Fredrick George Whibley (1855–1919) abandoned a career as clerk in a London bank to escape from the constraints and social expectations of respectability in the Victorian era.

[4] In 1898 he wrote to Charles Whibley asking whether his brother had repaid $15 to Gordon T Legg,[5] who was the manager of the Union Steamship Company of British Columbia.

[6] Fred Whibley had borrowed the money to travel from Vancouver B.C., to Sydney, Australia, where his sister Eliza was living with her husband John T. Arundel.

Fred Whibley had the reputation as the black sheep of what was otherwise a respectable Victorian era family.

Whibley appears to be one of those Europeans who chose to live on an isolated Pacific atoll as an escape from the constraints and social expectations of respectability in the Victorian era.

- It would be off the line of what you may have heard or read at home, but all favourable to the decent, peace-loving, sensitive quiet, good man, who to me is little short of a fetish.

Captain Ernest Frederick Hughes Allen, of the Samoa Shipping Trading Co Ltd, received a retainer from members of Whibley’s English family to bring him to Funafuti from Nuitao and taking care of him as he had "slipped into dereliction as a beachcomber".

The 3 children were raised by their large extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins overseen by their grandfather Luaseuta.