A number of years ago Robert Dean Frisbie (1895-1948) set up a trading station on Danger Island (aka Pukapuka OC-062), a lonely paradise four hundred miles northeast of Samoa. This autobiographical story relates how the author fell in love with a charming Polynesian girl, how he became part of the life of the island, how he eventually survived a man-sized South Sea hurricane."Chapter I : In a past inconceivably remote it must have been the peak of a volcano, jutting from the midst of a sea whose solitude was broken only by flocks of migrating birds, a pod of sperm whales lumbering down from the Austral ice fields, or the intangible things of the mythic world; the spirits of Storm, Fair Weather, Night, Day, and Dawn. Coral polyps attached themselves to the steep walls of the volcano to build their submarine gardens a mile or more to sea, surrounding the island with a reef and shallow lagoon; then erosion, the battering of the Pacific combers, and subsidence, until finally the volcano had disappeared, leaving a blue lagoon shimmering in the sunlight, a barrier reef threaded with islets and
sand cays; Danger Island, or Puka-Puka--Land of Little Hills...."
Read here the full story
Photo: Pukapuka from the air (http://www.cookislands.org.uk)
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