Country | |
Publisher | |
ISBN | 9780473450656 |
Format | PaperBack |
Language | English |
Year of Publication | 2018 |
Bib. Info | 224p. |
Product Weight | 800 gms. |
Shipping Charges(USD) |
"This is a colourful tale of English-born rogue, Charles Wells Banks, who emigrated to the United States at 14 years of age. He fought in, and was wounded during, the American Civil War, and was in New Orleans during the emancipation of slavery in the aftermath of the war. He moved to San Francisco to take up employment in the finance department of the renowned Wells Fargo and Company. Banks married, and became well-to-do, and a person of status socially, with strong interests in the field of science. He owned property and other investments, including a brothel. Banks had a penchant for opportunistic engagements with the opposite sex, and was well known as a philanderer, which was eventually to lead to his undoing. He embezzled a large sum of money before absconding from the United States to the Cook Islands, in the South Pacific and, he hoped, anonymity. What was not known at the time, was that he had become obsessed by the beauty, and exotic appearance, of a Polynesian princess, who had been sent to San Francisco by royal personages to seek a cure for consumption. Using a false identity, under the assumed name of John Scard, he travelled to the small island of Aitu, in the Cook Islands. To his great dismay the chief, who was also the father of the girl, forbade him to marry the princess, because he was a commoner. Aituan legend has it that Princess Mokoroa, for that was her name, died of a broken heart. Mokoroa's mother, herself a high chief on the island of Rarotonga, thwarted Wells Fargo and Company's detectives from effecting Banks' extradition to America. In retaliation, they placed arrest warrants in surrounding countries, ensuring that the lovelorn Banks was ring-fenced for the rest of his life with the Cook Islands. In effect, he was a virtual prisoner in paradise"