ILLUSTRATION: JACQUI OAKLEY
Mr Peacock’s Possessions started life as a book in the Robinsonade tradition about a wandering 19th-century family who become the sole inhabitants of a small and incredibly remote South Paciic island, Raoul. It’s the stuf of Victorian juvenile iction: the story of the Bells, a family of settlers of English origin who claimed an uninhabited Paciic island and made it their home for over 30 years.
It could’ve been written by R M Ballantyne, Johann David Wyss, or Robert Louis Stevenson. Yet remote Raoul is no iction and Thomas, Frederica and their six small children were not shipwrecked, but became voluntary Crusoes. Raoul seemed to ofer what Thomas Bell hadn’t found in several decades of wandering around New Zealand and Polynesia: fertile land that belonged to nobody else, and a chance to become monarch of all he surveyed. He was the ‘King of the Kermadecs’.