to do a wretched act that never profited them, but had killed a people.

All this discovery and suzerainty did not interest me much, but
what the great captains, and Loti, Melville, Becke, and Stoddard, had
written had been for years my intense delight. Now I was to realize the
dream of childhood. I could hardly live during the days of the voyage.

I remembered that Europe had been set afire emotionally by the first
reports, the logs of the first captains of England and France who
visited Tahiti. In that eighteenth century, for decades the return to
nature had been the rallying cry of those who attacked the artificial
and degraded state of society. The published and oral statements of
the adventurers in Tahiti, their descriptions of the unrivaled beauty
of the verdure, of reefs and palm, of the majestic stature of the
men and the passionate charm of the women, the boundless health and
simple happiness in which they dwelt, the climate, the limpid streams,
the diving, swimming, games, and rarest food--all these had stirred
the depressed Europe of the last days of the eighteenth and the first
of the nineteenth centuries beyond the understanding by us cynical
and more material people. The world still had its vision of perfection.

Tahiti was the living Utopia of More, the belle île of Rousseau, the
Eden with no serpent or hurtful apple, the garden of the Hesperides,
in harmony with nature, in freedom from the galling bonds of government
and church, of convention and clothing. The reports of the English
missionaries of the nakedness and ungodliness of the Tahitians created
intense interest and swelled the chorus of applause for their utter
difference from the weary Europeans. Had there been ships to take them,
thousands would have fled to Tahiti to be relieved of the chains and
tedium of their existence, though they could not know that Victorianism