) that illustrate how people living all the way across the world from the European homelands still engaged in national rivalries. The last chapter is the one part of the book that provides for a coda or an update on things. Princess Noanoa, one of O'Brien's Tahitian friends, writes to him in 1919 to tell him that almost every Tahitian he met on his trip is now dead. The Spanish flu pandemic killed them.
That's what things were like for Frederick O'Brien, when he spent part of the years of 1913-1914 in Tahiti. O'Brien seems to have been heavily influenced by James G. Frazer, although he makes no mention of him in this book. But his claims for common roots among Christianity and other religions with Polynesian beliefs could well come from early editions of The Golden Bough. For O'Brien gives over many pages of Mystic Isles to religion, philosophy, anthropological musings, as well as the personal romance of traveling to a remote and relatively untouched part of the globe. He sometimes gives in to purple prose, so it's a good thing I'm something of a connoisseur of writing that is sometimes overstuffed and overflowing with descriptive passages. Give me more!
As stated, almost all the book tells of O'Brien's journey to the South Seas right before World War I--the book itself was published in 1921. There are some German-French-British tensions (not American, however) that illustrate how people living all the way across the world from the European homelands still engaged in national rivalries. The last chapter is the one part of the book that provides for a coda or an update on things. Princess Noanoa, one of O'Brien's Tahitian friends, writes to him in 1919 to tell him that almost every Tahitian he met on his trip is now dead. The Spanish flu pandemic killed them.
August 15, 2023
Interesting Journal
This book was long and at first a bit boring. As I read it I realized it was a journal of the author's experience of his South Sea trip to Tahiti.
This book was long and at first a bit boring. As I read it I realized it was a journal of the author's experience of his South Sea trip to Tahiti.
November 7, 2013
Delivers much the same flavor as "White Sands in the South Seas"
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews