Sun, Sep 3, 1978
The adventures of a 15 year old English boy who spent four years in Tonga. There he became a powerful chief with large estates. William Mariner was the Captain's clerk on a ship captured by the Tongans in 1806 for the sake of armaments. He was saved from death by the local chief and, later, helped him conquer the other islands in the group, laying the foundations for the modern kingdom of Tonga.
Sun, Sep 10, 1978
One evening in 1709 the captain of an English privateer, lying off the uninhabited island of Juan Fernandez, 350 miles west of Chile in the South Pacific, saw a light ashore. It was the signal fire of a sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who had spent four years there completely alone. The next morning he came aboard clad in goatskins and looking wilder than the islands first owners.
Sun, Sep 17, 1978
The fate of the nine European men, twelve Polynesian women and six Polynesian men who ultimately found that home on isolated Pitcairn and became self castaways by burning the "Bounty" is comparatively unknown. The unique multiracial, multicultural experiment failed. They fought over the women, they quarreled over the land, they attacked each other murderously. In the end, one European was left alive with all the women and children.
Sun, Sep 24, 1978
In 1849 a boat party from HMS "Rattlesnake", on a survey of the islands in Torres Strait, came upon a white woman living amongst the aboriginals. She was Barbara Thompson, a 21 year old Scots girl, who had been shipwrecked there with her husband four years before. All were drowned except Barbara, who was adopted by the tribe on the island and married a chief. She recounted how an escaped Irish convict had, during the 1830s, established himself as king of the islands in the middle of the strait. He was a wild white man given to head-hunting and killing. He had tried twice to abduct Barbara from her tribe.