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Insane and Inspiring Enterprising Stories from History

Khalid Elhassan March 30, 2021 35 min

German soldiers of the 6th Army in Stalingrad. Encyclopedia Britannica

Carl-Emil Pettersson with his family, circa 1918. Svenska Oden

28. Becoming a Hit in Cannibal Island

When Carl-Emil Pettersson washed up in Tabar Island in 1906, he was met with a group of hostile cannibals. He convinced them to take him to meet their ruler, King Lamry. Pettersson convinced him that he could make him rich if he would just give him a chance to demonstrate how. The trick was to take advantage of the island’s amenable climate and soil to produce coconuts. As in a whole lot of coconuts, for wholesale trade, by clearing ground for coconut plantations.

King Lamry was game, so he let Pettersson try his hand at transforming Tabar from a cannibal island into a coconut one. The enterprising Pettersson’s revolutionizing of Tabar’s economy not only pleased and impressed King Lamry, but also pleased and impressed his daughter, Princess Singdo-Misse. Soon the Swedish sailor and island princess were madly in love. Her father was eventually talked around into blessing the union, and the duo got married, and settled down to raise a family of nine children.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.