The Island of Desire: The Story of a South Sea Trader

by Robert Dean Frisbie

Robert Dean Frisbie left America for the South Pacific in 1920 and four years later set up a trading station on Danger Island, now called Pukapuka, a lonely paradise four hundred miles northeast of Samoa. This autobiographical story relates how the author fell in love with and married a charming Polynesian woman, whose name translates as Desire, and became part of the life of the island.

The next six years were wonderfully happy ones. Desire gave birth first to Johnny (a girl), then Jakey, Elaine, and Nga. The charm of their lives, beyond "the faintest echo from the noisy clamour of the civilised world", is spread before the reader with the miraculous colour and texture of a Gauguin painting.

Genres: Travel

204 pages, Print on Demand

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Robert Dean Frisbie was an American writer of travel literature about Polynesia.

Reviews

[Elliot Hadley · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading an island to oneself by Tom Neale I heard about the author frisbie and got this book. The first half of the book where he talked a lot about his wife to be 'desire' I found to be entertaining enough but as other reviewers have alluded to, the real nuts and bolts of the book come when he comes to live on suwarrow atol.
The book made me chortle at times, other times was very sad and then during the end I was in suspense for a good half hours reading. If your interested in South seas island life or true life survival stories then I think you'll enjoy it.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is much wrong with this book. But there is much, much more that makes it special. Consisting of two parts, it first tells the tale of Robert Dean Frisbie's courtship and life with his Polynesian wife on the island of Puka Puka. The seemingly melodramatic title of the book is a pun on the name of his wife, Desire. The second half of the book describes how he and his four children took to one of the most remote spots in the world, Suvarrow Island in the Cook Islands, and there managed to survive a severe hurricane that obliterated 90 percent of the atoll.

What is good and unique about this work is how Frisbie, who has come to be regarded as a legend among chroniclers of the South Seas, integrated himself so closely into the world and society of the people of Puka Puka. He never "went native," and strongly advised against anyone ever doing so, but he lived and made a family in as close a proximity to the ways of Puka Pukans as is possible to imagine for any foreigner. And when he shifts his locale to Suvarrow, his descriptions of his family ties and their struggle to survive the worst that nature can through against them makes for both moving and gripping reading.

Against these attributes, the failures of the book seem relatively insignificant. Yes, Ropita, the best that the Puka Pukans could do to approximate the pronunciation of his first name, Robert, is prone to employ purple prose. And he sometimes gets lost in his own prose. It is easy to see why he never became a successful novelist. His worst fault in The Island of Desire is the lengthy passages devoted to Captain Prospect, who Frisbie undoubtedly thought would serve as a colorful old coot of sorts but who quickly becomes tiresome and one-dimensional. All these drawbacks, however, are washed away in the detailed and exciting chapter on the Frisbies' encounter and survival of the hurricane. Many times, only seconds separated them from life and death. This part of the story is harrowing and exciting. It exceeds in its descriptiveness, in fact, Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall's fictional portrayal of a cyclone dismembering a South Seas island in their 1936 novel, The Hurricane. Hall was a friend and supporter of Frisbie's. Such an irony that Frisbie lived to experience what Nordhoff and Hall could only imagine some years earlier.

Robert Frisbie was not an immature man, although his seemingly careless ways and risky decisions may make it seem that way to contemporary readers. But the truth was that 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. 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 100 or 200 years from now, while more contemporaries, much more popular at the time, fade into oblivion. I suppose that, then, is about as meaningful as it gets.

[Kim Bulles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read An island to oneself by Tom Neale and decide to read this. Good book esp. The 2nd half. Now to reading one of Grisbee daughter's book "Miss Ulysses from Puka Puka", Florence (Johnny) Frisbee.

[DropOfOcean · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading Tom Neale’s excellent ”An island to oneself” I noted for myself that someday I have to read this Frisbie’s book. Well I finally finished it and somehow it took me quite a while to finish it. There was something the way it was written that I could read it only in small doses.

[Timo]

Wat Robert Dean Frisbie schreef, is erg complex. Er moet op de juiste manier mee worden omgegaan. De manier waarop 'Benediction Books' deze uitgave presenteerde, voldoet alvast niet. Zelfs proeflezen werd blijkbaar overbodig geacht.

[Leland Dalton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tom Neale brought me here. After reading his book "An Island to Oneself" this was the next logical step. This was a good book but, not near as good as Neal's book. Nevertheless, it was a good read and I enjoyed visiting the southern Pacific through the pages that Frisbie had penned.