Lieutenant Tony Fry, who appears in nine of the nineteen tales, is one of the most anti-authoritarian of the American characters in Tales of the South Pacific. Readers meet Fry in the first tale, "The South Pacific," when Admiral Millard Kester orders Fry to remove from the side of his old TBF the twelve painted beer bottles illustrating Fry's twelve "heroic" beer-ferrying missions.

In the tale "Mutiny," which takes place on Norfolk Island, Fry becomes involved with a descendant of one of history's best known mutineers, Fletcher Christian. The old woman Teta Christian and her family object to the navy's building an airstrip on their island because the most strategic place for the airstrip is in the middle of a stand of pine trees planted by their ancestors. Siding with the mutineers, Fry dynamites a bulldozer in protest against the desecration of that "living cathedral." In "The Cave...