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Concept
Éric de Bisschop
Summary
Éric de Bisschop (October 21, 1891 – August 30, 1958) was a French seafarer, famous for his travel from Honolulu to France aboard the Polynesian sailboat Kaimiloa.
He spent most of his adult life in the Pacific Ocean, notably in Honolulu (1935–1937 and 1941–1947) and in French Polynesia (1947–1956); he was not simply a sea adventurer but had a deep interest in the Pacific and its inhabitants, whose history he tried to study.
He was born in Aire-sur-la-Lys (Pas-de-Calais).
Trained in a Jesuite secondary school then as a sailor, he commanded a patrol boat in the English Channel in 1914–1915, then was transferred to the air force and sustained a serious plane accident (1917).
After the War, he went to China in 1927. There in 1931 he met the man who was to be his teammate for the seven next years – Joseph Tatibouet.
He built a Chinese junk, the Fou Po and from 1932 to 1935 sailed with Tatibouet in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Fou Po was destroyed in a hurricane on Formosa (modern day Taiwan), but de Bisschop quickly built a new, smaller junk, Fou Po II in 1933. In July 1935, they were detained for two weeks by the Japanese in Jaluit (Marshall Islands) under suspicion of being spies and barely escaped, fleeing towards the Hawaiian Islands. On October 25, they reached, half starving, Molokai Island and were rescued at the Kalaupapa hospital. On the 27th, the Fou Po II was destroyed by a storm, along with all the scientific work done during these years of seafaring. After a while, they flew to Honolulu.
During the year 1936, they built a Polynesian "double canoe" (a catamaran, but Eric de Bisschop always refused to use this word); he met a Hawaiian woman, Constance Constable, alias "Papaleaiaina", whom he married at the end of 1938.
In March 1937 he and Tatibouet left Honolulu aboard the Kaimiloa, reaching Cape Town in September, Tanger in December, and after a long stay Cannes in May 1938. In 1939, he published his book Kaimiloa, which was translated in English in 1940.
Official source
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