Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogues

by Paul Martin

  After working for various trading companies for a few years, O’Keefe started his own business. He quickly established himself as a wheeler-dealer. Focusing on the copra trade, he set up a network of trading stations on Yap and other islands, and he assembled a fleet of sailing ships to haul his cargoes to markets in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Singapore. His trade on Yap flourished thanks to his understanding of the local culture. Earlier traders had never done well at motivating the islanders to expand their production of copra, since the Yapese had little interest in the manufactured goods they were offered in exchange. The islanders were content with their traditional way of life. O’Keefe, however, saw one area he could take advantage of—helping the Yapese obtain the stone they used to make their money, which they could only find on distant islands, chiefly Palau, over two hundred fifty miles to the southwest.

  In exchange for copra, O’Keefe offered to provide metal tools for use in quarrying the heavy stones, and he also offered to haul the stones back to Yap aboard his ships. This seemed like a good idea to the Yapese. Previously, they’d had to make long ocean journeys in open canoes and transport the stones aboard rafts—a difficult and dangerous undertaking. Now the stones would be delivered right to their shores. By keeping the stones in his possession until the Yapese handed over the specified amount of copra, O’Keefe energized the laid-back islanders.6

  One of O’Keefe’s most productive ventures involved St. David’s Island (now known as Mapia), a flyspeck atoll near the western fringe of the Carolines. O’Keefe leased the island for $50 a year and established a thriving, highly profitable coconut plantation there, bringing in laborers from Yap and other islands for six-month periods.

  St. David’s held natural resources beyond its bountiful copra crop. When he first visited the island, O’Keefe met an Englishman living there with his Micronesian wife and daughter. O’Keefe married the daughter, Charlotte, but instead of taking her back to Yap, he sequestered her on St. David’s. O’Keefe’s eye later fell on Charlotte’s aunt, an island beauty named Dolibu. Apparently subscribing to the girl-in-every-port tradition of seafaring (some sources say O’Keefe had numerous paramours sprinkled around the islands), he whisked Dolibu back to Yap and married her as well. Though he only visited poor Charlotte a few times a year, O’Keefe gave her something to remember him by—three children. He also fathered five children with Dolibu. Along with his wife Catherine and daughter Lulu back in Savannah, O’Keefe had assembled a dynastic menagerie worthy of an Oriental potentate. Legal and moral issues aside, he did support all three families financially, which must have earned him a few crumbs of karma.7

  O’Keefe’s reputation grew as he tightened his control over the copra trade throughout the western Carolines. A number of trading companies—representing German, Spanish, and other interests—continued to do business in the islands, with Yap as their center of operations, but few of their managers were as capable as O’Keefe. The big Irishman’s empathy with the Yapese and exclusive arrangement to provide them with stone for their money gave him a significant advantage—a kingly domination some said.

  Besides his financial success and multiple wives, O’Keefe displayed other trappings of royalty. He flew his own flag, emblazoned with the initials “OK,” over a private isle called Tarang, a tree-covered sliver of land in the channel between Yap’s four main islands. There he built an impressive two-story brick home, workers’ quarters, and shipping facilities. Tarang swarmed with men loading O’Keefe’s ships or imbibing the rations of rum included in their pay. O’Keefe filled his house with fine furniture, a piano, and a library brimming with books, and he gave Dolibu a staff of servants to help with the cooking and cleaning. The genial master of Tarang entertained guests with elaborate dinners, music, and card games. It was a sweet life for someone who’d had to slink out of Savannah a beaten man just a few years before.8

  Not surprisingly, O’Keefe’s accomplishments didn’t thrill his competitors. His chief nemesis was a fellow American with the toothsome name of Crayton Philo Holcomb. In 1883, Holcomb and other rival traders leveled several legal charges against O’Keefe. They said he’d cheated Holcomb out of twenty-five tons of copra, defrauded a former employee, and tortured islanders who worked for him. British authorities cleared O’Keefe of all the charges, accusing his rivals of acting out of jealousy and asserting that O’Keefe had always done well by the locals. But, just as in Savannah, while O’Keefe may have been acquitted of wrongdoing, his reputation still suffered. “He is at war with all the other whites on the Island,” claimed one observer, “all of whom thoroughly detest him.”9

  O’Keefe didn’t allow his antagonists to get him down. Even with ongoing trade wars, he continued to prosper. He also weathered the unstable political situation in the Caroline Islands, which was like a party with two petulant dandies—in this case, Germany and Spain—squabbling over who got to dance with the prettiest girl. Although Germany had set up the first permanent trading station on Yap, in 1869, Spain announced its sovereignty over the island five years later. Germany responded by dispatching a warship to guard its turf. In 1885, Spain attempted to cement its claim by building a governor’s mansion on Yap, duly hauling in a collection of bureaucrats, priests, convict laborers, and water buffalo. Germany hurriedly hoisted its own flag over the island. It was a big kerfuffle for such a small place, but this was when Europe’s colonizing powers grew apoplectic over every contested speck of land. The tug-of-war was settled in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII, who awarded Yap and the rest of the Caroline Islands to Spain but granted trading rights to Germany and other countries.10 (Who knew the pope could do that sort of thing?)

  Despite a few tussles with the Spanish colonial administration, O’Keefe made money up through the early 1890s. Then in 1895, a series of disasters occurred. First, the copra crop was devastated when leaf lice infested Yap’s coconut palms. Next came two typhoons, one in 1895 and a second in 1899 (the year that Spain ended up selling Yap and its other Micronesian possessions to Germany following the Spanish-American War). In 1900, the islands suffered a severe drought. Those calamities forced O’Keefe to abandon the copra trade and put his ships to work hauling general cargo.

  Around this same time, O’Keefe got religion. (When Spain took possession of the Carolines, one of the first things it did was to build several Catholic churches.) Perhaps the unrepentant bigamist and one-time taker of human life, now in his sixties, felt it was time to start hedging his bets. With Dolibu and the kids in tow, he began attending mass regularly. O’Keefe supported the church financially and sent two of his sons to the mission school on Yap. He also sent his two oldest daughters (one by Dolibu and one by lonely Charlotte back on St. David’s Island) to a convent school in Hong Kong.11

  In 1901, while returning from a trip to Hong Kong, O’Keefe’s luck ran out altogether. On May 7, he and two of his sons sailed from Hong Kong harbor bound for Yap. They never made it home. O’Keefe’s schooner, the Santa Cruz, is believed to have gone down in a storm. None of the passengers or crew were ever found. The estate O’Keefe left behind was a tangled mess. Estimates of its value ran as high as $10 million, although the actual amount was probably far less. O’Keefe’s will provided for his families in the islands and his daughter Lulu in Savannah. However, he left nothing to his first wife, Catherine, who sent a lawyer to Yap to recover what she thought was hers. O’Keefe’s heirs fought over the estate for years.12

  Dolibu lived out her life on Tarang, and other family members stayed on the island until the Japanese pushed them out during World War II. In 1944, American planes bombed a Japanese munitions dump on Tarang. After the war, the Yapese removed the bricks from the shattered O’Keefe mansion, although a few ruins still stand to remind visitors of the mighty Captain O’Keefe.

  It’s easy to understand how people who witnessed O’Keefe’s influence in the islands and his lavish lifestyle might have come to regard him as a virtual king. Historian Francis X. Hezel, who has written extensively about the Caroline
and Marshall Islands and dispelled several O’Keefe myths, cites comments made by a Norwegian man who worked for the wealthy American. Writing to his parents, the man claimed that his boss owned a sizable chunk of Micronesian real estate and enjoyed “unlimited favour” as the “King of the Cannibal Islands.”13 After O’Keefe’s death, American newspapers embellished this image. The New York Daily Tribune ran a story in 1903 headlined “An Irishman Who Became King.” The story pushed the fantasy that O’Keefe reigned over thousands of islanders, who looked upon him as a white god à la Joseph Conrad’s title character in Lord Jim, a novel that came out just before O’Keefe’s death (although the story wasn’t based on O’Keefe).14

  What fixed the image of O’Keefe as an island ruler was the 1950 book His Majesty O’Keefe, a melodramatic biography by Lawrence Klingman and Gerald Green. Klingman and Green liberally mixed facts and conjecture, writing that O’Keefe held royal sway over the islands of Yap, Mapia, and Sonsorol.15 Their book, in turn, inspired a massively hokey 1954 movie with the same title, starring Burt Lancaster. Grinning manically, the tousled, bare-chested Lancaster battles fractious islanders, lecherous slavers, and dastardly, monocled Germans as he goes about setting up his copra business and winning the affection of demure tropical hottie “Dalabo” (a character loosely based on O’Keefe’s real-life spouse Dolibu). In the end, the islanders recognize O’Keefe’s “wisdom” and anoint him king. The film highlights O’Keefe’s role in helping the Yapese quarry and transport the large stones they used for money, and it touches on the actual outcome of that arrangement: the stones that O’Keefe provided eventually lost value in the eyes of the Yapese. They came to be referred to as “O’Keefe’s Money,” a kind of ersatz coinage, in that they lacked the heritage of sacrifice and toil associated with the older stones.16

  Regardless of whether the real David O’Keefe held the power of a king or was just a highly influential trader, there’s no doubt that he played a significant role in the history of Yap and the western Caroline Islands. What he was, it appears, was a benevolent rogue—a major league bigamist, ruthless competitor, spinner of self-promoting yarns, and, to his credit, a fair and generous boss. In all the legal proceedings he faced, no islander ever spoke out against him, most likely because he treated his employees with respect (he originally refused to sell the islanders liquor, only giving in when that stance put him at a competitive disadvantage with other traders).17

  On the Pacific islands colonized by Western powers, new ways were often cavalierly imposed on the locals (chiefly the three “B’s”—booze, Bibles, and breeches), but David O’Keefe represented a different mentality. He attempted to adapt to the Yapese culture. Admittedly, he exploited the culture to advance his business interests, but he wasn’t some rapacious foreigner who swooped in and tricked the locals into giving away their treasures for a box of trinkets. Nevertheless, by providing iron tools and ships to mine and transport the Yapese stone currency, he unintentionally altered the islanders’ way of life.

  The stone rai produced during O’Keefe’s heyday can still be seen around the island, standing here and there in the thick vegetation and weathering slowly in the tropical sun and rain. The pioneering trader’s memory is also kept alive at two establishments located along Yap’s harbor—O’Keefe’s Kanteen, a historic store, and O’Keefe’s Waterfront Inn, a colonial-style lodge.18 Visitors who make their way to Yap, a celebrated diving mecca, can stop by the bar in O’Keefe’s Inn and hoist a rum punch in memory of the American who, for thirty years, loomed over these islands like a colossus—one of the western Pacific’s most memorable characters of the late nineteenth century.

  Herbert Bridgman

  Herbert Bridgman’s summer ocean voyage was no relaxing pleasure cruise. In 1894, the avuncular fifty-year-old Brooklyn newspaperman traded his bustling hometown for the bleak waters off western Greenland, a realm of ice and eerie silence. As Bridgman stood on the deck of the steamer Falcon, the only comforting sounds he heard were the vessel’s constant creaks, groans, and hisses. Against the immensity of their surroundings, the Falcon was nothing more than a toy boat chugging bravely through an intimidating expanse of blue—a hostile seaway congested with icebergs as big as office buildings, Egyptian pyramids, glistening mountain peaks. In this otherworldly zone, it would come as no great shock to see a phantom long ship emerge from the mists with a crew of hollow-eyed Norsemen sitting at the oars. Bridgman watched a passing pod of bowhead whales with relief—life existed here after all.

  As the Falcon eased its way up Davis Straight and across Baffin Bay—“Iceberg Alley” to generations of edgy seafarers—Bridgman and the others aboard the little steamship stayed on the alert. Only in these warmer months, when the normally frozen sea briefly opened up, could ships reach far northwestern Greenland. It was there that explorer Robert E. Peary had established a base camp at the southern end of Smith Sound—the channel separating Greenland and Canada’s Ellesmere Island. Bridgman and Peary had become friends in 1892, just after the explorer’s first major expedition to the Arctic, during which he attempted to prove that Greenland is an island. An ardent admirer of Peary, Bridgman began raising funds for the dashing naval officer’s polar adventures. In appreciation, Peary would name a cape on the northern tip of Greenland after his friend.1 Peary had returned to the Arctic in 1893, and now Bridgman was heading northward to resupply the explorer’s party.

  Bridgman’s rendezvous with Peary took place as planned. The relief expedition delivered vital provisions to the beleaguered group, which included Peary’s wife, Josephine, along with a tiny addition—the couple’s infant daughter, Marie, who’d been born in the Arctic the previous September. Bridgman brought back Mrs. Peary and Marie when the Falcon returned home, while Peary and two companions remained in Greenland to investigate the Cape York meteorites, the mysterious source of iron from which the Inuit had been fashioning tools for centuries. (Three years after Peary found the massive chunks of iron, they were transported to the American Museum of Natural History, where they’re still on display.)2

  Bridgman’s 1894 voyage turned out to be the first of three such trips he would mount on Peary’s behalf over a period of seven years. Afterward, the journalist assisted his friend in an even more important way. In September 1909, Bridgman received a telegram from Labrador announcing Peary’s claim that he had reached the North Pole in April of that year. Bridgman, who’d helped organize the expedition, became one of Peary’s leading cheerleaders, championing him in newspaper and magazine articles over rival explorer Dr. Frederick A. Cook, who maintained that he’d reached the pole a year before Peary.

  Bridgman’s efforts were instrumental in convincing the public that Peary was the North Pole’s true discoverer, an accomplishment many experts now question. In promoting Peary and casting Cook as a pretender, Bridgman went off the deep end as a journalist, becoming one of the twentieth century’s early masters of media manipulation. His fanatical support for Peary’s assertions helped lay the groundwork for a debate that still rages today.3

  Bridgman had forged a respected career as a newsman before he took to shouting Peary’s praises. Born in 1844 in Amherst, Massachusetts, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Amherst College, apprenticing on local newspapers while still a student. In 1866, he landed his first professional newspaper job, on the Springfield Republican, where he rose to be city editor. After stints with the Associated Press, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and the New York Tribune, Bridgman began the most enduring journalistic association of his life. In 1887, he became the business manager and part owner of the Brooklyn Standard Union. He would remain with that newspaper for the next thirty-seven years, a period in which he helped to establish the American Newspaper Publishers Association, serving as the group’s president from 1914 to 1916. He also found time to head the geography department at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences and to serve as a regent of the State University of New York.

  Bridgman’s senior management role on
the Brooklyn Standard Union gave him the freedom to pursue his personal interests. A prominent member of the Explorers Club and other geographical organizations, he traveled the world and wrote extensively about his adventures. He rambled through the Balkans, sailed to Hawaii, climbed Mesa Encantada in New Mexico, and traced the source of the Nile in Africa, an experience that resulted in a book, The Sudan: Africa from Sea to Center. Throughout his nearly sixty-year journalism career, Bridgman never lost his boyish enthusiasm for visiting new places, which is undoubtedly why his connection with Robert Peary proved so strong. In 1898, Bridgman helped establish the Peary Arctic Club, a group dedicated to funding the explorer’s quest to become the first man to reach the North Pole.4 The following year, Bridgman again came to his friend’s assistance, leading a second relief expedition to the Arctic.

  Two years later, Bridgman led his third and final relief expedition in support of Peary. During that 1901 voyage, Bridgman engaged Brooklyn physician Frederick Cook as the expedition’s surgeon. Cook had served on Peary’s first expedition to northern Greenland in 1891 and afterward had earned a reputation as an explorer in his own right, twice performing acts of valor on polar voyages. In 1894, he crossed ninety miles of the Arctic Ocean in a small boat to find help after the ship he was serving on, the Miranda, hit an iceberg. Four years later, while taking part in a Belgian voyage to Antarctica, he led the successful effort to save the expedition’s ship after it became trapped in the ice, earning him a knighthood from the king of Belgium. Shipmate Roald Amundsen—who later became the first man to reach the South Pole—described Cook as “the most honest and most dependable man I have ever known,” a person of “unfailing hope and unfaltering courage.”5 Cook commanded sufficient respect to be elected president of the Explorers Club in 1906. All of which may have made it inevitable that Cook and the egocentric Robert Peary would never get along.