Page 329 - Micronesia

David O’Keefe: Man, Mystery and Legend

I t was a typhoon, or so it’s said, that cast up he did it by turning himself into the “king of story that made it to the silver screen half a
David O’Keefe on Yap in 1871, and when the cannibal islands”: a 6-foot-2, red-haired century later in the forgettable Burt Lancas-
he finally left the island 30 years later, it was Irishman who lived an idyllic tropical exist- ter vehicle His Majesty O’Keefe (1954), and
another typhoon that drowned him as he ence, was “ruler of thousands” of indigenous this version, says scholar Janet Butler, that
made his way home to Savannah. Between people, and commanded “a standing army is still believed by O’Keefe’s descendants in
those dates, though, O’Keefe carved himself of twelve naked savages.” (“They were un- Georgia.
a permanent place in the history of the tutored, but they revered him, and his law
Pacific. So far as the press was concerned, was theirs.”). It was this version of O’Keefe’s