In the South Seas, by Robert Louis Stevenson

The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet,
Fertile the isle, the temple much suprassing
The common praise it bears.
—The Winter’s Tale, III.i

What now is Oceania, was then the South Seas, and Stevenson made several stays among the island groups, as told by the book’s full title:

In the South Seas
Being an Account of Experiences and Observations in
The Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands
In the Course of Two Cruises, on the Yacht ‘Casco’ (1888) and the Schooner ‘Equator’ (1889)

The Marquesas are still the Marquesas, but the Paumotus are also now the Tuamotus (formerly French Polynesia), and the Gilberts are now Kiribati. Even by 1888 the old way of life was passing because of contact with European and Chinese traders in weapons, opium, and other sundries.

What Stevenson may have lacked in anthropological training is compensated by the eye of a storyteller. The island paradises aren’t so heavenly, and probably never were. Cannibalism (feasting on “long pig”) had only just passed away, and may just have gone into hiding.

French Polynesia is governed by a rational bureaucracy, or tries to be. The Gilberts salute the Queen across the water, and some take RLS to be her son.

Beach bums wash up and stay a while, but never make out well. One Englishman fell for an island queen, who wouldn’t consider the “naked” look of the untattoed. So, he submitted himself to the painful art out of affection. “The fickle fair one could never behold him from that day except with laughter. For my part, I could never see the man without a kind of admiration; of him it might be said, if ever of any, that he had loved not wisely, but too well.”

In the Paumotus, RLS studies life on an atoll, where a calm lagoon is sheltered from the rough ocean waves. The food is monotonously coconut-based, and fish are notoriously undependable. A fish may be deadly in the lagoon but nutritious if caught just out to sea; or healthy eating on this island, but poisonous on the next. Even the native islanders are helpless to judge away from their own place.

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