Robert Dean Frisbie

Robert Dean Frisbie (born April 17, 1896 in Cleveland , USA; † November 19, 1948 on the island of Rarotonga , Cook Islands ) was an American writer whose subjects are mainly set in the South Seas .

biography

Frisbie was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1896 to Arthur Grazly Frisbie and Florence Benson. Even as a child he was weak and sickly. As a soldier in the US Army , he took part in the First World War. During the retirement check-up he was told that he had tuberculosis and that he would not survive the next cold winter in Ohio. To regenerate in a warm climate, he left America and settled on the island of Tahiti in 1920 . There he managed a plantation near Papeari in the south of Tahiti Nui . In Tahiti he met the writers Charles Bernard Nordhoff and James Norman Hall , the authors of the trilogy about the mutiny on the Bounty .

Inspired by them and his role model Robert Louis Stevenson , Frisbie wrote short stories and magazine articles about the South Seas, which were published in various American magazines. In 1924 he gave up the plantation and moved to Rarotonga , where he operated a trading post for the Australian shipping line and chain Burns-Philp (Burns, Philp & Co, Limited). During this time, Frisbie visited several islands in the Cook Archipelago , French Polynesia and Samoas . In 1929 his first book, a collection of South Seas stories, was published under the name The Book of Puka Puka .

On Puka Puka he married 16-year-old Ngatokorua in 1928, the adopted daughter of a local missionary , with whom he had five children: Charles, Florence, William Hopkins, Elaine Metua and Ngatokorua-i-Matauea alias "Nga". Ngatokorua died of tuberculosis on January 14, 1939. With his children, some of whom were still very young, Frisbie moved to the remote Suwarrow atoll in the north of the Cook Archipelago. His experiences on the lonely island, including how he survived a cyclone with his children , he processed in his most famous novel Island of Desire . In 1942 he returned to Rarotonga. There he married the local Esetera for the second time. The marriage was short-lived and Frisbie went back to Puka Puka. In 1943 he was diagnosed again with tuberculosis and the young US Air Force lieutenant and later writer James Michener flew him to a hospital in Pago Pago , American Samoa, for treatment . A friendship developed between the two men, which greatly influenced Michener's later work.

Recovery was slow, but Frisbie continued his restless traveling. On November 18, 1948, he died of a tetanus infection on the island of Rarotonga . His grave is in Avarua Cemetery , Rarotonga.

Frisbie's children stayed with relatives and friends in New Zealand and Hawaii through James Michener's mediation . His daughter Florence, his second child with Ngatokura, also became a writer. She lived with her husband, the TV producer Carl Hebenstreit, in Hawaii and published the adventurous family story under the title "The Frisbies of the South Seas". Elaine Metua married the wealthy magazine publisher Don Over and Nga married actor Adam West .

Bibliography (excerpt)

• The Book of Puka Puka (1929)
• The Ghost of Alexander Perks, AB (1931)
• My Tahiti (1932)
• A Copra Island (1932)
• Mr. Moonlight's Island (1939)
• The Island of Desire (1944)
• Amaru: a Romance of the South Seas (1945)
• Dawn Sails North (1949)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ James Michener: The world is my home. Gustav Lübbe, Bergisch Gladbach 1995

literature

• Johnny Frisbie: The Frisbies of the South Seas , Robert Hale Ltd, London, 1961 (autobiography and family history, written by Robert Frisbie's daughter)

Web link

The Island of Desire as a free e-book (in English)