Carl Emil Pettersson: The Swedish Sailor Shipwrecked on a Cannibal Island Who Became Its King

Apr 10, 2020
6 min read

Updated: Jul 3

Collage of sailors and a family on a tropical beach with palm trees; caption reads Carl Pettersson's Odd Journey to Tabar Island And Its Throne

On Christmas Day 1904, a Swedish sailor named Carl Emil Pettersson found himself in a hibiscus hedge on the shore of a Pacific island, soaking wet, surrounded by a group of islanders known to practise cannibalism. He was 29 years old, he had no weapons, no papers, and no way off the island. What saved him was the colour of his eyes. The Tabar islanders had never seen blue eyes before. They lowered their weapons, carried him to their king, and the king's daughter fell in love with him.

Pettersson spent the next three decades ruling the island as its king, building coconut plantations, discovering one of the largest gold deposits in the Pacific, and raising nine children. When he died in Sydney in 1937, a Swedish author named Astrid Lindgren was already working on a story about a girl whose father was a sailor who became king of a South Sea island. She later confirmed the connection. His name was Carl. Pippi's father was called Efraim.

Sailor in uniform poses confidently on a ship deck. Masts and ropes visible in the background. Black and white photo.

A Restless Swede Who Went to Sea

Carl Emil Pettersson was born on 23 October 1875 in Sweden, the second of six children. His father left the family when Carl was young, and by 1892, aged about seventeen, Carl had gone to sea. He spent the following decade on merchant vessels, working routes across Europe and into the Pacific.

By 1898 he'd made it as far as the Bismarck Archipelago in German New Guinea, where he found work with the Neuguinea-Compagnie, a German colonial trading house based in Kokopo. The company ran copra and labour recruitment operations across the islands of the South Pacific, and Carl fitted in naturally, learning the local trade and picking up languages as he went.

It was on a routine recruiting trip that everything changed. On Christmas Day 1904, his vessel, the Herzog Johan Albrecht (Duke Johan Albrecht), sank off the coast of Tabar Island in New Ireland Province. Pettersson survived the wreck and washed ashore near a village, landing tangled in a hibiscus hedge. He had barely caught his breath when the islanders found him.

The Blue Eyes That Saved His Life

The people of Tabar practised cannibalism. This wasn't a rumour. Contemporary accounts, missionary records, and later anthropological documentation all confirm it as part of the island's culture in the early 1900s. When a battered white sailor washed up on their shore, their first instinct wasn't welcoming. What stopped them from killing him, according to accounts passed down through the island's oral history and corroborated by Pettersson's own later interviews with Swedish journalists, was his eyes. They were a vivid blue. The Tabar people had never seen eyes that colour before. Curious and unnerved in equal measure, they decided to take this strange arrival to their king rather than deal with him themselves.

King Lamy studied the waterlogged Swede and made a calculation. Rather than kill him, he'd hear what the man had to offer. Pettersson, who had enough experience of the islands to know the situation required more than charm, made a practical pitch: he could bring wealth to the island through coconut cultivation, a trade he understood well from his years working in the region. Lamy was interested. He let Pettersson live, and gave him the chance to make good on the promise.

A sepia-toned photo of a family sitting on wooden steps. Two adults and five children wear white clothing, exuding a serene, historical vibe. — Pettersson with Singdo and their children

Teripax, Singdo, and a Coconut Kingdom

Pettersson got to work. He established a copra plantation on the island and named it Teripax. It was a success almost immediately, generating cash income for the island community and giving Lamy's people access to trade goods they hadn't had before. Pettersson also proved himself to be an unusually fair employer by the standards of the era, paying his workers properly and respecting local customs rather than trying to override them. His reputation for both physical strength and decency earned him a nickname among the islanders that stuck for the rest of his life: Strong Charley.

King Lamy's daughter Singdo had been watching all of this. She and Pettersson married in 1907, three years after his arrival on the island. She was a princess of Tabar. He was a shipwrecked sailor from rural Sweden. Together they built a family and a business. The plantation expanded. Pettersson added two more properties: Maragon on Simberi Island and Londolovit on the Lihir Group. When King Lamy died, the succession passed naturally to his daughter's husband. Carl Emil Pettersson, formerly of Sweden, became King of Tabar.

Singdo and Pettersson had nine children together, though one died in infancy. Swedish women's magazines in the 1930s ran breathless feature pieces about the coconut king of the South Pacific, often embellishing freely with tales of sharks and pirates. Pettersson's granddaughter Maria Chan Hoerler, speaking to SBS in 2019, said he actively enjoyed the attention: "He'd write in the Swedish papers and he always wanted to tell people of his adventures in the South Pacific. He'd write about the whole family and what they do."

Two men in vintage attire, one seated and one standing, both in white suits with bow ties. The seated man wears a pith helmet. Grayscale setting. — King Carl E Pettersson in 1907

Loss, Gold, and the Long Decline

In 1921, Singdo died of puerperal fever, a bacterial infection that can follow childbirth. She was still a relatively young woman, and her death left Pettersson with eight surviving children and no immediate support. The following year he sailed back to Sweden for the first time in decades, partly to visit his old friend Birger Morner, and partly to find a new wife who could help run the household on Tabar.

In Sweden he met Jessie Louisa Simpson, an Anglo-Swedish woman who agreed to return with him to the island. They married in 1923. But the plantation had declined badly during his absence, and he came home to near-bankruptcy. Both he and Jessie contracted malaria, which became a recurring problem. The one genuine piece of luck in this period was the discovery of a gold deposit on Simberi Island, which Pettersson reportedly kept secret for years, using it quietly to rebuild his finances. It turned out to be significant: the Tabar Group of islands now hosts one of the largest gold deposits in the Pacific, and commercial mining operations have been running there since the late 20th century.

Jessie's health eventually failed entirely. She left Tabar for medical treatment in Australia and then returned to Sweden, where she died in Stockholm in May 1935 from malaria and cancer. Pettersson himself left Tabar the same year, intending to follow her home. He never made it back to Sweden. He died of a heart attack in Sydney, Australia, on 12 May 1937, aged 61.

The Pippi Longstocking Connection

Astrid Lindgren published the first Pippi Longstocking book in 1945, eight years after Pettersson's death. The central character is a freakishly strong, independently-minded girl whose father, Efraim Longstocking, is a sailor who was shipwrecked and became king of a South Sea island. Lindgren never stated explicitly in her lifetime that Pettersson was the direct inspiration, but she didn't deny it either, and the parallels are precise enough that Swedish writers and academics have treated the connection as established for decades. The physical description of Efraim, his background as a sailor, the mechanics of the shipwreck, and the island kingship are all drawn from the known details of Pettersson's life.

Sailor in uniform, wearing a hat with "G.C. Flottan" text. Neutral expression. Black and white portrait, plain background.

The connection got formal cultural recognition in 2012 when Swedish producer Mirijam Johansson announced at Cannes that she had acquired the rights to a film called Efraim Longstocking and the Cannibal Princess, based on a screenplay by Daniel Fridell and Ulf Stark and approved by Saltkrakan, the company that holds Lindgren's rights. The film, as of Pettersson's last known information, has not yet been made. If it is, it will be based directly on the life of a sailor from rural Sweden who washed up in a hibiscus hedge on Christmas Day 1904 and talked his way out of being eaten.

His story has a loose parallel in the remarkable life of Jackie Chan's parents, whose own adventures across Asia involved espionage, smuggling, and reinvention that reads almost as implausibly as Pettersson's. And for a different kind of Pacific survival story, the Donner Party faced a far grimmer encounter with the question of cannibalism under far less romantic circumstances. Pettersson didn't escape from anything. He simply looked at a cannibal island in the middle of nowhere on Christmas Day 1904 and decided it would do.