Zusatztext The best book about those far-scattered islands that has appeared in a long time . . . a portfolio of rare and ruthless personalities that is calculated to make the curliest hair stand straight on end. The New York Times [Combines] research and scholarship (A. Grove Day was a professor at the University of Hawaii) with a gift for spinning a yarn and depicting character (Michener! journalist and novelist! needs no introduction). Kirkus Reviews Informationen zum Autor James A. Michener and A. Grove Day Klappentext In a thrilling collection of nonfiction adventure stories, James A. Michener returns to the most dazzling place on Earth: the islands that inspired Tales of the South Pacific. Co-written with A. Grove Day, Rascals in Paradise offers portraits of ten scandalous men and women, some infamous and some overlooked, including Sam Comstock, a mutinous sailor whose delusions of grandeur became a nightmare; Will Mariner, a golden-haired youth who used his charm to win over his captors; and William Bligh, the notorious HMS Bounty captain who may not have been the monster history remembers him as. From lifelong buccaneers to lapsed noblemen, in Michener and Day's capable hands these rogues become the stuff of legend. Praise for Rascals in Paradise "The best book about those far-scattered islands that has appeared in a long time . . . a portfolio of rare and ruthless personalities that is calculated to make the curliest hair stand straight on end."-The New York Times "[Combines] research and scholarship (A. Grove Day was a professor at the University of Hawaii) with a gift for spinning a yarn and depicting character (Michener, journalist and novelist, needs no introduction)."-Kirkus Reviews Leseprobe His name was Samuel B. Comstock, Harpooner, of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and he is remembered today because at the age of twenty-two he engineered the most horrible mutiny in the annals of the Pacific. Compared to his gruesome one-man uprising, more notorious ones like that of the Bounty seem commonplace and lacking in passion. Sam Comstock was a Quaker, son of a respectable schoolmaster of Nantucket. The blond-haired, sallow-faced boy had his early training at a fine Quaker school, the Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New York, where his father was teaching at the time. Here he learned mathematics, reading and other basic subjects which constituted an education for young gentlemen of the day, but the lesson that completely gripped his imagination, and which in time set fire to his brain, was one he heard by the fireside while growing up in Nantucket. Captain Mayhew Folger, a resident of the town, used to thrill the youngsters with the amazing story of how in 1808, as master of the sealer Topaz, he had by chance discovered on lonely Pitcairn Island the survivors of the Bounty mutiny against Captain William Bligh. Young Sam Comstock listened with intense concentration as the story of this famous mutiny unfolded. In Captain Folger's version, the inescapable moral of this yarn was that mutiny never pays, for he described the pitiful aftermath that transpired on Pitcairn, where the successful mutineers quarreled about their native women and brutally stalked one another to death or fell to the muskets and spears of the brown men whose women had been taken. Young Sam did not listen to this part of old Captain Folger's narration, for dreams of mutiny, high adventure on the seas and sovereignty over some savage island had already inflamed his imagination. He was impatient to be off. His first sea voyage was a relatively tame one. At thirteen he ran away and joined an inconspicuous ship which carried cargo from New York to Liverpool, but he quickly ditched this job. He had heard that if a boy was to gain great adventure, he must join the whal...

Autorentext

James A. Michener and A. Grove Day

Klappentext

In a thrilling collection of nonfiction adventure stories, James A. Michener returns to the most dazzling place on Earth: the islands that inspired Tales of the South Pacific. Co-written with A. Grove Day, Rascals in Paradise offers portraits of ten scandalous men and women, some infamous and some overlooked, including Sam Comstock, a mutinous sailor whose delusions of grandeur became a nightmare; Will Mariner, a golden-haired youth who used his charm to win over his captors; and William Bligh, the notorious HMS Bounty captain who may not have been the monster history remembers him as. From lifelong buccaneers to lapsed noblemen, in Michener and Day's capable hands these rogues become the stuff of legend.

Praise for Rascals in Paradise

"The best book about those far-scattered islands that has appeared in a long time . . . a portfolio of rare and ruthless personalities that is calculated to make the curliest hair stand straight on end."-The New York Times

"[Combines] research and scholarship (A. Grove Day was a professor at the University of Hawaii) with a gift for spinning a yarn and depicting character (Michener, journalist and novelist, needs no introduction)."-Kirkus Reviews

Leseprobe
His name was Samuel B. Comstock, Harpooner, of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and he is remembered today because at the age of twenty-two he engineered the most horrible mutiny in the annals of the Pacific. Compared to his gruesome one-man uprising, more notorious ones like that of the Bounty seem commonplace and lacking in passion.
 
Sam Comstock was a Quaker, son of a respectable schoolmaster of Nantucket. The blond-haired, sallow-faced boy had his early training at a fine Quaker school, the Nine Partners, in Dutchess County, New York, where his father was teaching at the time. Here he learned mathematics, reading and other basic subjects which constituted an education for young gentlemen of the day, but the lesson that completely gripped his imagination, and which in time set fire to his brain, was one he heard by the fireside while growing up in Nantucket.
 
Captain Mayhew Folger, a resident of the town, used to thrill the youngsters with the amazing story of how in 1808, as master of the sealer Topaz, he had by chance discovered on lonely Pitcairn Island the survivors of the Bounty mutiny against Captain William Bligh. Young Sam Comstock listened with intense concentration as the story of this famous mutiny unfolded.
 
In Captain Folger’s version, the inescapable moral of this yarn was that mutiny never pays, for he described the pitiful aftermath that transpired on Pitcairn, where the successful mutineers quarreled about their native women and brutally stalked one another to death or fell to the muskets and spears of the brown men whose women had been taken.
 
Young Sam did not listen to this part of old Captain Folger’s narration, for dreams of mutiny, high adventure on the seas and sovereignty over some savage island had already inflamed his imagination. He was impatient to be off.
 
His first sea voyage was a relatively tame one. At thirteen he ran away and joined an inconspicuous ship which carried cargo from New York to Liverpool, but he quickly ditched this job. He had heard that if a boy was to gain great adventure, he must join the whalers.
 
Sam was fifteen, his education behind him and the blessings of his proper Quaker parents upon him, when he trod the deck of his first whaling ship. His inaugural trip was exciting enough to please even Sam, for in the first months of the voyage the ship was seized by Chilean pirates. Sam, thrown ashore in South America, beat his way back to Nantucket.
 
Ablaze with dreams, he haunted the water front until, in 1819, he found a berth with the whaler Foster, new-built and starting on her maiden voyage. On her he first saw the thundering expanse of the South Seas. From her decks he first spotted a lonely tropical island, rising slowly through morning mists. We are not required to s…