About the Author

Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Ohio (1896) but his health was crippled after fighting in the First World War and a doctor informed him that another North American winter would be his last. In 1920, he sailed for the Southern Pacific with a library of books, a desire to live and an ambition to write. His first job, aged 24, was managing a plantation in Tahiti from where he began to explore the scattered islands. In 1924 he travelled out to Puka Puka, where he ran a store for A.B. Macdonald. Over the next four years he wrote a series of twenty nine articles for Atlantic Monthly, which were later gathered together to create The Book of Puka-Puka.