After forty days at sea, Stoddard comes ashore in the Pacific islands and writes of what he found: a deep friendship with a young Hawaiian, Kána-Aná, a fête-day in Tahiti, Joe of Lahaina, the night-dancers of Waipio, pearl-hunting in the Paumotus and a canoe cruise on the coral sea. The prose is lush and personal, and its view of islanders is that of a nineteenth-century outsider.
Among the most intimate early American writing on the Pacific, by a writer whose friends included Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Download the free EPUB.