Rascals in Paradise

The successes of Mr. Michener’s , Tales of the South Pacific and Return to Paradise showed how skilfully he cast the spell of the Pacific over his readers. It is to the Pacific that he returns in collaboration with Mr. Grove Day in Rascals in Paradise .The authors tell the true life stories of nine men and one woman who in the last four centuries sought fame and fortune, and pursued their dreams, in the most romantic of all the world’s oceans. Rascals all, though few without redeeming qualities, they operated on so bizarre, so individual a scale that their lives assumed epic proportions, and their stories amaze as much as they thrill or horrify us.We read of the nineteen-year-old sailor who, in pursuit of his dream of ruling an island kingdom, started a mutiny and with his own hands murdered all the officers of his ship; of the French Marquis who sent shipload after shipload of prospective settlers to a death trap island off New Guinea, having first pocketed their savings; of Bligh, of the mutiny on the Bounty fame, and of that other mutiny he had later to face when Governor of New South Wales; of Coxinga, the Chinese Pirate, who came within an ace of overthrowing the great Manchu dynasty; of Dona Isabel, “one of the supreme bitches of all time”, who. set out from Callao in Peru in 1595 to win a Pacific empire for herself; of the fourteen-year-old English boy, Will Mariner, who became chief adviser to the King of the Tonga Islands; and, in modern times, of the fantastic painter on velvet who regularly once a fortnight ran amok in the capital of Tahiti.Violent men, greedy for fame, or power, or money, these “rascals in Paradise” forma a superb portrait gallery, and the authors have done them splendid justice. This is a book for everyone who loves excitement, romance, and the pleasure of good stories well told, and in the telling Mr. Michener and Mr. Day lead us down many of history’s least known and most fascinating by-ways.