Time of Pacific romance

The legend of South Seas Islands romance took shape a century ago. It was based mainly on early voyagers’ tales of a work-free existence on islands of great beauty, where the tropical lands were cooled by a consistent trade-wind, and man’s days rendered delightful by shapely and complaisant women.

Of all the books which shaped the legend, none achieved more than those written by the adventurous sailor, Herman Melville, who was among the first Europeans to settle in among the light-brown peoples of what is now French Polynesia. His most notable books, Typee and Omoo, describing his experiences among the friendly, happy Poly nesians of the Marquesan archipelago and especially his love-life with Fayaway greatly stimulated Euro pean interest in the South Pacific Islands, already stirred by the reports of Wallis, James Cook, Bligh, and the early French explorers.

Melville’s books still are among the most popular of the South Pacific’s early records; and now that indefatig able research scholar and writer, Pro fessor A. Grove Day, of the Univer sity of Hawaii, has given us, in a new book, Melville's South Seas, a sum mary of Melville’s Polynesian tales, in more modern English and with helpful comment.

It is a useful and timely compila tion, for pleasureable reading and as a source of reference. It is the more valuable because it really marks the end of the Pacific Islands’ romantic era.

Only remnants remain of the once numerous populations of Eastern Polynesia, especially the Marquesan and Hawaiian Islands. They were destroyed in the last 70-100 years by European “culture”, including poxes, black-birding, epidemic diseases, and politico-economic creeds which are not applicable to the Polynesian temperament.

The peoples whom Melville and other early recorders met in the Polynesia of 150 years ago were healthy, virile and completely content in the semi-communal life which they had evolved in a (supposed) thousand years of occupancy of their lovely islands. The Polynesians of today, greatly reduced in numbers and in spirit, trying awkwardly to adapt themselves to Western ways and shib boleths, are a vastly different people.

Grove Day’s new book makes it very clear that modern readers of the original Typee are in for rude shocks if they expect to find a Fayaway in the Marquesa Islands of today. Hundreds still go to Tahiti, looking for romance. Instead, they

find a gin-sodden Quinns.-

Rwr.

(Melville’S South Seas. Edited By

A. Grove Day. Published by Hawthorn Books, Inc., New York.)