29-year-old Swedish sailor Carl Emil Pettersson went down with his ship in the middle of the Pacific and washed ashore with nothing but his will to live. But within a decade, he was ruling a tropical island, married to a princess, and running his own gold-rich empire.
On Christmas week of 1904, the Herzog Johan Albrecht was swallowed by the sea off the coast of Papua New Guinea. But the sailor, Carl Emil Pettersson, somehow drifted to the Tabar Islands, a cluster of lush, isolated dots in the South Pacific. Exhausted and half-dead, he was found by local villagers and carried inland to the local ruler, King Lamy.
