This is the Memory Palace. I'm Nate DeMayo.

They were called into the principal's office and asked if they wanted to go on an adventure.

They probably knew they weren't going to get in trouble, those first boys, the six of them.

They were good kids, some of the best students and best athletes at the best boys high school in Honolulu.

They were just about to graduate, the way to big things, going places in their lives.

That was why one's parents agreed to send you away from home to attend the Kamehamehameh's school,

to seek opportunity.

And here was one seeking them. Their principal explained that he had been visited by

an envoy from the United States government. It was organizing expeditions to a handful of islands

in the South Pacific. They were tiny. They were deserted. They were among the most remote places

on earth, smack dab halfway between Hawaii and Australia.

There were scientists, it seemed, who wanted to study them, all overseen by a renowned naturalist

from Johns Hopkins, a man who'd been alongside Admiral Bird during his first and second expeditions to Antarctica,

and who had recently been in the news there in the middle of the Depression for leading an expedition to the Gobi Desert that had brought back dinosaur eggs.

This new expedition needed some assistance.

So why not graduating seniors from the illustrious Kamehamehamehs school,

young men who not only excelled academically, but who were also children of the Pacific Islands.

Kids who had grown up fishing and swimming and camping, who were athletic and hardy and resourceful.

The principal made it clear.

This was a great honor for the school, for the boys, an opportunity they simply could not pass up.

Though why would they want to?

And so in March of 1935, a naval ship manned by 12 crew members and six recent graduates of Kamehemiahai set out from Honolulu Harbor.

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