“A Pagan Feast in Rikitea”

This episode of Tell Us Something was recorded in front of a live audience on March 21, 2017 at The Wilma in Missoula, MT. 8 storytellers shared their story. The theme was “Don’t Look Back”.

Today’s podcast comes to us from Georges de Giorgio and is titled  “A Pagan Feast in Rikitea”. Thank you for listening.

Georges de Giorgio pilots a ship that lands on the Island of Mangareva, the largest island in the Gambier Islands in French Polynesia. He ties his ship in the town of Rikitea. There he meets Fr. Michelle, the spiritual leader of the island’s 300 inhabitants.

Georges de Giorgio was born in a car wreck in France on the way to Italy in 1928. Georges’ father moved the family to Chile at the age of 4 where he grew up working in his father’s wooden ship boatyard.

In 1947 at the age of 17, Georges joined an American Expedition to Antarctica becoming the youngest person to ever spend a year there. Georges lived a month alone on the Palmer Peninsula plateau and was the first to cross the Atlantic to the Pacific by dogsled with a joint British/American party. He has a mountain named after him, de Giorgio Mountain.

Georges then spent the next 30 years sailing the world’s oceans. Georges was the navigator on the ship Mischief for the famous English explorer HW Tilman. He also hunted for Sir Francis Drake’s lost treasure on Robinson Crusoe Island.

For the past eight years, Georges has worked at the Lewis and Clark interpretive Center and Cascade Historical Society in Great Falls.