Thomas Machell: the explorer, the cannibal’s daughter and me

Jenny Balfour Paul has followed Victorian adventurer Thomas Machell from India to Patagonia. She reveals how a chance meeting in the British Library sparked a 15-year obsession“Lovely indeed is the fair island of Nookahiva,” wrote Thomas Machell, “and lovelier still the dark daughters of that sea-girt isle.” He would certainly have known. In 1844, the Yorkshire teenager sailed round Cape Horn on a ship bound for the largest of the Polynesian Marquesas Islands. As soon as the vessel, whic