This is the Memory Palace.
I'm Nate Tameo.
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 and they're 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 Kamehameha 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 Byrd 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.