The 7th Man: A True Cannibal Tale of the South Sea Islands

1930

Special Collections PR6013 I21 S38. Reproduced by permission of the Robert Gibbings Estate and the Heather Chalcroft Literary Agency

Waltham St Lawrence, Berkshire: The Golden Cockerel Press

In 1928 Gibbings flippantly wrote to publishers Houghton and Mifflin with the idea that they should fund a trip for him to the South Pacific to which they, surprisingly, agreed. So at a very busy time at the GCP, Gibbings left Moira ‘holding the baby’, in more ways than one, and boarded a ship to Tahiti. The publishers instructed Gibbings to seek out and collaborate with the American author James Norman Hall (1887-1951) who had lived in Tahiti since 1920. Gibbings spent four months on the island and became fast friends with Hall who never actually wrote any text for Gibbings’ illustrations. In the end Gibbings wrote, illustrated, and published this book, The 7th Man, with fifteen wood engravings and ‘precisely one hundred and eighty nine words’. It tells the tale of a shipwrecked sailor’s survival on a Pacific island; as told to Gibbings by the sailor’s grandson while in Tahiti.