I AM A SOUTH SEA TRADER on the atoll of Puka-Puka, or Danger Island, as it is marked on the hydrographic charts. If you search diligently you should find a dot smaller than a fly-speck on a line whose ends touch Lima, Peru and the northeast point of Australia. Perhaps the dot doesn’t appear to the naked eye. In that case, if you are still interested, intersect the first line with a second running from San Francisco to the northwest cape of New Zealand, and a third traversing the Pacific from Shanghai to the Horn. Where the three lines cross you will either find Danger Island or you won’t, depending on whether the hydrographer thought it worthwhile to mark such an insignificant crumb of land. In any case you will agree that the spot is a sufficiently lonely one.
Danger Island comprises a reef six or seven miles in circumference, three small islets threaded on this reef and a lagoon so clear that one can see the submerged coral mountain ranges ten fathoms below. The islets are little more than banks of sand and bleached coral where coconut palms, pandanus and a few grotesque, gale-twisted trees and shrubs break momentarily the steady sweep of the trade wind. The bizarre stunted trees on the windward beaches defy both the poverty of the soil and the depredations of the Puka-Pukans, who lop off branches to make drums and popguns, coffins for dead babies and poles on which to hang spirit charms.
But when a hurricane comes, hundreds of trees are blown down and the little Puka-Pukan houses are carried away like so many card-castles. Away goes everything then – drums, popguns, coffins, spirit charms, and sometimes a man or two, whirled with his household gods to Maroroyi, the legendary land of the departed. At such times the Puka-Pukans scramble up the stoutest coconut palms, hack off the fronds that have not already been blown away, and roost among the stumps until the gale blows over and the seas subside.
But for years on end Puka-Puka is untroubled by great storms. Then the weeks and months slip serenely by, their monotony broken only by the yearly, or semi-yearly, arrival of Captain Viggo’s trading schooner.
I hunted long for this sanctuary. Now that I have found it, I have no intention, and certainly no desire, ever to leave it again.
R. D. F.
Puka-Puka
August 1929