A colonial prison letter from Papeete, Tahiti by Oscar Nordman dated 1930

NORDMAN, Oscar Georges. A colonial prison letter about notable Tahiti expatriates.
 
Colonial Prison, Papeete, Tahiti, to Mr & Mrs C. W. Grove of Dover, Kent, dated 8 December 
1930.
 
2 separate writing sheets, in ink, with original envelope bearing Papeete postmarks and stamped from Prison Coloniale. Overall very good letter with a fair envelope. 
 
Writing from incarceration in the Colonial Prison at Papeete, local Oscar Nordman describes his remarkable life up to that point as maritime mail worker, landowner, fixer and cultural intermediary in French Polynesia.
 
Nordman states that he served for many years on US mail steamers running between Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, through which he formed an extensive expatriate network. He describes his role in welcoming and settling foreign arrivals in Tahiti and Moorea, arranging land purchases, and acting as host and patron to writers and artists. Most notably, he records that he offered property formerly owned by Paul Gauguin to the English novelist Robert Keable, which the two named “Ventura”, and that it was there, with his companion, that Keable wrote his novel Numerous Treasure (1926). 
 
Nordman was at the heart of the expatriate cultural circle, naming Frederick O’Brien, the celebrated author of White Shadows in the South Seas, the playwright Martin J. Merle, the novelist Armin von Tempaski, the writer Norman Hall, and British Army officer Captain Cyril Hawkwright. He also claims to have been instrumental in founding the Tahiti Yacht Club and in organising the first San Francisco–Tahiti yacht race of 1925, supported by the Commodore of the San Francisco Yacht Club.
 
The most arresting element is Nordman’s own situation: writing from prison, he awaits judgement, expressing religious resignation and emphasising that, whatever the charge, he “has taken the lives of no one”.  It is an unsolved mystery what Nordman was accused of, but it was serious enough for him to suggest in his writing, that a problematic and life changing fate awaited him.