Horror in Paradise

Jerry eBooks

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 2014 by Jerry eBooks

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EUGENE BURDICK • ROBERT DEAN FRISBIE • JAMES NORMAN HALL

• W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM • JACK LONDON • GENEVIEVE TAGGARD

• ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON • MARK TWAIN

are among the thirty-four writers whose true “grim and uncanny tales”

from Hawaii and the South Seas are collected in this volume.

COPYRIGHT 1986 BY

A. GROVE DAY AND BACIL F. KIRTLEY

First Edition

Manufactured in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

“The Puzzle of the Ninety-Eight” from
The Blue of Capricorn
by Eugene Burdick. Copyright 1961 by Eugene Burdick. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

“The Honolulu Martyrdom” from
Shoal of Time
by Gavan Daws. Copyright 1968 by Gavan Daws. Reprinted by permission of the University of Hawaii Press.

“Bully Hayes and Ben Pease” from
Slavers of the South Seas
by Thomas Dunbabin. Copyright 1935 by Thomas Dunbabin. Reprinted by permission of Angus & Robertson.

“The Marchers of the Night” by Mary Pukui and Martha Beckwith. From
Kepelino’s Traditions of Hawaii,
edited by Martha Warren Beckwith (Honolulu: Bernice P. Bishop Museum, 1932). Reprinted by permission of the Museum.

‘The Girl in the Red Gauze Blouse” by Marjorie Sinclair. Reprinted by permission of the author from
Hapa,
No. 3, Fall, 1983. Copyright 1983.

“Over the Reef” by Robert Dean Frisbie from
The Book of Puka-Puka,
copyright renewed 1957 by Florence Frisbie Hebenstreit. Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Hebenstreit.

ISBN 0-935180-23-0

Library of Congress Catalog No. 86-060370

to the memory of my dead wife,

JOAN,

who read thousands of pages

of Pacific narratives

helping me look for suitable accounts

B
ACIL
F. K
IRTLEY

The islands of the Pacific have been a favored region for legend and romance ever since the early eighteenth century, when Jonathan Swift invented the tales of Lemuel Gulliver. But when the great explorers filled in the map with charted islands in place of mythical kingdoms and writhing leviathans, a shelf of “true” literature began to accumulate.

Ever since the ancient era of our cave-dwelling ancestors, listeners have shivered with delight when hearing stories of terrifying events while sitting in safety around the evening fire. Today, the popularity of horror tales and films repeats the instinctive joy of viewing another’s distress while comfortably at home. Horror fiction is a marketable type along with romance, sci fi and fantasy, westerns, sea stories, and detective yarns.

We have chosen, however, except for the opening short story, to collect here a volume of narratives of actual events—as true, that is, as truth is possible with messages from the uncanny world. Horror of a crude and obvious sort, of course, can be found in your daily newspaper; but few such episodes are worth preserving as literature, lacking as they do the shivery appeal of whisperings and tellings. We have sought not only stories of sorcery and the supernatural, but also classic narratives of man’s inhumanity and desperate survival by beach and ocean, in jungle or city highrise. Often the true accounts of what has happened in the island world of Oceania rival in suspense or allure even the most imaginative yarns of South Sea fiction.

The selections that follow draw upon supernatural folklore, reports of sprites and phantoms, visions and fancies. Here are tales of the kahuna cult of Hawaii and the witch doctors of New Guinea, ghosts on high isles and reef-decked atolls, diabolism and fatal tabus. Here are the misadventures of beachcombers and yachtsmen, and buccaneers like Bully Hayes and Ben Pease. Here are the wars of island tribesmen and the beleagured defenders of Wake Island in World War II. Here are the survivors of an attack on a ship by an enraged whale, or the sun-parched occupants of open boats on the vast world of water. Here prowl phantom animals and here march the menacing giants of the nighttime. Here the sudden “cauld grue” of fear brings a copper taste to the tongue and a conviction of the existence of things that must not be.

The arrangement of the stories comprises a reverse chronology based on the date of the incidents they present. Starting with more recent events and exploring into the past, the reader, besides encountering memorable tales, may find it easy to make something of a historical excursion into the Pacific past as well. The range in time runs from the 1980s back to the ancient years before Captain Cook’s ships sighted the Hawaiian group. The boundaries of “paradise,” for our purposes, extend across the Pacific from Juan Fernandez in the east to the Carolines in the west and encompass the island areas of Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia.

We have aimed to present herein a variety of episodes and personalities. The collection, we feel, reflects occurrences, or aspects of life and character, that will evoke for the reader pretty much the seamy side of Pacific life as it was, in spirit as well as in fact.

A.G.D.

B.F.K.