RASCALS IN PARADISE

Ten adventurers whose stage was the Pacific, and who played their parts over four hundred years (1595 to 1953) have been chosen by the authors as examples of men (and one woman) whose choice for a way of escape lay in the Pacific. Sometimes greed was behind their choice; sometimes a lust for power; sometimes the lure of the unknown, of adventure, of remoteness. There are pirates and buccaneers among them, explorers, a writer, an artist, a politician, a whaleman obsessed with the idea of mutiny. They are Spanish, Chinese, French, English, Americans. They range from off the China coast to Peru, through the islands better known to us since the war than ever before (the Hawaiian Islands, the Marquesas, Samoa, Tahiti, the Solomons, Formosa, etc.) Most of the names are unknown to the average American reader- only Captain Bligh is a familiar figure- and he is drawn in quite different colors. Here is a book for very special tastes, but —combining as it does, research and scholarship (A. Grove Day was a professor at the University of Hawaii) with a gift for spinning a yarn and depicting character (Michener, journalist and novelist, needs no introduction)- those tastes will have a far reach.