The Island of Desire by Robert Dean Frisbie

I have been back on the main islet for nearly a month, and I am writing in the Danger Island trading station. If anyone should find these scribbled pages among my worldly effects, when I have passed happily into the pagan underworld, and should wonder why I now speak of my atoll as Danger Island instead of Puka-Puka, let him understand that, to me, the modern name better fits the main islet with its three churches, its native store, its resident agent (a native of the Lower Islands), and its villagers clothed in ragged European clothes. The main islet is only four miles from Frigate Bird, yet in time I seem to leap from a primitive age to a mockery of civilization-- from Puka-Puka to Danger Island.

Here in the station the empty shelves are about me, with their ghosts of cheap print, butterfly scent, pipe knives, smell soap, marbles, lollipops, firecrackers; a few books are on the counter where formerly flowered muslin was cut in three-yard lengths, where Lord Beaconsfield Twist Tobacco was traded for coconuts, where beaudful maidens leaned their elbows as they smiled at the Yankee trader. And it is the same counter where I piped off many a watch while drawing pay as a trader, and where William the Heathen and I discussed many a bottle of brew. I might call it a storied counter, and I might tell of the storied bar of the Line Islands Trading Company, the wreck of which is still in the other downstairs room. Sometimes I fancy I can smell the stale beer.